gwyn | That was not my idea of a good time

So, as some of you know from

mlyn's updates, I had a really fun day on Saturday and Sunday. Or, you know, not. Eight hours in the emergency room at a hospital on a Saturday after midnight wouldn't go in my Book of Fun.

About one or two, I got this fiery pain in my stomach that I remembered from four or five years ago, that would sometimes stop after a while, and sometimes would continue on and morph into this really sickening pain and nausea in my whole abdomen area and all over my back, especially around my kidneys. The last time this happened, they made me go through all these gastroenterological tests, some of which were so labyrinthine and gymnastic that I boggled at the realization that someone had even created them. Plus, I got tired of drinking all these strange things, most of which were either poisonous-tasting liquids hidden in a worse-tasting liquid like Crystal Light (why does it have to be a diet drink? Ugh!) or were what I described as chalk pudding.

Anyway, despite the vomiting my entire body weight out and bizarre tests, they never found anything conclusive, and I began to flail and panic at the thought of the most definitive test, the camera down the throat one, so since I hadn't had an attack again since the tests began, I packed up my bags and went home. Till this weekend.

Unfortunately, I was hosting the monthly bash wherein a bunch of us Seattle fen from the Media Cannibals get together, and I ended up spending the whole second half on the floor or on my bed, and so everyone went home very early, and I felt really craptastic about that. But I was also afraid that since the pain hadn't gone away in over 8 hours, and usually it would fade after five or six hours, I was experiencing something different and that I would go into a coma or something or die and the cat would be forced to eat my body, so M'lyn was going to stay with me that night. But I wasn't getting much better even after yakking up everything I'd eaten earlier, so she got on the nurse hotline and they of course told me I should really come in. "Eight hours of increasing pain is a very bad sign," the nurse said.

It was weirdly quiet there for a Sat. night. At leat, until about 2:30 or so, when all hell seemed to break loose and one paramedic team after another brought in patients. Some of them were stupid, a lot annoying, but there was one situation that ended up forcing all the rest of us to wait hours longer than we would have -- an 11 or 12 year old boy with two fractured writsts came in with his mother and older sister, and the two women were interfering so much, and causing so much trouble while the staff tried to fix the boy in a fairly delicate procedure, that it took them hours to do something that could have been handled in 45 minutes. They had to call person after person in, including a social worker, at 4 a.m. This woman was unreal, the situation was unreal, and it was all right outside my room, so I couldn't help but endure the whole thing when I really wanted to sleep. She kept going on about her faith in the lord to fix things blah blah, and I was like, then why don't you just take the kid out of here and get him to a fucking church, or let the doctors fix him, you stupid cow? It took everything in me not to unhook myself, get up, and go out and slap her. (I won't even get into why a kid that age was coming in at 3 with two just-broken wrists.)

I have to say, everyone at Providence was excellent to me. I was expecting the worst (the Providence ER is at the edge of some of the worst low-income neighborhoods in Seattle), but even the most brusque or businesslike staff person was still incredibly nice. They never minimized my pain, or made me feel like a malingerer, even when I was feeling really bad that nothing unusual was identifiable to them. The nurse who set me up in the room and gave me the pain meds and anti-nausea drugs was great, and I was sorry to see him go when he went off shift around 1:30. (And by the way, I loooove Dilaudid. Oh yeah, that was the stuff!) And the doctor was a hottie and very nice, if very stumped by what was happening. I got the impression they were very surprised to have a patient at that hour, on that kind of night, with not just a vocabulary and who was relatively well-educated, but who understood and knew about the stuff they were discussing, and who had a sense of humor. The nurse and I especially were into full riffing mode by the time they let M'lyn, who'd taken me there, come back to hang out, and the doctor seemed to really enjoy that I was making fun of myself and how I didn't have anything identifiable and "cool" wrong with me. Both of them amazed me in how they treated the news that I had a twin who had died of ovarian cancer last year -- they were incredibly kind about it, but they also got how significant that was without saying anything specific to make me feel worse or more worried. The doc even asked about family history and I mentioned that we didn't know, as we were adopted, and he was pleasantly surprised -- he said, "Wow, it's unusual that you were kept together" and I said "I know! It was a private adoption, otherwise they would have split us up back then." Later on, he was talking about that in a way that made me realize he was kind of touched by the whole story, that we had stayed together and such.

They gave me a CT scan but all that showed was the same thing I got before -- just an extra thick gall bladder wall. So about 5:30 they asked me if I wanted to do an ultrasound there, or go to the regular doctor, and I said, well, hey, I might as well stay here since I'm all cozy and settled in. Unfortunately all that showed was that maybe, possibly, I could have gall stones, but they can't be certain. The weird thing was when they finally finished with that awful woman, and the doctor came in to talk about the CT scan results, he pulled up a chair and sat down with this very serious face. I thought, "Oh wow, I really do have cancer. And I'm actually going to die like I thought I would."

Of course, it wasn't cancer, just that he was upset they couldn't pinpoint anything other than an elevated white cell count in all the tests so far. But he ordered the ultrasound since that catches gall bladder issues better. That didn't show anything more conclusive except a hint of possibly stones, so I was finally allowed to check out about quarter to 8 in the morning, and I got a cab home (I *just* had enough cash) because I didn't want to call anyone that godawful early. The doc really wants me to see the surgeons at the hospital and to call my doc; the latter I don't mind because I like her a lot (and it was so cool -- he knew my doctor very well, and mentioned that I was the youngest of her patients he'd ever seen there, as she has a lot of elderly female patients. I hadn't known that, but he seemed to think the world of her, enough that he even had asked her for a rec for his own personal physician when he first got here), but I'm rather disinclined to give up my organs if they don't know for sure what's wrong.

Yet, I realize it probably makes sense. My dad had been feeling poorly for a long time and they were going to talk about taking out his gall bladder, but when he went for his appt., they admitted him for emergency surgery because he was so sick he nearly passed out. It turned out his gall bladder had -- I'm not kidding -- necrotized. It was completely dead tissue, and poisoning the rest of him. So... I don't know. The thing is, I'm surgery phobic to the Nth degree. There is no rationality to it, I just am. I've been cut on so much because of the skin cancer thing, I just don't want to have real big surgery and it scares me. I also react very weirdly to anesthesia of any kind. And I have hospital issues these days, really huge ones. When this happened the last time, they put me in the same ER room where my mom was dying before they had moved her to ICU. It was awful, but fortunately, my pain was gone by the time they were going to treat me, so

movies_michelle, who'd taken me there, and I left before I took any tests, and I was so freaked out I don't know what I would have done if I'd had to stay there. And that was before I'd had to commute back and forth to San Diego and all the hospitals my sister was in. When they put the little ID bracelet on my wrist, I actually started crying. I felt like a fool, but it was this thing that, for me, was hard to handle.

When I got home I was pretty wiped out from being mostly awake all night (man, did I want to just coast on that Dilaudid -- did I mention how much I liked it? -- and nod off, but they weren't having any of that, for sure). Between the crazy people, the automatic blood pressure cuff that left weird bruises all over my upper arm (they just suddenly go on with no warning, which scared the crap out of me the first time), the beeping of a machine outside my door, sleep wasn't a part of the package. I crashed for a few hours because

feochadn, M'lyn, and Christy had tidied up the house and fed Emma and cleaned out her box for me and so I was able to skip having to deal with all that.

More than anything, I feel foolish. That I had to wreck the bash by being sick, that I had to go to an emergency room like a wuss, that I had to drag people out in the middle of the night. I cannot stand to talk about bodily functions -- I flail and mumble and freak out whenever people talk about that, but of course, now I have to deal with all these gross bodily function issues because I guess pain meds shut down your system. And of course there are all the questions I will have to answer over and over. And talk about my sister, because the twin gene thing is very important in illness, I know that; it's just hard to do clinically, to be dispassionate about it. And contemplate surgery, which I can't contemplate without freaking out. We hates it. But it's not cancer, and it's not immediately life-threatening, which I am very grateful for.

Oh, and the worst thing of all? I got my new haircut on Saturday before all this, and it sucks. I can't get it to do what it's supposed to do, and she didn't cut it as short as I think it needs to be to flip outward, and so... I have to go back and get it fixed as much as I can. Good hair would have made it all bearable!