That Time My Organ Tried to Explode and Kill Me
It’s been two weeks since I’ve posted anything. A lot of you know why, but some of you don’t. I finished the first week of my new job and settled into bed to sleep before the start of my second week. But I couldn’t sleep. I had had some indigestion in the evening that was worsening, so I got up and took some Pepto Bismol.
The pain was diffuse in my epigastrium but was localizing to my right side. I knew something was wrong. I can sleep through anything, but this pain was keeping me up. I had rolled into bed around 2300 and was tossing and turning until 0500. I had tried other remedies. I wondered if I was constipated, but two productive episodes on the toilet told me that I was not obstructed. The pain, like the venerable Elizabeth Warren, persisted.
I knew I had to be evaluated by a physician. I had an idea what was going on, but I didn’t know for sure. It’s a dangerous game trying to diagnose yourself. A lot of people get away with it because their friends and loved ones don’t challenge them, but I am not that confident about myself. Besides, when I have a patient that comes in and says that they’re having a heart attack or appendicitis or something different and even more strange, they are almost always wrong.
I texted my friend Sean, the charge nurse at my old ER near my house and asked how busy the department was; I texted knowing that I was going to go in no matter what. “Plenty of beds open,” he texted back. I hopped into my Subaru and went his way.
I walked into my ED as a patient and was greeted by my friends. “I want to check in,” I told them with a mixture of shame and pain. Nurses take pride in being able to rough it through illness. They wear these badges of shame because they don’t want to be put through a system that they help run. Nurses can be really fucking stupid.
Trey, the steely eyed and stoic triage nurse, took me back to a room. I don’t know if it was my insecurity or ability to read people, but I was certain that he thought I was coming to the ED because I was holding in a fart. Trey did my intake on the computer charting system while I undressed myself, put on a robe, and hooked myself up to blood pressure cuff and pulse oximeter. We made a great team.
The doctor comes in, pushes on my stomach, and tells me that he thinks it’s my gallbladder. I tell him that I think he’s fat shaming me. We both laugh. He leaves the room and I gasp in pain from laughing. Imaging will confirm what’s going on. A nice lady comes in and wrenches her ultrasound all over my abdomen and I want to scream but I don’t because I am not That Patient. All nurses have had That Patient and they hate That Patient. If you’re That Patient and you whine and scream, then we hate you. We make fun of you. We close your door. We are mean and insensitive people. I have a pathological need to be liked so I was not That Patient.
The ultrasound didn’t show anything conclusive. Ultrasounds are often inconclusive, but they’re cheaper and don’t expose you to radiation. When they work, they save you money and a chance at getting cancer. I was not so lucky. I was off to a cat scan. I have taken hundreds of people to cat scan and they always get the same spiel about how the contrast dye injected through an IV will make them feel warm all over, kinda like peeing your pants. All these things are true. It was kind of nice because the cat scan room is kept quite cool.
Like the cat scan speech, I give my patients a spiel about dilaudid—the Big D—which is a powerful opioid. I say: “this medication might make your head feel spinny and make you feel like throwing up, but it will take the pain away.” Fucking hell, I couldn’t have been righter and more wrong.
The dilaudid starts as a fire in the back of your head. This fire swims around your head for about two minutes. Now my head was on fire and my appendix was starting to leak fluid into my abdomen. The pain was there to stay, but the dilaudid—as good Big D does—put me to sleep.
I was hesitant to take any pain medication. The scared part of me recognized that addiction runs marathons in my family. Logically, I new that one dose of pain medication wasn’t going to get me chasing that dragon, but the idea of being an addict is my personal hell. If I wanted to chase some fleeting enjoyment with nothing but severely diminished returns and the destruction of personal life, I’d watch Lost again. Luckily, I only needed a few doses of pain meds while in the hospital. I was also off the pain pills three days after being discharged from the hospital. No addiction for me. Well, no addiction other than pizza for me.
My first night post-op was spent writing in some pain. It was fine if I didn’t move. That was good enough. I didn’t move. I got up once to pee and it wasn’t the worst pain. Moving from laying to sitting to standing felt like I was being slashed by tiny knives in my incisions. I took only the Tylenol.
The next day my nurse convinced me to try pain pills because, she assured me, that I was “going to hurt like a motherfucker.” I made a note to remember her name and give her a perfect score on my satisfaction survey. I am a nurse who cusses and I’m going to take care of other nurses that cuss.
What We Leave Behind
I’m going to get all Christopher Nolan here and go back a little bit. I left my job very quickly. A lot of people didn’t know it was my last night when that Wednesday rolled around. Now I was on the other end, privileged to receive the care from some of my closest friends.
A lot of my nurse friends swear that they will never come to the hospital where they work if they have an emergency. We have these privacy laws where you’re not supposed to talk about someone’s health information. I can’t say for sure that I was being talked about while in my ED, but I certainly had a lot of visitors coming to my room to say hi and see how I was doing. HIPAA doesn’t exist if you’re a healthcare worker. I didn’t care. I loved seeing my friends again.
I don’t think I received any special treatment. I’ve cared for more appendicitis patients than I remember. No one did anything more for me than I’ve done for those patients. When friends came from other halls to see how I was, I would deny their offers for anything. I even offered to let some of them jump into bed with me.
When my night shift friends went home, the day shift nurses took over. My day shift nurse was Kristen, the spitfire ex-charge nurse. Kristen is the reason I worked I that ED. The company had downsized my old position. I was all set to be laid off. The ED needed a ward clerk. Kristen took the ED manager aside and told her to hire me. I didn’t interview. I didn’t turn in a resume. I just started working in the ED. Kristen came in and gave me IV fluids and antibiotics. I joked and talked with her, but mostly I kept looking up at her. I had tears in my eyes and kept thinking, “thank you, thank you, thank you.” Your transient nurse boy gets wistful on opioids.
When they transferred me from my ED room to my room upstairs—the nicer rooms with bathrooms and windows—I had another visitor. Mark, the house supervisor, came into my room while my nurse was giving me some medication. I have known Mark for as long as I had worked in that hospital. When I was a security guard, he and I were the only responders to a code gray (a code gray is where a patient is acting up and sometimes violent). I am 6ft 6in and over 300lbs. Mark is 5ft nothing and weighs 75 pounds. Mark and I were able to handle this patient in a safe but firm manner. We joked with each other every week after that. Two men bonded by drug induced violence and trust in the other.
Mark walks into my room and my nurse says, “Oh. Hello, Mark.” The nurse is very nervous. The boss of the entire hospital doesn’t just pop into random rooms. If they go in, something is wrong.
“Is this patient being nice to you?” Mark asked my nurse and the nurse nervously nodded. “We had a lot of complaints on him in the ED and he’s going to need a rectal tube right now.” My nurse’s eyes widened as he looked at me. Mark and I laughed in unison. He shook my hand and asked how I was doing.
Mark and his rectal tube joke followed me everywhere I went. The OR tech took me to the pre-op area and my nurse there said that he had been directed by administration to insert the largest rectal tube the hospital had. They assured me that it was necessary but there was also a national lube shortage.
Mark checked on me twice a day—the beginning and end of his shifts—and even pushed a nurse practitioner into my room to hep discharge me sooner than the other patients on my last day in the hospital.
Sean, my old charge nurse and close friend, visited me before, sometimes during, and after his shifts. Cori snuck me some chicken strips in the middle of one of my nights in the hospital because I was having a craving.
On my second night in the hospital, I meandered down to the ED to see some friends. It was around 0200. I told my nurse on the surgical floor that I was going to stimulate myself into a bowel movement. Mostly I was just tired of watching infomercials after Law and Order SVU. Everyone seemed happy to see me. I talked with a lot of them. I pulled up my shirt to show them by wounds. “You can’t have me arrested for indecent exposure because I’m a patient,” I’d tell them.
I chose to leave these wonderful and caring people. My last sight of them was not as coworkers, but as one of their patients. I may be biased because they’re my friends, but they are also incredible nurses and doctors.
What am I Feeling Now?
I’ve been doing a lot of navel gazing, literally and figuratively. I haven’t had any post-op infections and I have been having a lot of feelings. This surgery has me on a mandatory two week leave from my new job. Being a contracted laborer means that I earn no money when I don’t work. No paid time off when you’re a lowly traveler.
I have spent most of these two weeks expecting to be fired. No skin off Salem’s back if they cut me loose. Some people could see this as pessimism, but I am not a pessimist; rather, I consider myself an advanced realist. Doing the right thing and acting in good faith doesn’t have much of a place in capitalism. But this week I received an email from my recruiter with an updated contract. Salem is going to extend me two weeks longer for the two weeks that I miss.
This reassures me, but I’m eating into my savings with every week that I don’t work. I started traveling to see the world, expand my nursing skillset, and to make money. Travelers get paid very well. “If I’m going to be depressed and unhappy at work, I might as well be rich,” I told some coworkers when I accepted a traveler’s job. Eating through my savings is the exact opposite of what I wanted.
The mandatory light duty and weight lifting has me feeling depressed as well. I was in a nice routine with my exercise and diet. I have let myself go a little crazy with food and haven’t been able to be as active as I was. I have a lot of extra work to do there.
Mostly, I miss my friends. I miss my old job. Time off is giving me time to doubt myself and I don’t need any help in that department. I’ve been doing it well my entire life. But I can’t go back without really trying. I’m gonna keep going. I’m gonna keep traveling. I’ll do everything I want even if my organs try to explode and kill me.
What I’m Into This Week:
TV—Baskets and Arrested Development (like my ninth rewatch) and the Olympics. I have watched hours of curling and can say with some authority that I have no idea what the rules of curling are.
Movie—RoboCop marathon on IFC.
Music: Neil Cicierega. This guy mashes up and remixes pop songs into horrific masterpieces. I recommend Crocodile Chop, Annoyed Grunt, and WNDRWLL.
Podcast: Hardcore History with Dan Carlin – Painfotainment. This is an exploration of how we humans have watched other humans hurt humans for our entertainment and amusement.
Transient Nurse Boy 