Been a while, huh? This has nothing to do with action figures, but if you’re interested in what I’ve been up to, have a read.
The first name I came up with for this article was “Something Funny Happened on the Way to the Bathroom” but after years of potty jokes, I figured it was redundant.
Instead, I decided to move forward with the current title because it amused me. As most of the things I write, this will probably seem rambling, have no clear point, and in the end, you may get a few laughs. Probably with TMI.
Even though I spent most of November 2020 in the hospital, this story actually officially starts in 2018. Probably way before that, but for medical purposes, we will go with 2018.
Keep in mind, I am not a medical professional, these are just my interpretations of the events I lived through, tossed in with some supposition on my part based on my first hand experiences.
In 2018 (see? I told you that’s where it started) I went for a checkup. Partly routine, but also with targeted areas of concern.
Chief among them were my hands tingling/going numb, and my constant stomach issues. They sent me for a nerve test and in spite of being told it was 100% carpal tunnel, no evidence of carpal tunnel was found.
My colonoscopy/endoscopy revealed diverticulosis. My doctor at the time said, “Don’t worry, this is common, you’ll probably never have to worry about this.”
Ok, no answers on my concerns. It wasn’t my first rodeo. Anyone who has been caught in the medical loop of finding no issues knows what I mean. Accordingly, I quickly surmised this was going to be a waste of time, as it had been every other time I tried to be proactive about my health.
Time jump: 2020. By this time, my hands were numb constantly. I was always shaking them, trying to get rid of the tingles. In addition, I was now having random intense muscle spasms in my abdomen.
Whereas in years prior, I got these “ab charlie horses” getting out from under desks running cables, plugging in PCs, and would try to sit up too early. They would take my breath away but I just figured that was par for the course. Only this year, I was getting them sitting perfectly still, and I’d have to breathe through the pain. Many of them were bad enough that my girlfriend would ask if we needed to call an ambulance. I always declined because in my mind, if I know the pain is temporary, I work through it. I saw no point in going to the hospital for a pain that would pass in minutes.
It didn’t matter that they were happening more frequently, or that they were getting worse. They would pass.
I decided I’d go visit my doctor, because I reached a point where I was convinced the hands being numb and the spasms were related. When I say “my” doctor, I mean, “the guy who is working in whatever medical conglomerate owns my old doctor’s office now.”
I went in and told him my concerns. He asked me if I prayed and told me that prayer is helpful. This seemed odd to me, because it isn’t often you hear a man of science offer “prayers” as a solution (for your purposes, no prayers have ever helped me with anything). At the time, my biggest concern was my hands. Not only do I like having hands, as a musician, writer and photographer, I use them a lot. So it’s not just me being selfish that I like having hands; they are also very practical.
Instead of listening to my concern for my hands, he started going over my last colonoscopy results and saw they mentioned hemorrhoids. I reiterated my concern was for my hands. However, he was now obsessed with my backside and no amount of “but my hands” was going to stop him from putting a glass tube up my hiney and looking around.
Of course, he didn’t have KY Jelly, so he went from room to room demanding the KY jelly while I was laying on my side, now nude from the waist down. He found the KY, looked around, proudly proclaimed I still have hemorrhoids, and pulled out his doohickey. Now he needed tissues, because he had none. This sparked another building wide search with him loudly proclaiming he needed tissues, only to find some, come back, toss a few at me and told to “clean up.”
He then gave me a buttload of muscle relaxers for the spasms, and tried to set me up with another test for carpal tunnel.
Frustrated, I left.
It wasn’t long after that when I first experienced what I know now was a diverticulitis flare up. An area about the size of my fist in the lower left hand of my abdomen was in intense pain. I couldn’t stand up, use the bathroom, eat, or really anything worth doing.
This is a good time to pause and talk about how the human brain is capable of convincing itself of almost anything. Case in point, I convinced myself that I had jammed that spot into a cart, or something equally hard. My job, despite being in technology, is also very physical as I’m sort of a “one stop IT shop.” I thought I had a deep bruise. I laid around a lot and after a week, it got better.
If I had any common sense, I would have realized that was my body’s “Check Engine Light.”
Unfortunately, my stubbornness always overrides my common sense when it comes to my health. I can’t be “sick” because if I’m “sick” I have to miss work, and I CAN’T miss work because thousands of people depend on me.
That was roughly 2-3 months ago.
The first week of November 2020 the pain returned, only worse. Still no idea what the cause was, which once again gave my mind free reign to find a reason for the pain. This time I deduced I had pulled a muscle doing trunk twists in the front yard with my dog. Chalked it up to “old age.” If I’m being completely honest, I was reluctant to bring the pain to anyone’s attention, as our pug was recently diagnosed with cancer, and I didn’t want any issue I had to interfere with his chemo treatment after the amputation.
By Friday, the pain had only magnified. I left work 15 minutes early as I could no longer stand upright. I went home and pretty much stayed in bed Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning.
“If I could only get enough rest, I’d feel better.”
Finally, Sunday morning, my girlfriend said, “This is dumb, we need to take you to the hospital.”
I acquiesced. We hopped in the car and headed to the hospital.
By this time, we had deduced we were dealing with kidney stones. Worse, I started home remedies for kidney stones, which involved me drinking pure lemon juice and cranberry juice. That, in of itself, was pretty horrible. Go drink some… I’ll wait.
Gross, right?
Anyway, we get into the emergency room, it’s about 8 AM on a Sunday, so no line. It was pretty amazing, actually. They did a CT on me, sent me back to the ICU and gave me some pain killers while we waited for the inevitable kidney stone diagnosis.
Except, that’s not what happened.
The nice lady came back and said I had a diverticulitis pocket. It ruptured and infected the surrounding tissue. She apologized, and told me they’d have to admit me.
Next thing I know, I’m in a room in the orthopedics section (which is the only room they had), which led to people checking my feet more than I was ok with.
From Sunday until Wednesday, I was hospitalized on a metric ton of antibiotics. By Wednesday, I hadn’t had anything to eat since the Friday before, so five days, no food. Only saline bags with potassium.
When Wednesday rolled around, the pain had subsided to a dull ache, and certainly something with which I could work. The doctor who was seeing me asked me how I was, and I told him “great” because at that point, I really felt like everything was getting better. They gave me a bunch of antibiotics, and a work release for two weeks later.
I remember thinking “Two weeks is excessive, I bet I can go back a lot earlier.”
That was at 2PM Wednesday, the11th.
By 3PM, I was riding back home in the passenger seat, down Broad street, genuinely happy. I hadn’t stayed in a hospital since I was 5 and had my tonsils out. I was going home, which meant I could finally sleep in my own bed, and more importantly, I could eat. Because I love to eat. I missed my family, I missed my life.
Upon arriving home, I had a sugar free apple sauce, and about 4 bites of a piece of peanut butter toast. I was in no way prepared for what would happen next.
The only way to describe what happened is to say one second, I was fine, I just had to go to the bathroom for a pooh. The next second, my entire world exploded into whitehot pain.
It felt like it was all going to explode out of my genitals.
That’s right, guys, you read that correctly. Imagine if every vile, disgusting, physical ailment you had was attempting to shoot through your penis, or worse, explode your testicles.
But that was just the start. I couldn’t stand up, I could barely keep my eyes open and stay conscious. Within 37 seconds, for some reason, I decided my clothes were too constricting and contributing to the pain. So then I was naked, and still in insurmountable pain.
My mind wasn’t functioning. I felt like, if I could just go to the bathroom, everything would be fine. Only no, that entire area south of the waist line wasn’t working.
It’s important to note, at this point my girlfriend said I needed to go back to the hospital. “No!” was my response. I just got out of the hospital, and I would not be denied my bed, or a meal, or an evening on my couch because I was too weak to put up with some physical pain.
Next stop: the bedroom. Because I was sure if I could just take a bath and “relax” I’d be ok. If I could just get “under the covers” and rest, I’d be ok.
Instead, I started shaking. My entire body, almost to the point of convulsing. That shaking became more magnified in my hands. Shortly after that, I realized I could no longer control my hands. They wouldn’t open or close anymore.
Not long after, the vomiting started. And it would not stop. Between vomit and dry heaves, my body was convulsing from the inside out for the better part of three hours. I took two Tylenol for the fever I had now spiked, only to throw it up within minutes.
Fortunately, I remembered I had one more Zofran in my possession, that dissolved on the tongue. That put a stop to the vomiting long enough for me to figure out my next step.
Finally, I admitted defeat. I turned to my girlfriend and said, “I think we need to call an ambulance.” She opted to drive me there, but fine. The result would be the same. I’d hopefully get some answers.
This is an interesting aside, but I had a half a dozen friends or so tell me I shouldn’t go to Mount Carmel East. I should go to this hospital, or that hospital. All of which were 20-30 minutes away under the best conditions. Mount Carmel East is about ten minutes away, with traffic.
During that ten minutes, I felt every crack and bump in the road. Every acceleration, deceleration, stop and lane change. Each of them made me wish I’d just die and get it over with already. There is no way I could have made the drive to any other hospital.
I was dropped off at the entrance, and my girlfriend went to park the car. I walked in and unlike Sunday morning at 8AM, 6PM on a Wednesday night was packed. In my hands were what I thought was my golden ticket. My discharge papers from earlier that day. I was thinking as a consumer, and hey, here was proof I was under your care and you sent me home, so I don’t have to wait.
I had to stand in line, and as I am waiting, I feel my body deflating. Something happened and my body just kind of went on autopilot. I fell to my knees, and holding the discharge papers up over my head, as if handing them to an imaginary person, I just kept repeating, “Please help me…”
They called me forward and I couldn’t move. The lady got a wheelchair and helped me get into it. They wheeled me forward and I told them what was wrong, and I proudly gave them my discharge papers.
For future reference, they don’t care if you were just discharged.
“There’s a six hour wait,” the lady said.
Dejected, but in too much pain to do anything else, I found a nice quiet corner in the waiting room to wait while my body finished dying.
About an hour into my wait, a nurse called me back, and she was sympathetic to my plight, and did all she could in her authority to help.
Unfortunately, all she could do was take blood and send it down to be tested now as opposed to waiting for the blood pull when I was taken to the back part of the ER. I’m thankful she did that, though. In its own way, it sped up the process ever so slightly. I didn’t know it, but every second was now a factor.
They called my name around midnight, and gave me a bed in the back. I got some pain meds that didn’t help, and an IV.
Hey, at least we were on the fast track to answer-ville, right?
Around 2 AM they took me back for a CT. At 3 we saw the surgeons, who informed me there was some air that showed up on the CT, and it probably meant surgery. They told me I would probably have to have an “ostomy.” I never heard the term before, but I knew what a colostomy bag was. I told the surgeon, “I know this is dumb, but the only time I’ve seen someone with a colostomy bag, it was my dad, and he died.”
To me, a colostomy bag was synonymous with death. Then they left the room.
At roughly 4AM, my girlfriend (who had been up all day) had to go home and get some rest. I was worried she’d be driving so tired, but fortunately, we were close to home, and there wasn’t a lot going on with me anyway. At least nothing she could help with.
At 5:15 AM they bring me to my new room and tell me I’d be heading to surgery around 10:30 AM. By 6 AM the surgeon had returned and told me they had to move the surgery up.
This was my first indication something was really wrong. Had I not been in so much pain, I would have given that more consideration.
By 7:30 AM I was being wheeled down to surgery. All white room with easily a dozen different people in it, all working hard at something. This, I told myself, was looking more and more like the kind of “big deal” I’ve carefully avoided my whole life. They gave me the nighty-night meds, and that was the last time I was aware of dates and times for almost two weeks.
I came around in the recovery area which wasn’t too dissimilar from the recovery rooms I had been in for my outpatient surgeries… gallbladder removal, sinus surgery, the usual stuff. Then it dawned on me, I was trying to keep my girlfriend in the loop, and my last text to her was “I guess I’m going to surgery now” and as I was hitting “send” on that, they came in my room to grab me.
She was in a communications blackout for however long I was in surgery.
I asked the people around me if anyone had contacted her. There was a mixup and a few people who each thought it was the other person’s job to do so. A nice lady left to call her, and she called her from somewhere where I could still hear her end of the conversation. I could tell she was trying to calm someone down and I was consumed with guilt for worrying her like that for so long.
Everything kind of fades in and out here. I don’t know how long I was in recovery. I just know that I was really starting to hurt. I couldn’t swallow because I had an NG tube (nasogastric tube) down my throat. Didn’t understand that, but right then, nothing was making sense. Finally, I got wind they were taking me to my room.
I arrived at my room and before Olga (the nurse’s name who was such a sweet lady) could hit me with her information bomb, my girlfriend arrived to help me get set up in the room.
Man, they drop a lot of info on you when you first get there. The crux of it was, I wouldn’t be getting any food for a while, I needed to walk as much as possible, and I had to use a breathing “game” several times a day, ten times each usage.
That doesn’t seem like a lot of information but every one of these things, at that time, sounded like the worst information I could have received. Go for a walk? I couldn’t feel my feet yet. I couldn’t move. Breathing exercise? I was gasping for air through the pain. Of course, the eating thing was self-explanatory.
After Olga left, my girlfriend relayed to me the information that was communicated to her about what just went down.
From what she was told by the surgical team, as soon as they made the first incision into my abdomen, feces started pouring out. At some point, they don’t know when or how, but besides the popped diverticulitis that brought me in there, my colon perforated about the size of a jelly bean.
When they opened me, my insides were filed with literal feces. As in it spilled out. I was going into shock. They had to take my appendix because the feces had destroyed it.
They took out 12 cm of my sigmoid colon. Every single move, made me feel like I was dying.
I had a catheter in me, a drain at the bottom of my abdomen, and one on the right side. As I already mentioned, I had an NG tube running from my nose to my stomach because my bowels weren’t working. That means I couldn’t turn my head without a lot of pain. It also meant any medication they could give me via my IV, had to be crushed up mixed with water until it was a paste, and poured down my tube.
In summation, I was mere hours away from death. To further extrapolate, my white blood cell count was not going down which indicated more infection, and I was in a state of multi-organfailure.
At some point during this madness, I tried to push myself up in bed, because I didn’t want to bother the staff again. I raised my feet all the way up and lowered my head as far as it would go. Then it was going to be a simple matter of me using gravity and slight force to push myself up in the bed. Only I blacked out, and woke up laying upside down in my bed surrounded by 3 nurses who were trying to figure out why my heartbeat had gotten so irregular. Probably the upside-down thing, if I had to guess.
One of the skills I lost was wiping my own behind. There is little more humiliating than needing help wiping your butt. However, I also noticed their effort was rather lackluster. This led to… streaks on the bed sheets. I thought I was crapping myself. Shortly thereafter, I discovered the reason behind the streaking was, well, they weren’t really putting their whole heart into the cleaning of my backside. I wasn’t sure how to tell another adult they needed to wipe me better, so eventually I ended up using my friend Mark’s suggestion, and it worked. I told the folks, “Yeah, you’re really gonna have to get in there…”
Not my proudest moment, but any butt port in a storm, right?
I had another CT scan done Tuesday the 17th with contrast to see what was still the issue. They found infected pockets so I had to go back and have another drain placed in my abdomen, bringing the total amount of drains in me to three.
At some point, my veins had decided they had had enough of the tomfoolery. They were exhausted, and everytime they tried to replace an IV, the vein would collapse.
Eventually I ended up with a PICC IV in me, had no idea those were dangerous, but at least I was getting nutrition. A few days later, they gave me actual food (ok, broth, and jello). I ate it and within an hour vomited it all back up.
My NG tube was going through my vocal chords so I either couldn’t talk and the few times I could, it was immensely painful. However I found the sound it made comforting at night for some reason.
November 24th, two days before Thanksgiving 2020, I was discharged.
What did I learn? I learned that a hospital is a machine. Like any machine, you can find out how it works and subsequently, figure out how to work with it. In my case, I did some math and figured out how to move my meds around until I carved out a nice chunk of time to sleep at night. Sure, there are always techs stopping in to take your blood pressure or temperature, but by the end of my stay, I knew that from 11PM until 5AM, I would not be woken up for mediation.
I learned that Scrubs really was a good representation of the hospital and the people you meet in there. I almost had a surgeon come back to my room and watch Scrubs with me, but in the end, he was too busy. That’s ok, because a nurse watched an episode with me and I turned her into a fan.
Speaking of Scrubs, one of the first lines spoken to JD in the series, he is being told to place an NG tube in a patient. I now know what that means and the nightmare it would have been for that patient.
I learned that I had no idea the amount of pressure that I was under on a daily basis. It wasn’t until I was incapacitated and for the first time since I can remember, under no obligation to do anything for anyone. It was an emotional palette cleanser.
I only had one emotional bad day. Every day was a physical nightmare that I couldn’t wake up from, but through it all, I only had one day where I just completely broke down. Unfortunately a nurse walked in during the breakdown, which was a little embarrassing.
I learned that your muscles will atrophy to the point that when you get down in a pitcher’s position to untangle the cables wrapped around your IV wills, your thighs won’t support you and you’ll pitch, face forward, into the nearest wall. That was a fun lesson.
I’m told it could be up to 6 months before I stop hurting, and up to two years for me to be finished fully healing. Everything is a challenge now. Sitting up, walking, and wiping my own behind are now frustrating experiences for me.
My new objective in life seems to be to keep my bowel movements soft. I had no idea it would be so all consuming that I would essentially be worried about my dookie professionally. There is nothing stopping this all from happening again, and there is no guarantee it will be caught in time the next time it happens.
It’s all very depressing and overwhelming. It makes everything else matter less. Nothing seems important to me right now, and I don’t know how to get back to whatever normal is for me.
Before I leave you with that negative brainwash, let’s touch on some positives.
The nursing staff, the doctors and surgeons, heck, even the folks who were emptying trash cans, were all amazing people. I have never been so well taken care of in my life (shout out to Mount Carmel East).
I was in no way prepared for the kindness and concern of my friends (both work and personal). So many of them went out of their way to say and do kind things for me and my family that I could never thank them all. I will try once more: Thank you all for what you did!
Finally, the love and support of my family. Were it not for my girlfriend, her mom, my brother, my cousin, and others, I would have felt very alone. Especially considering COVID stopped all visitations from happening. Their constant texts and concern helped me at a time where my emotional defenses were all but obliterated.
Back at home my girlfriend has been carrying a double burden, not only doing the usual stuff she does, but also my end of the “usual stuff” that needs to be done in order for a household to run. Couple that with being my at home nurse as well, makes her the GOAT.
In closing, this has been a life-altering experience, one which I am not sure how or if I will recover from this physically AND emotionally. However, each day I plan on getting up, and fighting as much as I can, until I can’t fight anymore, and then doing it all again the next day.
