In Which Our Intrepid Crohn’s Patient Learns That
Flare-Ups Are Caused By The Full Moon,
Ice Chips Beat a Blank,
& When RNs Talk – Shut Up & Listen
By William D. Mongelli, M.L.S.
DAY ONE: MONDAY
I’m Too Obstructed To Die
The last time I was in hospital, so was Ronald Reagan, after nearly having been murdered by some impress-Jody-Foster bullets on an all-American D.C. street corner.
Flash-forward, dear Reader, to 2PM Monday afternoon—March 30th, 2009 precisely.
A grim-faced Emergency Ward doctor with a grim bedside manner grimly tells me that, based on the consistency of my stool, a digital probe of my rectum, and the pain I’m in, she suspects intestinal blockage.
The words “We’re going to have to admit you” leave her lips and I feel I’m smack-dab in the middle of that Monty Python moment where a 16-ton weight falls from the sky and crushes me flat. Unlike the Python actor who actually has an empty box encase him, I feel every five hundred and twelve thousand ounces of those 16 tons.
Five hours ago, at 8:55AM, I begin this day in my general practitioner’s office 40 minutes south of this here hospital. I thought he’d simply poke & prod, x-ray me, then send me home on a prednisone regimen like he did for my last flare-up three years ago.
Instead, he sends me straight to this Emergency Ward & they won’t let me leave.
Doctor Grim walks her grim bedside manner out of the room. I am left all by myself to contemplate my mortality.
Obsessing is a kind of avocation of mine. I am, by nature, what the pop-psych books term a ‘catastrophizer:’ I always think and expect the absolute worst of a bad situation. And that’s what I’m doing now.
I try to pray.
I’m too scared.
Nurse Yellow-Shoes
Twenty-five mortality-contemplating, anxiety-riddled minutes later, Trish breezes into the room in full Emergency Ward battle regalia which, for Trish, consists of an entire bright-yellow scrub set, and her feet covered by some very stylish and even-brighter yellow Crocs. She looks like a living Smiley-face but there’s two more reasons I like her: she makes me laugh, and she tells the truth.
Today Trish is the nurse assigned to ER #10, and that room at this moment contains a frightened middle-aged man with a distended stomach and acute abdominal pain. Trish was in the room when Doc Grim gave her diagnosis.
Trish smiles. “You want some more ice chips?”
“Listen” I say, looking deep into her eyes, “I need to talk. I’m worried.”
“I see that.”
“Can I die from this?”
Her smile fades into a professional seriousness, and she sits down. She looks me straight in the eye. “I’m not a doctor, but let’s talk about the good things. You have no fever and you’re not throwing up, something that patients with obstructed bowel always do. You have no stool impaction, in fact you’re passing diarrhea, so you don’t have a total blockage.
‘Now, the bad things. You’re suffering nausea. You have hot flashes and chills brought on by waves of abdominal pain. Your stomach’s distended. You can’t form a solid stool. And you’ve been admitted to a hospital.” She then gives me technical information of what bowel obstruction can do to the human body.
“In 13 years I’ve never been hospitalized for Crohn’s. Why now?”
“You know stress is important. How you manage it affects everything.”
“A friend at work just died unexpectedly. He was my age. I’ve been thinking about him.”
“B-I-N-G-O. Especially if you were obsessing about him.”
Hmmm….
Whine, Whine, Whine
I complain of pain and anxiety.
The pain I’ve been feeling since 1:30 Monday morning. I leap out of bed when a lateral line of burning stomach acid flashes just above my navel and continues every 7 minutes unabated.
The anxiety has just begun because I convince myself I’m dying and baby, I don’t want to die.
I want the pain to stop.
I want to be calm.
Trish passes this on to the doctor, who orders intravenous morphine and a sedative, which Trish administers. She also starts a saline/dextrose IV.
I accidentally inhale some ice chips & almost puke trying to hack them back up.
After using the bathroom across the hall, I have no underwear on so I end up dribbling warm stinking urine on my toes.
In my bed, I roll over to get more comfortable and nearly rip the IV needle out of the back of my hand.
A few minutes later I sneeze; my Johnny comes undone in the back.
Welcome to the hospital.
To Be Continued…
