Tell Me Lies

Well, I had my stomach procedure this week and I have to say, it went MUCH better than the endoscopy. I think that’s due to the following 3 things:

1.       I took a pregnancy test that morning.

2.       Opie took charge. When we arrived (20 minutes early again!), he confronted the receptionist immediately and said “Her appointment’s at 11:00, right? That’s what you have down? 11:00?”

Although it is interesting to note that as we were waiting, this other patient demanded to know what the hold up was, she was supposed to have her procedure at 10:30 and the receptionist said “We had you down  for 11:30.” 

Since it is difficult to believe that anyone could constantly make the same mistake and still be employed, I have decided that this is some bizarre tactic she uses when the doctors start to get behind.

In any case, the final reason that this experience was so much better than the endoscopy was:

3.       The nurse I had was an excellent liar. It wasn’t the same nurse I had last time and she listened when I said no one could get an IV in my arm. It did take her 2 tries to get it in my hand but that didn’t really irritate me because A. It always takes at least 2 tries to get an IV anywhere in my body and (more importantly) B. As she was trying to get it into my hand she kept saying things like “It’s hard because you’re so tiny. You need more meat on your bones. You’re just so little.”

Which is a big fat lie.

But here’s the thing, call me skinny and you can jab needles in my arm with reckless abandon.

It’s embarrassing but apparently true.

However, please don’t think that this means the entire experience was without typical Kimbo drama. And there were 2 big reasons for that.

1.       Opie is a TERRIBLE liar. When we got home and I was slowly working my way out of the anesthesia fog, he reported everything the doctor told him after the procedure…that one of my bile ducts was really constricted, that they had performed a sphincterotomy (which, when you’re slowly working your way out of an anesthesia fog, is a hilarious word and must be repeated in different voices, different tones and with different syllables emphasized a least 5 times) to widen the duct, and that this might have been the source of the problem.

“Might have been?” I asked. “It MIGHT have been the source of the problem?”

“He couldn’t say for sure,” Opie reported honestly. “There’s about a fifty-fifty chance. He hopes that it is, though, because if it’s not we’re basically back to square one.” 

“He did NOT say that!” I yelled. “Tell me that he did not say that there is a fifty percent chance that he still has no idea what’s wrong with me?!”

“No…well, kind of… I mean he thinks it could be…it probably is.”

I know honesty is one of the most important elements in a marriage but there’s something to be said for a convincing white lie now and then.

2.       God has a sense of humor. I woke up Wednesday morning with a terribly sore throat, which is understandable since I had spent an hour with a tube shoved down my esophagus on Tuesday. The fever, however, was a little harder to explain. Until I opened my school email and read a message from a student (who I had been working with on Monday) letting me know that he would be out on Wednesday due to a nasty case of strep throat.

I’ll leave my reaction to that news to your imagination (hint: there was swearing involved) but I will mention that I’ve been in bed swilling down antibiotics all week.

And maybe it’s still the anesthesia talking but sometimes I think I can hear God giggling and saying “Here’s some blog material for you!”

          

 I just hope He cured my stomach issues at the same time.

Bad Medicine

Tomorrow I go in for another (and hopefully final) procedure in the quest to figure out what’s going on with my stomach (you can read about the start of all that here and here).

And I’m pretty nervous about it. Not because I think something will go wrong but because I know that every time I have a medical procedure something goes wrong.

Take, for example, the first procedure in the stomach quest: my endoscopy. It was an unmitigated disaster.

And since I'm, apparently, turning into the kind of person who broadcasts her medical issues, I'll just give the full rundown of what happened:

The endoscopy was scheduled for 12:30 but we were supposed to arrive at 12:00 for check in, prep work etc. Left to my own devices, I would have flown into the building at top speed at 11:59 and used my last minute to cling to the reception desk in exhaustion and catch my breath—proud that I still made it on time.

Opie, on the other hand, has the insane belief that it’s less stressful to arrive early for things and my argument that no one is ever around to appreciate punctuality did nothing to sway him from his intended course.

Since he was driving, we got to the office at 11:40.

We filled out the paperwork, got all checked in and started to wait. And wait. And wait. And then, just to be different, we waited some more
.
I should probably mention here that in order to prepare for this test, I wasn’t allowed to eat or drink anything after midnight. But since we don’t usually have dinner at midnight, I actually hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since 8:00 the night before. And 16 hours with no food has a slightly discordant affect on my usually sunny nature.

At 12:15 I leaned over and snapped, “This is EXACTLY why I don’t like to get anywhere early…this is all your fault.”

“Of course it is,” Opie agreed, patting my hand. “But it will be ok.”

Unfortunately,  that’s when they started calling for people who had arrived well after we had….and I started to lose my grip on what was left of my temper. At 12:45 I leaned over to Opie again and hissed, “If I don’t get called next, I’m going to go over there and KILL the receptionist.”

Which means that, when the receptionist called another woman’s name, Opie jumped from his chair like he’d been shot from a gun and was at the desk before I could even move.

“You’re scheduled for 1:30.” She said, then blanched when Opie showed her the sheet with 12:30 emblazoned across the top. “I’m so sorry.” She called over to me. “I must have written it down wrong.”

“That’s ok,” I lied. “Mistakes happen. Could have happened to anyone.” But then I got a scrap of paper out of my purse and began surreptitiously drawing a stick figure labeled “receptionist” and stabbing its eyes out.

When they finally did call me back, things degenerated even more.

“Is your right or left arm usually better for an IV?” The nurse asked.

“Neither,” I told her. “No one can ever get it in my arm. You’ll probably have to put it in my hand.”

Most nurses appreciate this information, take a quick look at my arms and immediately switch to my hand. This nurse was in the 1% who take this comment as a professional insult—like I’m saying YOU won’t be able to do it because YOU look like the worst vein-puncturing, IV-placing excuse for a nurse I’ve ever seen.

I honestly don’t understand this reaction. How is that a personal affront? When people tell me they’ve never liked Shakespeare, I'm not insulted. And I certainly don’t fling them into a chair and start screaming Macbeth quotes at them.

In any case, after a cursory check, she said “Let’s try the left.”

“It won’t work,” I assured her.

And maybe she was the worst vein-puncturing, IV-placing excuse for a nurse I’ve ever seen because FIVE TRIES LATER she said, “I guess we’ll have to use your hand.”

I didn’t answer because in times of turmoil I like to close my eyes and visualize myself in a peaceful place, slowly throttling the person who has upset me.

Then the real trouble began. She started reading through her preliminary list of questions “Have you eaten anything today? Are you allergic to any medicine? Are you pregnant?”

And that’s when I made my fatal error.

I was honest. "No, I'm pretty sure I'm not pregnant."

“Pretty sure?” She asked “You’re not positive?”

“Well, I didn’t take a pregnancy test today or anything.” I said.

And she stared at me like I was Hester Prynne. “Have you had unprotected sex?” She asked in a horrified whisper.

“I’m married,” I told her. “So, yah, probably like a thousand times and I’ve never gotten pregnant.”

“We have to be sure,” she said. “We’ll need to do a test. We'll need a urine sample."

“I haven’t had anything to eat or drink for EIGHTEEN HOURS,” I said.

“Let’s give it a shot,” she said. “We only need a few drops.”

For the sake of decency, I won’t even attempt to describe the gymnastic efforts that providing this sample involved but I will mention that I was in the smallest bathroom in the free world, wearing a hospital gown that was at least two sizes to big with an IV in my right hand and an IV roller stand doing its best to knock me down.

“Good news!” The nurse announced twenty minutes later. “You’re not pregnant!”

“I was pretty sure I wasn’t,” I agreed. “Not unless you happened to look out the window and saw a really bright star and 3 wise men lurking in the parking lot.”

Which, in light of our previous conversation, was actually a terrible analogy. But keep in mind I was delirious from hunger. Plus, it always irritates me when people assume Opie and I are happy not to have children.

At this point the nurse patted my hand and said “Thanks for being such a good sport” with absolutely NO sarcasm (which means I’m either eligible for an Academy Award or she was completely clueless or most of her patients actually snap and physically assault her) and wheeled me into the exam room.

This should have been enough drama for one little endoscopy.

But it wasn’t.

Because the first thing the nurse in the exam room asked me was “Ok, you’re here for (insert some long medical procedure name I’d never heard of and certainly can’t spell).?”

“No,” I said. “I’m here for an endoscopy because the doctor thinks I have ulcers.”

“Really?” She asked skeptically.

Unfortunately for her, I had used up all my nice on the receptionist and first nurse. “What possible motivation would I have to make that up?” I demanded.  “So I can get a test I don’t need? Because I enjoy being in the hospital? Because I have Munchausen’s syndrome or some other mental illness? I’M HERE FOR AN ENDOSCOPY.”

The doctor came in, they consulted, pulled out a different chart and he said, “An endoscopy it is!"

And the nurse laughed. “Sorry about that," she said. “You know how Fridays go!”

“That might be the least comforting thing anyone has ever said to me before a medical procedure,” I told her with what she could have taken as a smile or (probably more accurately) a feral, teeth-baring grimace.

Though, to be fair, my statement wasn’t completely true. The least comforting thing anyone has ever said to me before a medical procedure was about 10 years ago. I had skin cancer and this woman I worked with who had had the same surgery came to my classroom-ostensibly to make me feel better—and launched into this long, horrifying monologue about how she woke up during the procedure, it was the most painful thing she’s ever experienced, and she still can’t believe how deep her scars are.

“Why are you telling me this?” I demanded. “Are you actually trying to make me cry?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s just that, you know, it probably won’t happen to you.”

Probably.

So, while the nurse’s insinuation that mistakes are to be expected on Friday afternoons wasn’t as bad as that, it was a close second.

“I think we’ll just go ahead and give you the anesthesia,” the nurse said.

From there, things went pretty smoothly.

Largely because I was unconscious and really don’t remember anything else from the rest of the day—although Opie says I was a constant joy to be around, randomly screaming nonsensical things at him.

I should probably tell myself that things couldn't get any worse but experience has taught me things can always get worse. 

So, say a prayer that everything goes well tomorrow and that I finally find out what's wrong.

And maybe a little prayer that Opie has the strength to go through it all again.

Vindication

So, since nursing a rambunctious puppy back to health isn’t drama enough, I’ve been having health issues of my own.

Some of you may remember a few months ago when I had painful attack and had to go to hospital etc. etc. After all that, I had to see a specialist and have an endoscopy (which is another long story in and of itself) and the doctor's conclusion was that I had an ulcer.

“I don't have an ulcer,” I told Opie. "I mean, obviously, I do have an ulcer; they saw an ulcer on the endoscopy. But I don't think all this pain is just caused by an ulcer. I don't think that's possible."

"I don't think you're a doctor," Opie countered.

And he may be right but I do read a lot of WebMd and that's practically the same thing.

So I should've felt vindicated a few weeks ago when I woke up in the middle of the night with another bout of unbearable pain.

Unfortunately in these situations all I can really feel is panic.

So instead of pointing out that after three months of ulcer medicine, I shouldn’t be having ulcer pain, 

I preferred to elbow Opie ever-so-gently in the ribs and announce that I was dying.

And I have to hand it to him—he is really calm in the face of an emergency. If the situation had been reversed, I would have sat up screaming “What? What do you mean you’re dying?” And then I would have called my parents (who live about 8 hours away) and things would have gone progressively downhill from there.

Opie, on the other hand, sat up, nodded and said “You’ve been under a lot of stress lately; it’s probably your ulcer.”

“It’s not an ulcer!” I yelled.

And after about 40 minutes I didn’t really care what it was; I just wanted it to stop. “But I don’t want to go to the Emergency Room,” I said. “It’s too expensive.”

It is interesting to note that when I was relating this story to my mom the next day, this is the exact point she interrupted me and snapped “You just spent thousands of dollars on medical care for YOUR DOG! Do NOT tell me that you won’t do the same for yourself.”

Which is a valid argument and one that Opie has used frequently in the last few weeks.

It is also interesting to note that I seem to have an almost pathological need to over dramatize situations—even situations that are already dramatic. Which is probably why I gripped Opie’s arm and announced again that I was dying. “We’ve had a good run,” I told him. “But this is probably it. So promise me that you’ll move back to St. Louis immediately. I don’t want you here, alone, so far away from your family.”

“You’re not going to die,” he said.

“Promise me!” I yelled. “I can’t bear the thought of you languishing away alone!”

And I continued on like this in a way that I like to believe he finds endearing but others seem to think is completely annoying.

“I promise,” He said at last (and St. Louisians, hold him to that if I do happen to die sudenly). “But you’re not going to die; we’re going to the Emergency Room and you’re going to be fine.”

“Wait!” I moaned. "I need help getting my yoga pants on."

This was a little confusing to him "Didn't you already have pants on?"

"Those pants are horrible," I told him. "I can't wear them in public!"

Then he started muttering under his breath in a manner that made it seem like he didn't find me endearing at all. So I didn’t mention that he's lucky this didn't happen when I was young and in college or I might have insisted on taking a shower and doing my hair and makeup before leaving the house.

In any case, we finally made it to the hospital (even though my hair was a hot mess) and in an exam room for blood tests.

Which never go well for me.  Apparently, I’m a “hard stick” and it takes at least 3 times for any nurse or phlebotomist to find a “good vein” and I end up with marks all over my arms like this:

May I just mention how much I enjoy walking

 around looking like I mainline heroin?

Four “sticks” later they had enough blood to do their tests.

And my need for drama kicked in again. I grabbed the nurse’s arm this time and said “Are you going to give me the good drugs now?"

She didn’t take my histrionics nearly as well as Opie does…and, oddly, he didn’t take this one well.

“Don’t say stuff like that!” He told me after the nurse left. “Now they're probably going to do a blood test to make sure you’re not some prescription drug abuser.”

"She knew I was joking,” I insisted. “I'm sure somewhere in my file it mentions that I'm hilarious!"

“Oh, I’m sure," Opie agreed but it didn’t sound like he meant it.

Even worse. I think he was right because it took a lot longer for them to bring the good drugs and even then they weren't as good as last time.

But they were good enough that I didn’t gloat when the ER doctor came in and agreed that it’s not an ulcer.

What is going on?

We still don’t know. I’ve had tests and more tests and in a few weeks I’m going back to the hospital for another, more specialized probe. All of which I’m sure I’ll share later.  The point, for now, is that I was right.

It’s not an ulcer.

And you know what? Sometimes vindication is almost as good as a cure!