Hospital S&M

I’m sure you all are waiting breathlessly for details on how today went.  Far be it for me to make you pass out waiting, yea?  For those who like things summarized, the stent is out and I have a nice size piece of piping sticking out of my stomach which needs to be removed on Monday.  You have your update.  Now go before your eyes pop out of your head and your ADHD drugs stop working.

For those who appreciate flowery prose and want to know details on what transpired today, I can promise only one of those – I leave it to you to determine which one.

I had to be at the hospital at 8am for lab work which generally consists of sticking a needle in an arm, rotating it 360 degrees until I am squirming and then sucking 5 vials of blood out of me.  Not exactly a leisurely beginning to a day, no?  I’ve become immune to it by now (having to do it at least twice a week since I’ve been here) and at least they’ve stopped saying to me, “You know that your red blood count is low?”  I always had to laugh at the irony of telling me that my blood count is low after extracting amounts from my arm.  But I digress.

After labs I went down to radiology where I was told yet again to strip and put on a gown.  Seriously?  I’m starting to think that folks working in hospitals have a strange fetish.  Properly prepared for the upcoming festivities, I was then asked why I was there.  True, it’s a bit strange to be asked this but apparently this is normal procedure to ensure that I, the patient, know what I’m getting myself into.  Unfortunately, this time the nurse was honestly asking me because they were just as much in the dark as to what needed to be accomplished.  I could have told them to make me look like Abraham Lincoln and gotten a facelift out of it.  Her admission to me didn’t inspire confidence and I quickly checked out possible escape routes lest they start hacking off perfectly good body parts.  Apparently what happened to me is so rare that no one at the hospital had ever seen it happen before.  Again, not confidence inspiring. 

Confusion reigned for a bit until a doctor came over to set things straight.  He described his job as a “removal specialist” and his team removed all kinds of things from inside the human body.  He didn’t go into detail and I honestly didn’t want to know specifics.  He outlined what he thought would happen but unfortunately there were a lot of unknowns including, but not limited to, bleeding out, the stent breaking again and/or inability to get to the stent in the first place.  Fantastic.  This is going to be fun.

With the general plan of not letting me die on the table in place, off we went to another room full of exceptionally expensive looking machines.  The idea was to use an ultrasound and x-ray to find where to stick me, stick me with a sizeable needle, extract the offending plastic and call it a day.  Put like that, I was starting to feel better.  Or maybe it was the drugs.  Either way, I resigned myself to the idea that it was out of my hands and let’s just get on with it.  They covered me up from head to toe with a tarp and set to work.

I didn’t get a general anesthetic but they did numb the area where the needle would be traversing my epidermis meaning I got the full experience.  After consulting the magical machines that saw my insides, they decided on a good place to poke and went for it.  The doctor, who must moonlight at a local S&M club, decided it would be a good idea to show me the sheath that would be going in and providing access to my insides.  My only frame of reference is a coffee stirrer.  Oh boy.  Thankfully the guy knew what he was doing because he hit the right spot on the first try.  Next up came another wire that apparently was only used to make me believe I needed to use the bathroom BAD.  It had something to do with my bladder and “finding purchase” but to be honest, I was actually more interested in the big 60 inch screen that showed the x-ray version of my abdomen.  It was scary and incredible at the same time, watching these things move around inside me.  More importantly, it offered a distraction to the decidedly uncomfortable feelings emanating from inside me.  Finally came the extracting wire which was essentially a tiny lasso they used to snag the end of the stent.  I watched on the screen as they went in and out, trying wrap up the stent until finally – success!  Before I could say “yeehaw this is fun”, bang, it was outside me and in the doc’s hand.  I was about to breathe a sigh of relief when he whipped out a 15 inch length of plastic tubing and said, “We’ll put this in to make sure there’s no complications and so that we have a way to get back in if we have to.  It can come out in a 5-6 days.”  Without waiting for my OK (which was implied apparently), I watched in morbid fascination as all but 3-4 inches was summarily shoved inside me. 

So that’s about it.  I got one tube taken out and another put in.  As I mentioned, they claim it is to make sure I have to come back for more wallet-burning work am safe from any leakage which is better than the alternative I guess.  I get to go back in on Monday to get it ripped out.  After all that transpired, I am left with a piece of tubing the size of 10 gauge wire sticking out of my stomach an inch to the right of my belly button and one hell of a sting from where I was stuck.  Life could be worse.

Obviously this changes my plans a little and now I anticipate making my glorious return to Florida on the 10^th.  Let’s see if I can actually get that to work this time.

As always, thanks for your support.  Now back to your regularly scheduled life.