So it had been over a year, things were looking not bad financially and I was feeling healthy; it was time to get that second Carpal Tunnel surgery.
There was a small wrinkle in that Mr Brain had forgotten to remind me to renew the program I was in that stashes pre-tax pay for medical bills, so 2022's taxes will be higher and out of pocket expenses will be higher. Stupid brain.
So I went to see Doc Snipsnip who did that thing he does of making eye contact until one is sure one is hypotonuzed who booked a date on his calendar and we were set.
Another problem was that my wedding ring seems to have shrunk over the 35 years of sheer hell it signifies and was impossible to get off despite several nurses (I'm coming to that) who swore by "the hand lotion trick" or "the dental floss trick".
Now as you, dear reader, may know, surgeons really hate to start work with a person wearing jewelry. They like to say it's because certain sensors can pass electricity through the jewely and deliver a nasty burn, but the only thing that seems likely to do that to me is the "sensors" that deliver umtytump volts across the heart when the said surgeons have royally screwed something up (I'm coming to that) and are yelling "CLEAR" at everyone. Another reason is that the hands can swell up when the anethetist inserts various chemicals into one and tight rings might cause an emergency fingerectomy.
So, much to the annoyance of Mrs Stevie, I went looking for a jeweler who could cut the ring off with the sorta-promise they could make it good again *and* resize it to my manly finger. I felt that that was unnecesary, but Mrs Stevie was firm on the matter so that was that.
I was called for the pre-surgical consult at St Catherine's Hospital as I was the last time, and so Friday the 13th found me tootling up to Smithtown for this Q&A and a gift bag full of Surgical Soap, Filthy Englishmen For The Scrubbing Of.
A lucky happenstance, as it turned out.
During the quiz about what new medical humiliations had been visited upon the Steviebod in the intervening year-anna-bit, my vision started to do the thing it did last summer when I passed out. Basically, this involves the backdrop getting brighter until all foreground detail1 gets consumed in the Nova Mr Brain has decided I should look at instead. I alerted the mediacl interviewer by asking if I might lie down as I was feeling a little faint.
She hustled me to the recliner every doctor's office has and, after applying various medical machines to me called for an emergency team to take me to the E.R. I protested that that was not really necesary and that I was sure I was going to be alright in just a few minutes2 but the team arrived and would not be gainsaid, even when their gurney would not fit through the door and they were reduced to asking me if I would mind walking from the medical recliner to the Wheeled Bed of Transportation to the Seventh Ring of Hell4.
And so I spent the next ten hours or so in the most uncomfortable bed I have ever had the misfortune to attempt rest upon, sans pillow because there were so many other patients they had run out of them. I ended up rolling up my Levi jacket and using that because I sleep on my side and that was the only way to get the needed head support.
Mrs Stevie came for a look to check I wasn't faking, shirking or lead-swinging. But it being Friday the 13th, there were more than the usual hideous piles of post-car-accident human remains and "code blue" alarms when people would decide they couldn't take the E.R. any more and would opt to leave this plane of existence, so she fled in short order. Well, as I said, the beds were very uncomfortable5.
Periodically, someone would appear to take blood pressurees, blood, do ultrasound on my heart, do an EKG[Just so they could ensure I wasn't dead by the screams when they tore off the stickers and my chest and leg hair too
and toward the evening I was told that in addition to the usual Q&A, the carpal tunnel interview would now have an added "sign-off by my cardiologist".I have no idea why American doctors always assume one has retained a staff of specialists and has them on speed-dial. Go to a GP and be told you need to see "your" dermatologist, caridologist or osteopath, then watch them recoil in surprise when you say "haven't got one of those".
I did a bit of uncharacteristic dickering and persuaded the staff to have one of their cardiologists, the one who had already visited me to supervise various nurse-goings-on stick a stehoscope on me and mutter about "heart murmurs", to do the said sign-off as I was at that time under the happy illusion that this symphony of suck was over, when in fact this was just the overture. The cardiologist hove into view around 8pm and made me sit up, stand up, lie down and do it all over again to see if I would faint. I did not so he signed me off for the Carpal Tunnel surgery.
Another doctor then told me they were going to admit me overnight for observation, so I had to hang around until about 10pm, when I was wheeled up to a ward and tranfered to a more comfy bed.
Unfortunately, the only available bed was in a room with three patients who required observation on account of them being "special needs". One of these young men wanted to go home very badly and was telling the world about it almost continually. I felt sorry for him, but I also felt sorry for me on account of my back hurt and I would dearly have loved to get some sleep.
6am rolled around and I was wheeled out of that room into a quieter one where I was able to sleep for about ten minutes until the nurses needed blood and a new cardiologist wanted EKGs and all the other things people want while one is desperate for sleep in a hospital.
Mrs Stevie hove into theater to find out why I was still there.
Which was when I realised I needed to go to the toilet very badly.
The nurses had left a portable commode by the bed but had instructed me that I was to call for a bed pan rather than use it. In light of later events this can only be seen as some sort of medical snare for the hospital virgin.
Having never been put in the position of asking a young woman to help me onto a bed pan and then to do whatever was needed affter I was done, the humiliation factor in doing so was extremely high and I elected to use the trap commode.
And passed out after doing so.
I woke to a crash team making a big fuss over me and a young nurse scolding me. Then someone took a look at what I had left in the commode and everyone got quietly efficient and reassuring.
Mrs Stevie was white as a sheet. A large elderly doctor (the first medical person I had seen over the age of Forty, I might add) who in what I heard as Germanic accent6 told me that he thought I was bleeding internally, and not to worry. He was going to move me to the ICU because he "prefered to have all his patients in the ICU". This was transparent patient-calming talk but I was so out of it I didn't care.
And so I was moved to the ICU and given a room of my very own with an even more comfortable bed, and the promise that I was going to be given a down-the-throat tube-oscopy to find the bleed, which was almost certainy in the bit where the duodenum and stomach meet, that I was going to be out for that part, and now I needed to be given blood.
This was when the nursing staff found out that I am what they medical profession refers to as "a difficult stick". This is a euphamism for my viens and arteries being protected by many layers of manly fat as an evolutionary defense against vampires, and the immediate effect is any attempt to draw blood or attach a "hep-lock" semi-permanent vein tap/port consists of nurses holding me down and stabbing me repeatedly while I help by my falsetto screaming and thrashing about in a suitably manly fashion.
In this fashion blood was taken, then a whole bag of new blood put back in.
The staff also delighted in attaching stickers to me for various machine inputs, then ripping them off c/w suitable amounts of chest and leg hair. This never got old7 and they were very put out when I eventually begged them (sometime around day 4) to just shave holes in the hair wherever they needed to put stickers. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Anyway.
That first evening in the ICU (Saturday), I was wheeled into an O.R. where an earnest young man said he was going to be my anesthetologist and would be doing "an awesome job" for me. Fighting words for the anti-anesthetologist demons he should have known were just waiting for the Call to Action.
I woke up with a tube down my throat and a machine making me breathe at just the wrong rhythm for comfort. I knew form shows like E.R. and Chicago Hope that this was normal for those situations where the patient had stopped breathing at some point in the previous hours, so I just lay there until someone noticed and we did the whole "Take a breath, now breathe out" thing. I was also connected to a variety of beeping machines, and my ankles were being rhythmically squeezed by another in a most disturbing fashion.
There was a whiteboard on the far wall. It said it was Monday. What happened to Sunday? And why did my throat hurt so much?
I looked around and assumed I was hallucinating that I was on the set of a TV medical drama. All the staff were between the ages of 25 and 35. The men were ruggedly handsome and had angles where normal people have cheeks. The nurses were all runway model gorgeous. Clearly Californian actors. Guessing I was hovering twixt the hell that is everyday life and the blessed oblivion of Lethe, I decided not to care about this. Indeed, part of the internal bleed problem was to be the lack of the need to care about anything, which was good as I was about to get a master class in the Escalation of Humiliation.
Well, no-one would tell me what was going on until Doc Accent arrived, beaming like Santa Clause, and he said that there had been a slight problem intubating me, that I had received a small cut in my throat and that it had had to be stitched up. After this it was felt that I should sleep for an extra day to let things heal up. Had he found he bleed? No. More procedures would be needed.
The real story of the throat fiasco only came out later. The "awesome job" guy had put the tube through my throat instead of down it, giving me a rather unusual peircing. An ENT surgeon had been called in who had said that the options were to remove the tube, let him stitch up the entry and exit wounds and then let Stabby McStabStab8 have another go, which seeing as everything was now swollen would be even harder, or for Dr ENT to slice the flesh in front of the tube open, freeing it, then stitch up the resulting slit. Since that would be the most painful, everyone voted for that. I was asleep, so they felt it was reasonable that I did not get a vote or a chance to bolt.
And so, on account of the new wound in my throat bleeding a bit more than it had when I was admitted, it was judged prudent to keep me in an induced coma while everyone got their stories straight. Mrs Steve was called by the Doc Accent and was told I had stopped bleeding9 but over the cell phone connection that provides the usual modern voice quality10 she heard "stopped breathing", and there was a subsequent freak-out when that was clarified and the insurance company had to be called to cancel the pay-out.
And they hadn't found the internal bleed. Doc Accent smiled and said I could have clear liquids and ices to eat. This was another ploy, as he would go on to deny me anything but ice chips for the next few days, but I grabbed opportunity by the opps and ate three tubs of Italian-style ice, which presented to the throat as acid-soaked razor blades. I didn't care, maddened by thirst as I was. Good news was that the new liquid intake would not require any effort from me to void on account of someone thoughtfully inserting a tube about the size of a garden hose up my urethra and into my bladder11.
One bed-pan later, I was sent for a CAT scan and put on a nil-by-mouth diet. I was weak as a kitten which had been dosed agressively with chloral hydrate, and so could do little more than grunt when informed of tests in which I took little interest anyway.
I think it was about this point when my legs and upper arms became both numb and yet somehow agonizing to touch. The weight of a blanket was sheer misery, and to this day if I get poke hard in the leg (say by colliding with the corner of a table) it is agonizingly painful. This was yet another factor denying me sleep as I could not get comfortable despite the bed being about the best one I've yet slept in. My GP's theory is that I have a trapped nerve in my back, so there is another set of painful nerve tests in my future. Back to the ICU.
The next day I was given a few more bags of blood, put through the bed-pan routine again, had my oxygen nose-tube changed for an oxygen mask in an attempt to combat the shortness of breath I was experiencing, was stabbed a few more times in the interests of medical science and made to drink "banana flavored" contrast for yet another CAT scan.
This involved me drinking one bottle over the course of two hours, the next over the course of an hour and the next over the course of a half hour, at the end of which I was struggling not to show everyone what it looked like after it had been drunk. I have no idea how they make the flavoring, but I never want to see the mutant bananas used in the process.
The CAT scan showed no bleed site.
The next day was more bed pans and blood bags on account of me leaking out the stuff they had put in me and digesting it, and they stuck a tube down my nose to syphon out some of the fluid to see if it was bloody. In order to turn this already awful procedure into sheer torture, the doctor (who looked like Neil Patrick Harris) shot "hurricane spray" up each nostril, which was slightly more unpleasant that what I imagine running a nasal lavage with concentrated sulphuric acid would be and produced what I imagine were some pretty impressive shrieks for someone barely able to draw breath. I spent half an hour heaving and gagging and begging the doctors and nurses to take the tube out, and they finally did having seen nothing but mucus in the syphon. By then my diet was my other people's donated blood, my own having leaked out pretty much completely by then, and - it would seem - my own snot.
The next day was colonoscopy day, so they made me drink two bottles of Magnesium Sulphate soda under the impression that I had more to give when it came to bed-pan time. This would have been quite pleasant, a walk in the park, but for the wound in my throat, which experienced the soda as pure citric acid. Very painful indeed.
Doc Accent had had a conversation with Mrs Stevie in which he had assured her they were under no circumstances going to attempt another intubation, which produced a very diverting drama in the O.R. It was as I was being wheeled in that I was informed I was going to be anesthetized again and I wailed "not by Stabby McStabStab!", to the amusement of the attending nursing staff (all of whom were privvy to the throat fiasco of Saturday night it would seem). The Anesthetologist carefully arranged my head so it was tilted back as far as it would go, aided by his lady assistant. Then Doc Accent arrived in theater12 and asked what was going on.
"We're preparing to intubate the patient" said Doc Ether.
"No! This is absolutely not to happen!" cried Doc Accent.
"Well you can't do an Upper Bowel Tube-Up-The Jacksyogram13 without intubation!" Doc Ether said, firmly, brooking no argument.
"This cannot be!" argued Doc Accent. "Do you know the position you are putting me in? Do you know what you've done to me"?
"I've done nothing to you" insisted Doc Ether, who was winning on calmness, but I was giving Doc Accent more points for emoting.
This went on for a few minutes until I asked politely if I had to be there for the argument, and whether or not some compromise might be reached that would not render the evening a complete waste of everyone's time.
And consensus was reached in that it was decided to knock me out and continue the professional frank exchange of views sans patient input.
And so I was colonoscopized, but the site of the bleed was not found.
The next day I had some more of other people's blood pumped in me. Though everyone was still smiling I noticed nervous debate on the subject of acquiring the blood needed. I have O negative type blood, which means I can give it to anyone, but I must get only O negative14, and it was apparent that I had used up all the O negative on-site.
On the up side, by now having my bottom cleaned by gorgeous young women (or muscular young men of the night staff) was no longer the humiliation it had been, but of course, my haemoglobin count was so low I pretty much couldn't have cared less had they started amputating bits anyway.
In fact, the staff and Mrs Stevie were becoming vocally concerned about my lack of interest in watching TV. I would later put it all together and realize that they were using this as a gauge of my mental wellbeing, but I was happy to just lie there looking at the patterns that occasionally lit up in the ceiling tiles due to oxygen starvation. I could watch TV any time (or possibly never again) but I didn't care either way.
I think it was about the time they hooked up the sixth pint of blood that I asked the young nurse tasked with watching me all day if it was time to have a difficult conversation with Mrs Stevie. They were pumping blood into me and I was leaking it out from somewhere in my digestive system as fast as they did so but they couldn't find out where, so it didn't take a genius to figure out that at some point the whole thing would become unviable.
The nurse smiled and said not to worry, but I noticed an increase of activity around me that night. Maybe they thought I was going to help matters along. I might have done so if only I could have mustered the interest in anything at all. It was all academic in Mr Brain thanks to the haemoglobin/oxygen thing. I knew some people would be upset, others less so, but from my perspective I wouldn't know much about it. Just like going to sleep.
And sleep would be a really good thing, because not only was there a steady program of wakings for blood samples and x rays and ultrasounds and stethoscope listenings (and of course the painful leg and arm thing), but my throat was swollen to the point that as soon as I drifted off I woke myself with truly staggeringly loud snoring. I can't sleep on my back anyway, even when I'm not hooked up to a nest of machines. I went days with very little sleep at all, which contributed to the lassitude I was experiencing.
Time for fresh humiliation. It was decided to put me under a "Gamma Camera".
This involved taking out some of my blood, parking me in a corridor while they irradiated it, then putting it back in me and arranging me under a large machine for 45 minutes during which time I was sternly instructed by another beautiful, young female technician not to move.
45 Minutes later, she re-appeared, giggling nervously.
"I don't know how to say this so I'll just say what Doc Radiation said. He needs to differentiate your penis from your bowel so he'd like you to elevate it"
I considered the likelihood that I was going to have the site of my bowel bleed found by a machine that could not distinguish my appendix from my appendage, and responded "In the interests of medical clarity, how far would Doc Radiation like me to raise the said member, bearing in mind that it has been a rather difficult week for me?"
The technician fled in gales of hysterical laughter and I was left attempting to achieve the requested adjustment. It should go without saying that the results were once again inconclusive.
Eventually, after ten pints of blood and nine days in bed it was felt that I was well enough to undergo another scanning. First though, Doc Accent decided I should drink something called "golightly", yet another laxative.
At this point I had had nothing but blood to eat for 9 days, so the benefit of all the laxatives was, I though then and still do, dubious at best. But there was an escalating pattern of disgustingness to all the revolting stuff I had to consume for tests (notwithstanding the out-of-band Hurricane Spray/Nasal Intubation torture which by rights should have been done more toward the end of the week) and this golightly stuff was absolutely disgusting. Not only did it have to be drunk in pint lots, it tasted rather like what I think the contents of a shark's bladder would. The point at which I was told I would have to drink three more jugs of it was the point where I mutinied and refused point blank.
The night nurse was understanding and allowed that there wasn't time for the rest of the drink schedule anyway as the scanner was available now and wouldn't be later so whatever it was was done on only one jug of shark pee.
This was when Doc Accent decided I was well enough to walk with a walker (I wasn't, but I was going to have to try), my garden hose was pulled out and one of his young staff gave me a camera to eat.
Eight hours later the sensor belt was taken off and the pictures analysed, whereupon it was found that the battery had gone flat before the trip through my entire digestive tract was over.
And the pictures they got had not shown the site of the bleed, which had seemed to have stopped all by itself.
So, since I had gotten better despite medical forensics, they moved me back into the regular hospital ward, where I spent my waking hours walking round the corridors with a walker trying to regain my strength, until Mrs Stevie arrived one afternoon to take me home.
I had been in hospital 9 1/2 days.
- Human beings, speeding cars, charging rabid animals etc↑
- Bringing my not inconsideralbe medical self-diagnosis powers to the fore3 ↑
- A sad mistake↑
- Anyone who has spent any amount of time in an E.R. knows this appelation is not hyperbole↑
- I have come to the conclusion that this is a deliberate choice by the hospital adminsitration as a litmus test against those just looking for a good snooze and some quality time listening to their next-bed-neighbor's soap opera-like revelations to doctors and relatives through the "privacy" curtains↑
- The Doctor was Israeli↑
- For them↑
- Not his real name but one I used for him in an unguarded moment as the next bout of unconsciousness loomed large in my future, to the amusement of the staff present.↑
- from the throat; my insides were still bleeding quite nicely thank you very much↑
- Somewhat less clear than that received from Neil Armstrong from the Sea of Tranquility in 1969↑
- I would periodically forget this and get tangled up, giving it a good tug with a spasming leg. The long days just flew by↑
- In Operating Theater in fact. Ahahahahaha↑
- Not the real procedure name, I forget what the real name was↑
- In point of fact I can't give my blood to anyone no matter how often I offer on account of being in the UK for two weeks in 1987 and therefore assumed to be a breeding ground for BSE prions. I digress↑
