...if I were in the hospital. Yup. Saturday, September 10th, 2011 broke a nice long streak of consecutive daily posts on Popthomology, dammit. Here's what happened.
I was a-sittin' here at my laptop as usual, getting ready to process the final Bumbershoot photos, and had just hung up the phone from arranging a playdate for MissEight. Rather suddenly, I thought, OH HELL I DON'T FEEL SO GREAT, and hightailed it up to my room. To make a long and graphic story short, I proceeded to have a gastric explosion of epic proportions, paired with realllly bad stomach and back pain. This went on and on and on. EIGHT HOURS INTO IT, SOMEONE FINALLY THOUGHT TO CHECK IN ON ME. EIGHT HOURS. By that time, I was a babbling, crying mess, exhausted. Kind Mr13 stayed with me, told me I was going to be OK, helped me up from the bathroom floor, and stayed with me for another two hours, asking if there was anything he could do to help.
It was at this point that everyone insisted that I go into the hospital. I did not want to go, because anyone who has ever been to an ER on any Saturday night knows that it's going to be busy, and the whole process is going to take hours. Plus, I was so messed up I could barely walk. After talking to an ER nurse who said, YOU SHOULD COME IN NOW, MA'AM, I went in. Slowwwwwly, and with a puke pan in my sad lap.
We first went to The Hospital Nearest My House. I was wheeled in from my car to the ER admitting. There were a lot of people standing around looking kind of dazed, and several other similarly-decrepit people sitting in wheelchairs. I sat. And sat. And sat. About 15 minutes later, after being prompted, the intake nurse said, OH! YOU WANT TO BE SEEN BY A DOCTOR? Well, no SHIT, Nurse Sherlock. There I am, in sweats and a t-shirt, greasy and sweaty with no makeup, hunched over a Tupperware grimacing...what did she THINK I was there for? She took my info WITHOUT ASKING WHAT WAS WRONG WITH ME AT ALL, and then said that all the ER rooms were full and there were 7 other people in front of me. OK...no. We then bailed and left to go to The Hospital We Should Have Gone To In The First Place, the next town over, where I was swiftly taken into a room and treated very well, with warm blankets and everything.
After a bit the ER doctor arrived. Ah, shiiiiit. Of course, he would have to be the most good-looking ER doctor that ever lived, while I am looking like a pan of cat dung with glasses. Oh, well. Dr. T.D.A. Handsome went over my info with me and ordered up a pile of tests, while giving the go-ahead right away for a bag of IV fluids and some nausea meds. I had enough symptoms that, combined with my age, they were taking no chances, so I was hooked up to a heart monitor, had an EKG, a full abdominal ultrasound, constant pulse oxygen monitor, and said "ahhh." This is my E.T. finger.
The pain was increasing in my back bad enough to make tears squirt out of my eyes when I was flat on my back, so next up was some IV Dilaudid, which is synthetic morphine, or what the nurse referred to as "joy juice." I hated it. Immediately it starts with a very very creepy effect, which is a vise-like feeling to the head and throat which decreases some a few minutes later, but not completely. It definitely produced no feelings of joy but did somewhat reduce the pain. All the meds combined added to my sleepiness, but I couldn't sleep. The hours passed by, mostly quiet except for the beeping of my various monitors, the chatter of the nurses in the hallway, and a fellow retcher in another room. I watched the early-AM CNN reports from Ground Zero as the 10th anniversary ceremonies for 9-11 were getting started. That's a perspective builder.
Around 5AM, Dr. Handsome returned with the news: we think it's your gallbladder, and we'd like you to have it out. Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit, I said, although rather weakly. He told me a story about a woman who put off the surgery and then her pancreas ate itself or something like that, gave me information to contact a general surgeon, 4 prescriptions, and let me go home.
Today, I slept on and off until 7PM. And then I got up and wrote this, and now I'm going to go back to bed, and maybe take a pain pill. Tomorrow I guess I will try to figure out what do to. And process Bumbershoot photos, I hope, because I just have no time to be sick.
© Copyright 2008- Marianne Spellman