In which there may be too much icky detail
Just in case anyone is reading this who missed the non-LOL posts on LOLMac: I have been in hospital since Monday night. I’m home now. I’m going to leave out a great many details here. Just so you know.
As many of you know, I have reached the fine age of 50. Here in the US, one of the things this means is that one is supposed to get a colonoscopy. (If you don’t know what that is, here’s Wikipedia.) Mine was on Monday morning, which means the icky preparation began on Sunday afternoon.
By Monday at noon, the procedure was over and I was free to go eat again - solid food, whee! - confident that I’d be back at work the next day. Even though the doctor had removed 24 polyps during the procedure, and told me this was a very high number. I will call this physician Young Dr. Young. He is fresh out of med school. I eventually learned that he’s not very good at communication. *facepalm* I got a list of call-if-this-happens items and a follow-up appointment for a month later.
I began hemorrhaging late that afternoon.
My attempts to contact the doctor met with a catastrophic failure in their office systems (I later learned that the person who usually answers the phone is on vacation). When I called at 4:50 pm to report the bleeding, hoping for some guidance (check paragraph above: the doctor did not talk to me about adverse after-effects), she put me into the voice mail of the office manager. When I called back again after leaving a message to demand if there was anyone in the office I could talk to, she said there was not (at 4:50 pm!!), adding, “I’m not a nurse, but I think you should go to the ER.” (Note: She was supposed to page the doctor on being told a patient was bleeding.) (Duh.)
We went online of course, Googling for the information that the doctor should have provided. Yes, bleeding is a common after-effect, you betcha. How much bleeding is normal? Hard to say. It’s damned hard to measure your own blood, especially in the squickiest of circumstances . . .
We kept an eye on the bleeding, but ignorance and inexperience made us hesitant. Hindsight is always so clear . . . I felt pretty much okay in spite of the increasing bleeding, right up until I passed out, about 8:30 that evening. My partner called 911 at that point.
I came to and passed out twice more as the paramedics got me into the ambulance and to the hospital. The ER was swamped - cases literally piling up in the hallways. I got a CAT scan at 1 am, and at 3 am the World’s Slowest Radiologist diagnosed me with appendicitis. o_O I was admitted to the hospital and scheduled for surgery in the morning.
On Tuesday, my three doctors - the surgical specialist (whom I will call Dr. Doctor), the attending medical physician (whom I will call Dr. Spineless), and Young Dr. Young (who finally learned I was in hospital, after at least four independent attempts to contact him) - as I was saying, my three doctors gave an ongoing string of conflicting instructions. Dr. Doctor wanted to find out if I had appendicitis, and ordered observation, no antibiotics or pain meds, which would have masked the symptoms. (Fortunately, I wasn’t in pain, just incredibly weak.) YDY, deeply contemptuous of all surgeons, couldn’t be bothered to communicate directly with DD, sneered at the notion of appendicitis, and had me scanned for internal bleeding. Dr. Spineless should have been mediating and coordinating; I’m not sure what he did, honestly, other than give instructions that conflicted with other instructions. He wanted to give me some blood, having figured out that I had lost a lot of blood. Clever, that.
Maybe if any two of my doctors had ever come into direct contact, they would have blown up. Who knows? By Wednesday morning, the conflicting instructions had been ramped up to DD and YDY countermanding each other’s orders. (DD wanted another CAT scan. YDY wanted me to eat lunch and go home.) During the night, I’d finally got a blood transfusion (two pints! hic! plus extra iron!), plus two whole hours of unbroken sleep, which gave me enough energy to chew each of them out individually over the course of the day.
DD took his scolding extremely well, and if I ever actually need to have my appendix out, I’d be glad for him to do it. In the end, I followed YDY’s wishes, ate lunch (solid food FTW OMG), and was discharged at 3 pm. Missy took me home, and we have mostly slept since then, with occasional pauses in the rigourous schedule of naps and snoozes to eat and shower.
That’s the main story. A few random notes:
This was actually my first-ever hospital stay, other than getting born (which I don’t remember). It was my second-ever ambulance ride, the first having been in 1988. I’d like to keep these experiences very rare in the future, thank yew. But other than the grotesque absence of medical teamwork, the care and professionalism were superb. The staff, nurses, and technicians were one and all fantastic amazing OMG superwonderfuldoubleplusultrafabulous. My night shift RN was especially wonderful.
Your thoughts and positive messages and supportive comments were amazing, and you made one hell of a big difference. On Tuesday night, I chased Missy home so she could get a real meal and a decent night’s sleep, and she called me in the hospital and read me all your messages from LOLMac. Um. Snif. You folks rock - what else can I say?
TV is horrible. I haven’t watched regular programming in years, just DVDs. In Seattle, doctors’ offices have magazines; in Florida, they have TV sets. Hundreds of TV sets. Most of them show the Food Channel, but in the ER, they all seem to show late-night programming that’s dark and jittery and loud and violent. The first thing I did on arrival was to plead for the set in my little cubicle to be turned off. They turned off the sound, bless them, but left the picture on, and I wasn’t always able to keep myself from looking.
I only tried turning on the TV in my room a couple of times. I managed to find re-runs of Doctor Who and Star Trek: TNG, which was good, although the Star Trek episode was, guess what, crewmember-get-special-effects-virus of the week! Eeep.
Also, can anyone tell me when the History Channel became the Testosterone Channel? huh??
My boss has been calling twice a day - to ask how I’m doing and admonish me to take care of myself and get better. Sincerely. I kid you not. This would never have happened at my previous job.
Missy was with me every moment, except when I drove her from my bedside to eat and sleep. Through many of the long draggy hours of waitingwaitingwaiting, she read to me out loud from a Georgette Heyer novel, much easier on the nerves than network TV. (She’s a fantastic reader as well as a general goddess-at-large.) I simply could not have made it without her, and I wibble when I think about it. Wibble.
So, I’m back. I’m terribly lethargic, although I seem to perk up more with each meal and nap. I remain moderately pissed off at the idiocy of white males in general and arrogant doctors in particular, and I’d like to kick the lot of them out so that the nurses and staff can get their jobs done. I remain deeply grateful that I have my partner, and health insurance, and live in a country with reasonably good health care (when it’s not being held hostage by the rich white bastards in suits insurance industry). I have a job, and the upcoming further kick in the ass from the uncovered portion of the hospital bills will not ruin us or cost us our home or drive us to despair. Nobody gave us a moment’s grief or hassle about her right to be with me.
And while I was unplugged from the world, the final revocation of DADT was made official, and the first legal wedding was performed between an active US serviceman and his new husband. So there are Good Things happening in the world.
Note to self: do not do this again.
As many of you know, I have reached the fine age of 50. Here in the US, one of the things this means is that one is supposed to get a colonoscopy. (If you don’t know what that is, here’s Wikipedia.) Mine was on Monday morning, which means the icky preparation began on Sunday afternoon.
By Monday at noon, the procedure was over and I was free to go eat again - solid food, whee! - confident that I’d be back at work the next day. Even though the doctor had removed 24 polyps during the procedure, and told me this was a very high number. I will call this physician Young Dr. Young. He is fresh out of med school. I eventually learned that he’s not very good at communication. *facepalm* I got a list of call-if-this-happens items and a follow-up appointment for a month later.
I began hemorrhaging late that afternoon.
My attempts to contact the doctor met with a catastrophic failure in their office systems (I later learned that the person who usually answers the phone is on vacation). When I called at 4:50 pm to report the bleeding, hoping for some guidance (check paragraph above: the doctor did not talk to me about adverse after-effects), she put me into the voice mail of the office manager. When I called back again after leaving a message to demand if there was anyone in the office I could talk to, she said there was not (at 4:50 pm!!), adding, “I’m not a nurse, but I think you should go to the ER.” (Note: She was supposed to page the doctor on being told a patient was bleeding.) (Duh.)
We went online of course, Googling for the information that the doctor should have provided. Yes, bleeding is a common after-effect, you betcha. How much bleeding is normal? Hard to say. It’s damned hard to measure your own blood, especially in the squickiest of circumstances . . .
We kept an eye on the bleeding, but ignorance and inexperience made us hesitant. Hindsight is always so clear . . . I felt pretty much okay in spite of the increasing bleeding, right up until I passed out, about 8:30 that evening. My partner called 911 at that point.
I came to and passed out twice more as the paramedics got me into the ambulance and to the hospital. The ER was swamped - cases literally piling up in the hallways. I got a CAT scan at 1 am, and at 3 am the World’s Slowest Radiologist diagnosed me with appendicitis. o_O I was admitted to the hospital and scheduled for surgery in the morning.
On Tuesday, my three doctors - the surgical specialist (whom I will call Dr. Doctor), the attending medical physician (whom I will call Dr. Spineless), and Young Dr. Young (who finally learned I was in hospital, after at least four independent attempts to contact him) - as I was saying, my three doctors gave an ongoing string of conflicting instructions. Dr. Doctor wanted to find out if I had appendicitis, and ordered observation, no antibiotics or pain meds, which would have masked the symptoms. (Fortunately, I wasn’t in pain, just incredibly weak.) YDY, deeply contemptuous of all surgeons, couldn’t be bothered to communicate directly with DD, sneered at the notion of appendicitis, and had me scanned for internal bleeding. Dr. Spineless should have been mediating and coordinating; I’m not sure what he did, honestly, other than give instructions that conflicted with other instructions. He wanted to give me some blood, having figured out that I had lost a lot of blood. Clever, that.
Maybe if any two of my doctors had ever come into direct contact, they would have blown up. Who knows? By Wednesday morning, the conflicting instructions had been ramped up to DD and YDY countermanding each other’s orders. (DD wanted another CAT scan. YDY wanted me to eat lunch and go home.) During the night, I’d finally got a blood transfusion (two pints! hic! plus extra iron!), plus two whole hours of unbroken sleep, which gave me enough energy to chew each of them out individually over the course of the day.
DD took his scolding extremely well, and if I ever actually need to have my appendix out, I’d be glad for him to do it. In the end, I followed YDY’s wishes, ate lunch (solid food FTW OMG), and was discharged at 3 pm. Missy took me home, and we have mostly slept since then, with occasional pauses in the rigourous schedule of naps and snoozes to eat and shower.
That’s the main story. A few random notes:
This was actually my first-ever hospital stay, other than getting born (which I don’t remember). It was my second-ever ambulance ride, the first having been in 1988. I’d like to keep these experiences very rare in the future, thank yew. But other than the grotesque absence of medical teamwork, the care and professionalism were superb. The staff, nurses, and technicians were one and all fantastic amazing OMG superwonderfuldoubleplusultrafabulous. My night shift RN was especially wonderful.
Your thoughts and positive messages and supportive comments were amazing, and you made one hell of a big difference. On Tuesday night, I chased Missy home so she could get a real meal and a decent night’s sleep, and she called me in the hospital and read me all your messages from LOLMac. Um. Snif. You folks rock - what else can I say?
TV is horrible. I haven’t watched regular programming in years, just DVDs. In Seattle, doctors’ offices have magazines; in Florida, they have TV sets. Hundreds of TV sets. Most of them show the Food Channel, but in the ER, they all seem to show late-night programming that’s dark and jittery and loud and violent. The first thing I did on arrival was to plead for the set in my little cubicle to be turned off. They turned off the sound, bless them, but left the picture on, and I wasn’t always able to keep myself from looking.
I only tried turning on the TV in my room a couple of times. I managed to find re-runs of Doctor Who and Star Trek: TNG, which was good, although the Star Trek episode was, guess what, crewmember-get-special-effects-virus of the week! Eeep.
Also, can anyone tell me when the History Channel became the Testosterone Channel? huh??
My boss has been calling twice a day - to ask how I’m doing and admonish me to take care of myself and get better. Sincerely. I kid you not. This would never have happened at my previous job.
Missy was with me every moment, except when I drove her from my bedside to eat and sleep. Through many of the long draggy hours of waitingwaitingwaiting, she read to me out loud from a Georgette Heyer novel, much easier on the nerves than network TV. (She’s a fantastic reader as well as a general goddess-at-large.) I simply could not have made it without her, and I wibble when I think about it. Wibble.
So, I’m back. I’m terribly lethargic, although I seem to perk up more with each meal and nap. I remain moderately pissed off at the idiocy of white males in general and arrogant doctors in particular, and I’d like to kick the lot of them out so that the nurses and staff can get their jobs done. I remain deeply grateful that I have my partner, and health insurance, and live in a country with reasonably good health care (when it’s not being held hostage by the rich white bastards in suits insurance industry). I have a job, and the upcoming further kick in the ass from the uncovered portion of the hospital bills will not ruin us or cost us our home or drive us to despair. Nobody gave us a moment’s grief or hassle about her right to be with me.
And while I was unplugged from the world, the final revocation of DADT was made official, and the first legal wedding was performed between an active US serviceman and his new husband. So there are Good Things happening in the world.
Note to self: do not do this again.