The past five days have been very surreal.
Last weekend, I had been experiencing some leg and back pain. I had spent quite a bit of the previous week sewing commissions, and since my office had not been set up yet, I was doing a lot of it on the ground. This awkward positioning, coupled with going into labor a week previously from my third m/c, put a buttload of strain on my back and caused something painful to happen.
Over the next few days the pain worsened. It was waking me up and night, forcing me to sleep on a heating pad or ice, and starting to make it impossible for me to walk. Tuesday morning, after a Monday workday that had left me sitting in an uncomfortable chair for the better part of eight hours, I was in so much pain I was awake, near screaming at four thirty in the morning. Brendan made the executive decision; it was off to the Emergency Room.
The best time to visit an ER is probably five in the morning on a Tuesday. No one is drunk, there are no screaming children, and bible infomercials are silenced on the televisions. We had to wait a while for our nurse, but after a few minutes without even the usual lobby cursory check in, they led me back to triage and started to see what’s up. I was in a lot of pain, but polite and patient as normal. We got sat down in our room, waited a bit, consulted a nurse, and saw our doctor. With my m/c one week before, and my choice of deciding not to come to the hospital for it, there was a lot of initial worry that the pain could be caused by an infection, due to remaining tissue left in my uterus.
Despite not having a fever and being pretty sure this pain was muscle and nerve related, I figured that it would be better to be safe and do some bloodwork. They put an IV in, did a few blood draws and sent me off to xray to take a look at my pelvis.
The Xray revealed what seemed to be a clot in my vena cava, a primary artery that runs through the abdomen. This upped my case’s severity and could explain the pain; a blood clot in the area may mean restricted blood to the kidney, causing a pain in the area I was experiencing it.
It also showed that several lymph nodes in my abdomen were enlarged. Xrays are not typical standard procedure after m/c’s, so it was hard to guess if this was a typical reaction to one or something more. It was at least something oncology should take a look at, because on the off chance I had lymphoma, the earlier they caught it, the better my chances.
The only really question in my admission was which area; cardiovascular or oncology.
They picked oncology.
Meanwhile, here I am, dosed on a few pain meds. I found out a few hours later that one of those meds happened to be morphine, which I had never experienced before.
Morphine is a very difficult world to describe. As someone with a brain that never seems to stop constructing the next idea, it seemed a sort of off switch. It wasn’t that the pain stopped, it was just that I stopped caring about it. Things felt heavy, but that was okay too. All you really needed was to lay down and close your eyes anyway.
The next three days were spent looking around in my insides with various expensive medical machinery. Everything about this experience was new to me. I had never had an IV in so long it started to become second nature to avoid it. I had never worn a heart monitor before, or gotten used to the vital checks every few hours. How the various lock chimes and sneaker falls at night become a sort of ebbing and flowing ocean of white noise, just outside the cracked door.
I marveled at how often the staff changed. Some girls had four hour shifts and I can’t remember them. Some I saw more than once and got to know a small bit. My two favorite nurses, one my age and one the age of my mom, I felt closer to than some people I’d know ten years or more. I felt okay with having some strangers touch me. You could tell the nurses who cared, and it was most of them.
It was a world of women; hospitals most certainly are. There are, of course, men there. Occasionally your courier will be a man, or the CT technician is a boring bald guy, but the people you get to know are women. The people who help you bathe, give you your meds, bring your food, make sure your blanket is warm enough, ask, each time before leaving your room “is there anything else I can get for you?” And somehow mean it each and every time, are women.
It became known why I was there, really. I was twenty six in oncology with piercings who had had three miscarriages. So many of the women there had as well. Strangers cried with me when I broke down in Ultrasound, because it was the same day as my appointment for my first ultrasound with my most recent pregnancy. Everything seemed so cruel and unfair.
Sleep came in waves. The first few days, the pain from my back radiated so badly I needed morphine every two hours. I couldn’t have morphine every two hours. I could have morphine every four hours. Injection, heaviness, sleep, wake to pain, deal, scream, injection, repeat.
The doctors saw me five minutes every few hours the first day, then five minutes a day after that. I was, after all, relatively low risk and while my case was curious, it was not particularly dangerous. The morphine was working, the tests were still happening, we just needed time for diagnosis.
My MRI was the worst.
It seemed almost as though I barely saw Brendan, though he was there the whole time. When we would be together, I’d be in pain or sleeping or drugged, and nothing seemed real. When I was cogent, I was in tests and he wasn’t allowed. The parts I remember most strongly of him are him walking me down to a test as far as he could go, holding my hand until the farthest possible point. Him always saying I love you as the doors closed. We had heard a lot at this point, from blood clots to lymphoma. I was getting sicker; the pain was worsening and the medication had left me throwing up anything I tried to eat and unable to shit. Things we’re getting entirely too real for twenty-six, and with the miscarriage just last week, things were too raw and scary.
When he left me with my techs for the mri, my anxiety had already started to unfold. I would not have made it through the test without the recent pain med injection they had given me. My techs and I joked about my tmnt pajamas that I had worn for three days now, and then moved me in for the test.
I felt off balance from taking all my piercings out. My body felt strangely loose and uncomfortable. When they put the earplugs in, I understood that it was going to be completely unlike I had expected. It was going to be loud.
I knew it would be tight. I didn’t know it would be human in a hot dog bun tight. After the scans started I thought to myself, “This could be worse. You’re claustrophobic but you can close your eyes. It’s loud but it doesn’t hurt. Just relax.”
But it starts to get hot. You start to sweat. You can’t move so it starts running down your scalp and the back of your neck. And it seemed the perfect thing to remind me that it was not okay, it was very loud and I couldn’t move and that the entire experience was terrifying and I wanted nothing to do with it.
Somehow the test ended before I screamed “Get me the fuck out of this fucking thing!”, but only barely.
Afterward, it seemed silly to had let something like that overwhelm me so much. But, while having a panic attack anywhere is bad, having a panic attack in a tube you can’t move in seems much, much worse.
Sometimes at night, when it seems everyone in the hospital is pretending to be asleep but no one actually is, I would look over at my fiance, sleeping on what had to be the most uncomfortable looking couch in the world, and say “I love you.” To his sleeping face. Sometimes I would just cry and hurt and think about the two babies we had lost. Most of the time I couldn’t believe how damn lucky I was that this man wanted to be in my life, in even the shittiest of times.
In a hospital, in some strange, way you are less alone than ever, and also in complete solitary. You are one of many, but utterly removed from everything you were before and will be after.
Can you say your full name for me?
What is your birthdate?
I need to scan your wristband.
I held onto who I was before admission through facebook. I wasn’t this creature of pain meds and hair matted with sweat. I made jokes and messaged friends and had visitors and reminded myself of who I was really was.
I was only there for five days. It seems absurd to even consider five days an experience. I feel like this writing will be scoffed at by people who spend regular time in hospitals.
Five days.
Four days in, my doctor rotation switched and my new MD looked at my case from a more basic perspective. My tests had all be inconclusive; no blood clots, although I did test positive for a clotting disorder. Enlarged lymph nodes, but no cancer. No joint damage.
She treated me for what I came in for originally, and it happened to be right. Both of my doctors made good calls, but were introduced to my case at different times; one right after a possible clot in my vena cava after a miscarriage, one after three days of inconclusive testing and ruling out and lots of bed confinement worsening my condition.
Anti-inflammatories and steroids did the trick. I could walk again in a day, I didn’t need the morphine, which meant no nausea, and I could eat again.
I could feel the day they would discharge me. The air outside felt a little closer when I woke up. My body felt more mine again. I could feel my home, only a few blocks away, telling me today was the day I’d leave.
And I did. I was surprised it took a ton of signatures to get in, and one to get out. Armed with scripts and my flowers and bags of snacks and sweaty clothing I was released back into sunlight and fresh air and freedom.
I sat outside and cried as Brendan pulled the car around. You can forget what it feels like to have fresh air blow across your skin.
I’m home now, laying in bed awake from the steroids and writing this because I feel changed. I feel like I understand myself more and less. I almost miss being checked on for vitals. There’s something comforting in having someone else awake when you are asleep; a feeling we lose for the most part alongside our childhood. For me, a woman constantly struggling with structure, the routine of the hospital was almost
motherly.
I guess I feel alone.
ThisIsZ 