Feb. 7th, 2011 at 10:04 AM
Day #14??? You know, your days are moving along awfully slowly.
True. Well, I’m counting days in Redwood Tree time.
As Sophia Petrillo (“see ‘Golden Girls’ if you’ve missed the cultural reference) would say, “Picture it: Cambridge, April, 2010: we’re just sitting on a bus, picking up passengers at a bus stop, when all of a sudden - *BOOM*!! Broad-sided by a jeep. True, it’s not like a jeep is going to flatten a full-size bus, no matter how fast it’s going – and it didn’t. But my seatmate and I got thrown forward, faces first, into the seats directly in front of us. Which might not have been so bad, either, except that the two of us were talking to each other when it happened, so both of our heads were turned.
First Appallingly Bad Mis-Diagnosis: Lawrence General Hospital Emergency Room (Lawrence, Mass.) who, without doing a single x-ray, or even a physical examination, announced, “It’s just a hyper-extended neck ligament and whiplash; you’ll feel fine in a day or two.”
They lied.
The pain in my spine accelerated at an alarming pace until I was unable to stand, was down on all fours and crawling. Wednesday June 9th I was sent back to the Lawrence General Hospital emergency room, who no doubt envisioned lawsuits over the initial misdiagnosis now tripped over themselves ordering X-rays, cat scans, an MRI of my back, ultrasounds … whatever other tests they could think of. NEW diagnosis: two bones completely out of alignment in my spine: upper near neck and lower at base of spine. Gee. NOW they get it right … thanks for the two months of needless agony, Lawrence.
So next I was sent to a neurologist -- a rude collection of sadists who could have given Steve Martin’s dentist a run for his money (“see ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ if you’ve missed the cultural reference), the New England Neurological Associates, and to see a physical therapist at the Northeast Rehabilitation Health Network. The therapist was able to fix the misaligned bone in my neck, so the severe 2 month long headache was finally gone; but the lower back was still causing enormous pain and I was now having back spasms. The Physical Therapist gave up and returned me to the neurologist recommending pain management. The neurologist ordered two more tests: an MRI of the lower spine and EMG/NCT Test (Neurological damage assessment). I began to use a cane because I was unable to walk without it. By this time it was mid-year – June and July of 2010.
The EMG/NCT Test (Neurological damage assessment) was performed on September 10th. Basically, it is a legal form of tasering: they shock you so severely that the neurological damage is determined by how loudly you scream in agony.
His evaluation: extensive (or maybe it was severe?) neurological damage and compression of the nerve exiting my lower spine. What, they couldn’t have figured that out without tasering me??? He could not make a recommendation; he had to receive a recommendation from his buddy, the Pain Specialist. This was beginning to smell like a fraud to me, but fine. A specialist unable to make a diagnosis without his buddy (another specialist) telling him what to do? Why are we paying him a small fortune if he can’t use his own brain?? Okay-dokey.
This was the recommendation: to prove that they didn’t rush into back surgery, they were required by law to recommend a steroid shot in the spine, even though everyone (including me) knew for a fact that it wouldn’t work (how’s a steroid shot in the spine going to cause a bone to shove itself back into alignment in the spine?), and then, as an absolute last resort: back surgery. Both required my brother Jim to fly up from Virginia to collect the mortal remains if something went wrong. Jim, being the best brother in the United States, dutifully flew north.
The steroid shot in the spine was so painful that I actually cursed the doctor out in Italian during the process – something to the effect of “Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, che la diritta via era smaritta … and an evil doctor stood at the crossroads with his long needle, on his way to well deserved hellish damnation for being the demon he is.” (See ‘Dante’s Inferno’, Book #1 if you’ve missed the cultural reference) – fortunately, he was an English-speaking-only idiot in addition to being a sadist, and so missed the reference to Dante’s Inferno. Jim (see brother, previous paragraph) was thoroughly entertained by my reciting Dante’s Inferno at the needle-waving “specialist”, proving that a construction supervisor was often vastly intellectually superior to needle waving “specialists” from the New England Neurological Associates who went to med school.
As expected, it did absolutely nothing for the back pain, except possibly make it worse – and now it was late in the month of September and we were looking at Lower Lumbar Spinal Fusion surgery.
Off to Lowell General Hospital. Jim wheeled me in the front door for the pre-surgical testing, only to discover that Lowell Hospital had lost me in their computer records. I nearly had a stroke on top of everything else. Took them a while, but they finally found me.
Another retarded stunt Lowell General Hospital pulled was announcing (while I was in the pre-surgical prep room being calmed down by my brother) that they needed a certain set of x-rays which we had at home. Mind, they had said nothing about bringing those photos with me, or I would certainly have done so. No, they tell me this an hour prior to surgery.
Instead of staying with me and keeping me calm, Jim now has to jump in the car and speed back to North Andover at top speed, pick up the x-rays and drive back again. It’s still dark this early in the morning and rainy. I’m now terrified for his safety as well as my own, going into surgery. When he gets back, the doctor informs us that he could have easily accessed the x-rays online. The surgical prep nurses at Lowell General have no idea how close they came to getting strangled that morning.
That evening, I found myself with 4 titanium screws and 2 titanium plates in my spine. My hair, once long enough I could sit on it, had snarled so badly during the operation that it now only hung to my shoulders in a knotted hair ball. (Within a week or two of being released, I had them chop it all off). Standing up wasn’t much of an issue; it was rolling over and pushing myself up to a seated position so that I could STAND up that was the problem. At one point, in the middle of the night, my lower leg was suddenly seized up in a violent leg cramp. I couldn’t roll myself over to sit up and stretch the muscle out and had no choice but to lay there and scream for help. Fun.
If that weren’t bad enough, the Sky Sadist thought it would be enormously entertaining if He made me violently sneeze with stitches in my back – gave Him the chance to cackle maniacally while I screamed in agony. I was sent home from the hospital only to ensure two sudden and violent bouts of vomiting, both of which sent me back to the emergency room in Lawrence … again, they just stood around looking bewildered and confused, which makes you wonder: WHY BOTHER HAVING A HOSPITAL AT ALL IF THEY’RE COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY USELESS???
The week-long vomiting episodes put me through another unexpected medical crisis: withdrawal. Because I couldn’t hold them down, I went off all medication, all pain killers, all Nicorette gum crutches, a withdrawal that left me trembling and twitching in addition to vomiting. The only advantage to being forced into medication withdrawal is that I learned something a bit surprising: the medication I had been on had prevented me from dreaming. Once I was off all the medication, I started dreaming again. Not surprisingly, Lawrence General Hospital had no clue what prompted the vomiting, even though I was in their clutches at least three more times within a month or so. I doubt Jim signed on for puke pan emptying, so you gotta give him credit for forbearance.
The Advantage to Jim’s Visit
While I recovered, Jim disassembled the daybed in the living room, got the maintenance men to clean out the dryer vents, called up a local “Handyman” service to have them move all the standing bins of things to storage and getting COMCAST to re-wire my computer into the back bedroom.
The span of time between vomiting episodes was very brief. I was getting hungrier and hungrier, while being unable to hold down solid food. Being unable to hold down any pain killers sent me into the stage I recorded as “The Knee Socks of Pain Days”, because of the burning pain that lit up my legs from my knees down to my feet.
I was also developing cravings I couldn’t explain, considering I wasn’t holding down any food. One day I developed an inexplicable craving for a baked potato.
“These knee socks of pain days”, I observed in my journal, “are symbolized by Rhydian Roberts singing, “I won’t let you walk this road alone”, even though he most certainly is, since I‘m dying slowly of “Knee socks of pain” disease and all I want in life before I die is a microwaved baked potato, and here it is, 11:30 p.m., and where is he, while I walk that road alone? NOT hovering nearby, solicitously handing me a microwaved baked potato, that’s for sure.” HE LIED!!!! (Sorry, Rhydian, but you have to admit, you did …)
The vomiting episodes continued even after I went back to work; at one point becoming so violent that I had to be whisked out of the office in an ambulance and sent off to Massachusetts General Hospital for a week. There I was, puking all over them all day, and they couldn’t figure out why, and they’re supposed to be one of the top hospitals in Massachusetts!
I was back to starving from sheer hunger, although they only gave me one bag of whatever it is they give you when you’re starving to death. Then they would schedule tests for the next morning that demanded you take nothing by mouth after midnight the previous night. The people who performed those tests could care less if you’re starving to death – they sometimes wouldn’t come for you until 10 or 11:00 in the morning. And THEN, as breakfast rolled around the floor for everyone else except me, the nurses proceeded to torture me.
Roommate #2 at MGH was a woman who was apparently admitted due to projectile pooping. Every five minutes, I’d hear a burst of machine gun fire emanating from her ass, followed by the inevitable stink. Nurses would run in all aflutter and change all her bedding (sending the stink further up and down the entire floor as they did it), and then they’d proceed to cram more breakfast food into the woman who would be shooting it back out at the walls 30 seconds later. All of this in front of another woman (me) who was slowly starving to death because she couldn’t hold anything down and they weren’t even feeding her intravenously.
A squealing Nurse Nancy to the Poop Chute: “Oh, your breakfast is here! A toasty English muffin! How many pats of butter do you want on it?? How many packets of sugar on your oatmeal? And a big, juicy orange! Here, let me peel it for you!”
Three days in a row, I came close to strangling some of the mindless nurses at Mass General. To kill time, I designed a board game, dedicated to Roommate #1, who was a Jehovah’s Witness and proselytized unwitting victims from Barbados from 7 in the morning until 11:00 at night, sometimes on two cell phones at once. I called the board game, “Stupid Simpering Silly Sows and their Cell Phones”. It had cards much like “Monopoly”, some of which read, “You are babbling idiotically on your cell phone and discover that your husband has turned into a cobweb-draped skeleton due to your lack of attention. You are remanded to the Torture Chamber for 23 turns. He is made King of England.”, or, another, “You are babbling idiotically on your cell phone and rear-end an SUV with a “baby-on-board” sticker. Both of you are arrested for being dangerously annoying and fined $10,000.”
First they told me their guesses, “Maybe you’re allergic to your medication”; then they told me, “Maybe it’s gallstones”, and then I demanded to be sent home in sheer disgust, only to start vomiting again, as soon as I was discharged. They finally pulled me out of work again.
Lest you think I had trouble only with hospitals during this disaster, you haven’t met my primary care physician. Right in the middle of this, she decided to abandon her previous medical group (The Pentucket Medical Group) and join a newly created one, the Merrimack Medical Group. The only problem was that she left the Pentucket Medical Group before the Merrimack offices were up and running. They had no phone, no offices, no office hours. And I’m puking my guts out, and have been hauled out of work again. And I have no doctor.
Laying in bed at home, I had to learn to stay still – any amount of jostling, and I felt nauseous, although I will say that other activities have been doing well. Cesare arrived and looks gorgeous on the wall; the Nymphs and Satyr also arrived and look equally gorgeous … I found a Venetian print and had that mounted on the wall as well.
Making Space: Wind Chimes
Wind chimes are supposed to attract good energy to you, I didn’t know why. Perfectly tuned wind chimes, and the emphasis is on “perfectly tuned”, can counteract the negativity of unnatural sounds, such as traffic noise - skate boards - fighting cats etc. Well tuned chimes can help create a positive energy flow.
I have no idea what a “perfectly tuned wind chime” means … I couldn’t hold a note even if it leapt into my hand and staple-gunned itself to my palm … and personally, on windy days I find outdoor wind chimes to be annoying after a while, especially if they never shut up, in-tune or not. Not that I’d know the difference. So I had the wind chimes, but since it was now winter I couldn’t open the windows to determine if they were “perfectly tuned” or not.
I read books, I watched “The Tudors”, I slurped on Pedialyte freezer pops, possibly the only thing in the United States that actually did what it advertised it was going to do – got my electrolytes back on track. I watched the riots in Cairo. I listened, horrified, to news broadcasts that had statistics to prove that a whopping 13% of secondary school biology teachers not only taught but advocated creationism in the schools.
Now, before a gaggle of hysterical so-called Christian women start jumping up and down, snorting and squealing like a pen of over-fattened pigs, I ought to point out here that I really have nothing against creationism per se. I’m just not so insipidly stupid that I can’t tell the difference between science and religion. You want your spawn to learn about creationism? Fine! Send the brat to Sunday School, you idiotic cow, and stop ruining what little is left of the public school system, now such an appalling purveyor of misinformation, Christian parents are single-handedly responsible for none of their children being able to get scientific jobs (read: jobs that actually pay more than the minimum wage) in the United States.
In disgust, I decided to change my religion to an undying worship of Terminus, the God of Boundaries. Major holiday: February 23rd: Name of major holiday: Terminalia. Holiday credo which must appear on the holiday cards I expect my friends and relations to send me on February 23rd: “Concedo nulli”. Translation: “I yield to nobody”. Each year I preach a sermon to the masses: ‘STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM ME!!”
Happy Terminalia.
No comments:
Post a Comment