Adventures in Health Care, pt 1, or, My Scrunchie Saved My Life!

[llcoolvad]

Thursday morning, still no sleep in sight, I call my doctor to whine. Leave message on his machine. He calls back, we discuss plans, he asks me to go get a chest x-ray before seeing him on Monday. I leave work, drive to a branch of his hospital, get the x-ray, drive back to work. I'm back about 20 minutes and he calls me. There's an abnormality in the x-ray and he wants me to go to the ER right away and get a CAT scan. I left work early, and got to Brigham & Women's hospital at around 5pm.

I'm coughing when I get there, of course, so they make me wear a plague mask: 

Every time I cough, ever other person in the waiting room is looking at me like I'm a baby killer, and I'm thinking, fuck y'all, I'm wearing a fucking mask. You probably have ebola and just don't SHOW yet. Some girl who had been puking into a container right near me (who I assumed was either suffering from massive head trauma or a wicked overdose) falls right out of her wheelchair and hits the floor. Everyone's all excited, then they wheel her off on a stretcher and everything goes back to normal, with me as plague central.

Two hours of evil stares later, I get taken into the back. I have to share a cubby with some 'slip and fall' scammer and her friend. Apparently she'd fallen two days ago at a Stop & Shop. Her biggest concern was that she got paperwork 1. for missing work and 2. to prove to Stop & Shop that something happened. [I was pleased at the end to hear that she had nothing broken and the most they could call her "injury" was bursitis. Probably not the biggest payday there. Aw.]

So anyway, I get seen right away by young hot doctor #1. (An aside, this hospital is STACKED with hot doctors. Excellent!) He's very charming, attentive, asking me all kinds of questions about myself. I felt like I was on a first date. He says he'll see if he can get a copy of my x-ray, and consult with his boss. Time goes by. My nurse, fairly attentive, brings me a blankie, tells me it's ok to use my phone, and sticks an I.V. in my hand. Young hot doc comes back and says he's seen my x-ray now, and I have "a pneumonia" in my right lung, and there are a couple of masses in my upper chest that they don't know what they are yet. O...kay. So now we definitely need the CAT scan because it will help them narrow down what's going on.

Around 9pm I get wheeled in to the scan. I am slightly nervous because I am claustrophobic, but the donut-shaped CAT scan doesn't end up bothering me at all. They take a couple of pictures, then inject me with some kind of glowy-irradiated-whatever stuff and take a couple more. Done in less than five minutes. Cool! So can I go home now? Not yet....

I am starving by now. I ate lunch around 1:30 and now it's around 9:30. I want something to drink, but they keep using terms like "biopsy" and they don't know if it's ok for me to eat or drink or not. I am both stressed and chronically bored by now, as my delightful Kindle is being delightful in my bedroom instead of in my bag and there's no tv in the ER. Very happy to have iPhone with me. Surf web a bit, read blogs, papers. Realize don't have phone charger with me. Stop doing that so as to preserve battery for phone calls. Sit. Stare. Sit. Try to eavesdrop on roommates, but they are speaking mostly Spanish so out of luck. Try to doze. See prev. re: speaking roommates. LOUD.

Nurse arrives, says I probably will get to leave soon. Really? Yay! And yes, you can have some food now, do you want a sandwich? DO I!! In the meantime, older hot doctor #2 arrives. "So how are you doing with all of this? I know it's a lot to process!" UM, wait, was I diagnosed with something?? There are still too many hypotheticals, he says. What we really need to do is admit you. You could run all these tests outpatient, but it would be much faster if we admit you.

Admit me?

 Beyond the first day or two of my life, I've never stayed in a hospital overnight. I know that's unusual, but there you go. Admit me? Yikes! But I am philosophical about the whole thing and I am a fan of science. Fine, admit me and we'll figure this all out. So more hours go by. I lose the slip and fall twins, get a new roommate. She's got an infection in her EYES (ew!) and it hurts to be in any light at all. We chat back and forth between our curtain, but then her husband shows up and they too switch to Spanish. I got no luck!

My transportation arrives, and at 1:45am they finally wheel me to my room. It's nice! 16th floor, nice view of Boston, no roommate yet. The floor doctor comes and chats for a while; she's very nice, and I have to explain every single thing again. She says she's going to get in touch with the thoracic surgeons to see what kind of test would be best to determine what's going on in my chest. Probably a PET scan, she says; the PET scan can see how active the masses are. (I picture tap-dancing masses playing wee banjos. Sorry, it's my head!) She leaves to do doctor things. The patient care chick finds me some soap and toothpaste and a toothbrush and some towels, plus a fresh johnny, so I decide to take a shower. It felt so good to scrape the ER off of me. No shampoo, though, so I left my hair up in a scrunchie. I leave the bathroom and the floor is wet and my feet go out from under me and WHAM! I've hit the back of my head hard on the doorframe. "Help!" The staff of the entire floor runs in. I'm all barely in my johnny, cradling an already-huge goose egg on the back of my head. I was thinking "this is great! I have an undetermined mass in the middle of my chest that may or may not be killing me, and now I've beaten it to the punch by splitting open my head." (Drama queen!) I think the scrunchie might just have saved my life, since I hit my head right there and I think it plus all the hair squished up there must have cushioned the lot. No bleeding.

They help me into bed and give me an ice pack and scurry out of the room. I'm all weepy now. My head hurts! I might have a giant tumor! My head hurts! I can't sleep! I can't stop coughing! My head hurts! How do I tell mom that I might have a giant tumor?! My head hurts! And it's 3am and there's no one to call, plus I wouldn't want to call someone in that state anyway. I try to sleep, but MY HEAD HURTS and so I watch The Usual Suspects on TV instead. People come in and poke at my lump, making sure it's not getting any bigger. I wince every time they do. Ow! Bastards! Then they have to take my vitals for like the 50th time. Ow! Stupid blood pressure cuff! Ow! I'm now on I.V. antibiotics and a heart monitor and an oxygen sensor, and everyone's very solicitous, but I am cranky because they had told me earlier that everything they would be doing to me could be done on an outpatient basis and so why the hell do I have to be here with a goose egg on my head watching movies I've already seen on a tiny tv far from my head where the volume doesn't work and then the damned doctor comes in and says OK, I've gotten in touch with the surgeons, and they're going to want an MRI.

Could this fucking day get any fucking worse? Apparently fucking so.

I had an MRI once. I needed knee surgery, so they needed pictures. Wisely I called around and found a place that had the open MRI, which looks kind of like a garlic press only bigger. See how open and airy? Nice. And it still made me practically hyperventilate. I am claustrophobic. Bigtime. And see the wee model in that picture? I am not wee. When they suck me into there, the bottom of the top magnet kind of presses into me. And they had to strap my knee down so I couldn't move it so I was trapped. And the idea forms in your head that the two parts are going to slowly squeeeeeeeze together, making tasty Laurie paste. And you can't get that picture out of your head. And then the damn thing takes a half hour or so. Ack!

So I ask "do you have an open MRI? Because I am SERIOUSLY claustrophobic, and wanted to cry when I had my knee MRI." Nope. A giant top-notch hospital like B&W doesn't have one. We can give you some Ativan beforehand though, that works for most people. Uh, ok. So then she tells me to get some sleep and I laugh. I am tied to my bed through my finger oxygen sensor and my heart monitor and my I.V., and I've just told her I'm claustrophobic, and I've never slept sitting up in my life. She asks if I want something to help me sleep. I kind of snap and say "there's no TIME now, it's 4am and you're going to wake me up at 6am anyway" so I wave her off. (I am a bad patient) I am weepy again, because of all the previous reasons, plus now an MRI! I am miserable. (something tells me the lack of sleep was a contributing factor to the misery-fest, here)

The sun starts to come up. It's gorgeous. I would have taken a picture, but my phone was in my bag, which someone "helpfully" had put in my wee closet so I couldn't really reach it. I turn off the TV. Verbal Kint is Keyser Soze, yes, yes, I know, whatever. I close my eyes. I open my eyes. This goes on for a while. I drift into sleep, and 5:40am "It's time to take your vitals!" Great. Then at 6:15 BAM! the door to my room slams open, and they wheel in a roommate. They spend all kinds of time trying to talk to her. Over time I gather that she's got sickle cell anemia and was having a crisis and she's in huge pain. They give her all kinds of meds, and try to get her blood pressure and everything hurts her and it's just awful.

She's an interesting case to them, though, so troops of people come in and out and try to talk to her, try to examine her. I swear, if I were her I would have thrown shit at all of them. I am not here to be your meat puppet, assholes. Fix me! So time passes thusly. No word on when I get to have my MRI, and just to add a touch of tasty despair, they don't know if they'll want to do a biopsy after the MRI or not, so no breakfast, no water, no nuthin'. I sit. No book. No paper. Don't want to watch daytime TV partly because I don't want to bother sickle cell girl. I get online, willing my phone to hold its charge a while longer. I get out my laptop, but it's behaving badly and won't come out of dual screen mode (with the laptop as the secondary screen) even after I reboot twice, so while I can boot up, I can't actually see anything. I pull out my iPod, remembering that I have some audiobooks and a season of "The Riches" on it, but the room is flooded with sunlight (and no shade) and I can't see the screen well enough to watch, and the audiobooks on there I've already listened to. Ack!

I would sleep, of course, but there's this beepy machine the sickle cell woman is hooked up to; at the end of every half hour it BEEEEEPS really really loudly until someone turns it off. BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP. And of course because she's interesting to them they've left our doors open so the bustle of the desk (we are across from it) and the ringing phones and the beepy noises from there are all in my lap, too. No sleep for me!

I call everyone and fill them in. But honestly I have nothing to say. And I'm not telling Mom about the mass yet; better to tell her once I know what it is. Minor chit-chat instead. Finally at 11:15 the doctor comes in says the test is soon, and gives me some Ativan. Soon? Ack! Around 11:45 some 16 year old kid comes to my room with a wheelchair and off we go. I sit in my johnny in the service elevator speculating how odd hospitals really are. We get to the MRI place and the kid splits, leaving me parked in the hallway. Soon the jolly MRI guy comes out and brings me in, and the horror begins!

This MRI is the tube kind. And because I need my chest done, I have to go in head first!

He made me lie down on the slidy bench thing to do a test, with my arms up over my head. Slid me into the thing, and I thought my heart might just burst. The machine was touching me all around! Snug. Like a glove. Or I guess a condom, all things considered. Mom had suggested that I wear a mask or put a facecloth over my eyes, so I suggested that. He said that a lot of people do that, grabbed a facecloth from right next to him and draped it over my face, put headphones on me, slid me in, and said "OK, you're doing great, let's get started." Because this was a chest image, it was all about me holding my breath. Good times for someone with asthma, bronchitis and pneumonia! Yay!

But I managed! I got through the whole thing, and from what I can tell they didn't take any picture more than once (you can kinda tell by the noises just when a picture is happening). Thank you, Ativan!

Back to the room. The beeping. The roommate. The nothing to do. Dozed a bit, startled awake by the beeping; lather, rinse, repeat. 2:00pm my nurse tells me I can order food! I can?! Halleleujah! I call the room service number and joy! 30 minutes later I have food. I speculate about what being allowed to eat means. Am I going to have to stay longer and have a test or the biopsy done tomorrow? Does it mean maybe that I don't have a tumor at all and it's just fluid or something? Can I go home?? But no answers.

Finally around 5pm hot doctor number 25 comes in, and explains what they know so far. The mass looks like it's part of the thyroid gland. They want to discuss everything with Radiology further, and involve some other surgeons in the discussion, but that's what they think. So I can be discharged and do the rest as an outpatient. But just hang in there a little longer and we'll make sure...I call mom, tell her the good news that I can come home soon (probably) and tell her about the thyroid issue. Then I go back to waiting.

Eventually the thoracic surgeon intern comes by (with the most luxurious beard I have EVER seen on a man in my life. Splendid. Deep chocolate brown. Looked like a soft pelt all over his face) and explains exactly what they've discovered. It is indeed the thyroid; it is a goiter. Which are almost always benign. Yay! Goiter! I feel like I'm in a Victorian novel now, but I'll take it. I'd like to point out that the picture on this page has nothing whatsoever to do with me. Nothing's visible externally, and in fact the masses are in my chest cavity. Now, ther are two individual masses, but they think they're both from the thyroid; one is actually connected to the thyroid via tissue, but the other one seems to be sitting there on its own. It's further down into my chest, but it still seems to be the same stuff. So he describes the next steps: another CAT scan, this time for my neck (the surgery starts up at the side of the neck), and then a thyroid scan to see if the mass is indeed thyroid tissue. They really want me to hang around before being discharged to have the second CAT scan, but he says I can do the thyroid test as an outpatient.

So that means more waiting. I'm ok with it for a while. I order some food (I had a feeling I'd regret it if I didn't). I put the Sox game on and almost instantly doze off (baseball is VERY soothing) but then jerk awake with more beeping. Finally it's 9:30pm and suddenly I'm PISSED (I wake up mean). I have been waiting for over 24 hours for nothing. I've got a bump on my head, had some IV antibiotic, had my vitals taken at least 10 times, blood drawn three times, and I am no closer to LEAVING!! So I get dressed, gather all my shit together to go, and huff out of my room to tell them that I've had it. Hot doctor #-whatever (this one is geeky cute, but still cute) who is the current floor doctor comes into my room and tries to get me to settle down. I explain that all of this could have been done outpatient, that I haven't slept in almost three weeks, and that I am sick of the endless waiting. He suggests that I try to sleep, and I laugh. I say, just listen for a minute. I point out the various beeps and laughing and tv sounds and general ruckus. He suggests that he give me something for anxiety, and I laughed again and said "I'm not anxious, I'm pissed off!" He laughed and said that there were things he could give me for that, but they probably wouldn't be best. He patted my hand and said that I should really stay and have the test, that it was best for me. I said that I didn't want to be leaving at midnight. He suggested again that I stay for the night, "get some rest" and leave in the morning. I snorted and said "there is no rest to be had here!"

He leaves, I go back to sulking. Have I mentioned that I am a bad patient?! I watch Stargate Atlantis, which is diverting, and one minute before the end of the show I get the call, time for my test! So ok, I'm glad I stayed. It takes us longer to walk there than it takes to have the test. I get back to my room around 11:15, and now all I need are discharge instructions and for someone to take my IV out. And I sit. The nurse comes in with my Rx for antibiotics (10 more days! Oy!) and today's dose, removes the IV, and says "the doctor will be in with your discharge info". So I wait more. Doctor comes in, suggests that I stay again, I say no again, then he tells me to drive safely. No discharge info! He says my nurse will have it. Arg!! She's helping people, of course, so she gets to me by five minutes of midnight. And then brings me down to the front part of the hospital and I am free!!

I was so happy to be home. Took a shower, cranked up the A/C, chatted with mom for a bit, then crawled into blissful noise-free bed. I still woke up a few times last night. But I slept better than I have in three weeks...and today I've spent the day napping and doing nothing much other than reading up on goiters and thyroids.

Monday I see my regular doctor, so I will ask my many questions then. Then I have to have my thyroid scan, and then set up appointments with my surgery team (I have a team!). They need both a general surgeon and a thoracic surgeon, apparently, so that's fun. 

 

Comments

[anywherebeyond.livejournal.com]

Dude, this fucking sucks. I mean really, it doesn't get plainer than that. This sucks and I'm sorry for what you've had t go through so far, and for what you're going to continue to go through as the tests continue.:( You have my best thoughts and wishes, for whatever they are worth. *hugs*

[llcoolvad.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much! I really appreciate it. In a way it's good to know. I had actually started to feel like it was hard to swallow -- I had assumed it was part of the bronchitis. So it's good to know, and good to deal with. Bad to have happen, and bad to have to deal with the damnable health care industry.

Hopefully it will be easy to resolve...

[elevengirl.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry you're having to deal with this. My best wishes are with you!

[llcoolvad.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[rolandgsl.livejournal.com]

If it's any consolation, my Dad went through his goitre surgery just fine (his was starting to show).

Isn't it amazing how tiring it is sitting in a hospital with nothing to do? Glad you survived the aggravation.

[llcoolvad.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it is amazing. I'm sure it was exacerbated by the exhaustion I already had, plus I went in with certain expectations (they will fix my cough and I will sleep) and came out with a completely different result.

They told me the surgery had an easy recovery, was that true for your Dad?

[rolandgsl.livejournal.com]

As I recall, yes.

[ozymandiasism.livejournal.com]

well, I'm glad you're doing better and at home!~

[llcoolvad.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Me too!

[jostajam.livejournal.com]

I'm so sorry you had to go through this. I've got my fingers crossed for you of course! Get better and get through....

[llcoolvad.livejournal.com]

Thanks! So much of my misery was self-imposed, of course. And sleep-deprivation-imposed. I got 5 straight hours of sleep this morning; my entire worldview has shifted!

[p-j-cleary.livejournal.com]

I heard all of this during your various updates, but isn't the hospital totally fun? Whoo!

At least there were hot doctors on-call.

[llcoolvad.livejournal.com]

I know I am a whiny baby and there are people dying and whatever. Maybe with sleep I will have a different perspective and some more patience. Oy!

[sarcasticah.livejournal.com]

WHY did you not call me?! I was off work all week! I'd have come to hang out with you and yell at doctors andf whatnot!!

[llcoolvad.livejournal.com]

Oy! I forgot you were off work all week! I probably would have thought of it had my brain been functioning at all. Thanks! Although I would NOT have been very good company. But you could have seen sickle cell woman and all the hot doctors.

If I had to stay a second day I would have called everyone, marshalled the troops as it were...

[sarcasticah.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you finally got to go home! So is the goiter making the coughing worse, or is that all the pneumonia?

[llcoolvad.livejournal.com]

I don't know yet! I also wonder if the goiter is affecting my sleep -- almost everyone who hears me sleep thinks I have apnea, and now I wonder if the goiter is making it harder for me to breathe when I lie down. Could be!

But I think the major cause of the coughing is definitely the pneumonia. I've been on huge doses of antibiotics for three and a half days now (thu night, fri, sat, sun) and already am coughing a little less. I slept over five hours straight this morning! Wheeeee!

[livingdeb.livejournal.com]

Wow, what a story. I hope you have re-charged and re-loaded your electronic toys. I never thought of that as a good investment in happiness. Certainly more important than clean underwear.

[llcoolvad.livejournal.com]

Ha! Yeah, although clean underwear would have not gone amiss, either. I really think most of this was that I was so sleep-deprived; if I had any reserves at all I could have dealt with some of this more gracefully. But I am catching up now. Soon I will be able to entertain myself with nothing more than my well-rested brain. Right?