E.R.

Originally Posted Saturday, November 22, 2014

When it comes to my health, I am of a darker turn of mind.  Any pain is an indication of cancer.  I guess I have the fear. 

Thursday night, I came down with a bad pain in my lower abdomen.  I felt a bit nauseous, had a bit of a fever, and thought I was constipated.  I was up and down all night.  My friend told me just a few days before that his brother had an emergency surgery for colon cancer.  That was where my mind first went, of course.  If not that, what?  I know two people who had to have emergency surgeries for a twisted bowel.  That, I know, is an awful surgery that has an extraordinary long recovery and leaves a terrible scar.  So there was that to consider, too.  The pain grew worse during the night to the point that I dare not touch my lower abdomen. 

In the morning, I decided that if I just moved about, had some coffee, that I would poop and it would all just go away.  It didn't.  I called my mother, but I couldn't reach her.  Whatever.  I decided to drive myself to the hospital. 

I was an oddity in the E.R. waiting room for a number of reasons.  Race was one.  I was the only white one there.  I wondered about that.  Where do the white people go?  But I guessed that we were all the same in not having a primary care doctor.  We were people who had no other place to go when we fell into an illness we couldn't treat ourselves, though there may have been other factors, too. 

Secondly, though, I was the only one there on his own.  All the others were brought in by someone or had an entire family in tow.  Sitting alone in an E.R., I had a real sense of my own fragility if not mortality.  Someday, I thought, this will be the last stop, the last road trip you will take.  I was hoping that this wasn't the one, of course, but I was going down some very dark roads. 

They ran lots of tests on me, of course.  They were very nice about telling me what they would do.  Blood tests and urine tests.  They would look for elevated blood levels.  They would take a look at my PSAs.  They checked my kidneys.  We were looking at three things, I thought, two of which hadn't occurred to me--colon cancer, prostate cancer, and diverticulitis.  I hadn't even thought of prostate cancer.  That put a chill in me.  I was pulling for the third though I didn't know what it was.  It seemed the best of the three options.

They decided to run a CT scan on me.  Of course.  I think the hospital does this to everyone.  That CT scan is a little money maker.  In my case, of course, it was essential, so I couldn't complain.  I could only worry. 

"O.K.  In a little bit the doctor will be in to discuss what your tests indicate.  Are you comfortable?"

I sat in a little barcalounger in a room full of barcaloungers.  Every two seconds, there was a ding. . . ding. . . ding. . . coming from some invisible speaker.  Family members of the sick were surfing through the stations of commercial t.v.  The room was freezing.  I sat in a little hospital gown with a blanket over me.  How could I not be comfortable in this modern version of purgatory? 

Somehow, I managed to fall asleep.  I woke to a doctor tapping me on the knee and saying my name.

Apparently, I am a pretty healthy fellow.  That is what they always tell me.  They tell me that, I think, because I take no medications.  At my age, I find, that is a rarity.  My blood pressure is good, my heart rate low, etc.  Apparently there was nothing alarming about my PSAs, either.  The doctor, though, was surprised when he looked at the CT scan.  "As we get older," he began. . . .  I had option #3.  Diverticulitis.  I was happy.  He prescribed two strong antibiotics for me and told me to stay on a liquid diet for the next couple days.  My symptoms should get better with the oral antibiotics, he said.  If they didn't, I would have to be admitted and put on an antibiotic drip and starved until I healed.  If it got to be more serious, I would require surgery. 

I was pretty happy to walk out of the hospital on my own two feet. 

This morning, I have done a little research on diverticulitis, though, and am not quite as happy as I was.  It is not a trivial thing.  I won't go into all of it, but the antibiotics will treat the symptoms, not the condition.  I was told to follow up with my primary care physician, but I haven't one.  Remember, I am a healthy fellow.  But I've thought about it.  The E.R. is there to treat the symptoms and get you back on the street.  They did that.  But I would think it more prudent to follow up with a gastroenterologist than some General Practitioner.  That, I think, is what I should do. 

I am more than a little depressed today. 

If there were a sympathetic fallacy, today would be proof, gray and drizzly and somber.  I still have pain and am achy and weak.  I am living on Gatorade and Ensure.  I will stay in bed and hope I can read, though if I can't I may buy an audio book from Amazon.  I will need some distraction. 

My knee seems to be healing fine, but it will take awhile.  Between that and yesterday, though, I am feeling quite feeble.  I have had too much medicine and too much trauma.  I think of Elliot's most famous poem--not with a bang, but with a whimper.