The Hospital Stay

And now we're finally to the point of why I don't like hospitals. Of course, as I'm writing these blogs I realized something important...the hospital is just a place. It was the image in my head that I would see when I thought about that horrible time in my life. It become the icon for what happened. But my illness was a collection of events and procedures and dark days, well before I stayed at the hospital.
   It's just when my brain filed it all away, so I wouldn't have to dwell on it; it slapped a label on it and the label said, "the hospital."
    But my brain was wrong. I didn't realize that until just this very moment. I needed something to represent that time in my life and for what ever reason I picked the image of the hospital. And perhaps that's normal. Hospitals are not the prettiest buildings. Our hospital is eight or nine stories of hard, gray concrete, rising above all the other short and flat buildings around it. You can see it from quite a few places in our small town and it just seems imposing against the blue sky.
   It's an unforgiving sort of structure and it doesn't ask to be anything it's not. It's not decorative, it's not relaxing; it's not soft.
   It serves a purpose.
   Which is to save people's lives.

   The ER was a blur of more procedures, blood work, and lots of test. I had a great ER doctor whose job it is to fix people in emergency situations. And I was in crisis.
   He took tons of blood and found that I was dangerously low on my iron. And when I mean dangerously low, I mean that. Much lower and it could have killed me.
   I was given blood. Which is the weirdest thing ever. To watch someone else's blood drip into my veins. But I started to feel better right away. It was crazy.

   I had a CT scan, in which I reacted violently to the contrast dye and started breaking out in huge welts and started having trouble breathing.

   I was assigned a room, and I was even given a single bed. Which, without insurance, doesn't happen often, but someone was watching out for me and the doctor decided that I needed my own bathroom and the privacy to use it. I could have cried with gratitude.
   I had lost so much weight I had a line inserted into a major vein inside my arm, that traveled up my arm, across my shoulder and dropped down to my heart. If I twisted my arm wrong I could actually cut off the line. They used this central line to give me a liquid diet since the doctor decided I shouldn't digest anything for the next nine days or so.
    I had a long list of tests to check on the condition of my intestine, which surprisingly was not in horrible shape. A different GI doctor, the specialist in Crohn's, tried to convince me to have most of it removed anyway and live with a bag for the rest of my life.
   I looked at the photos. It was an unhappy intestine; swollen and sore but I wasn't bleeding and I didn't have dead areas.
   My surgeon was shocked that he wanted me to go under the knife in the state of health I was in. He didn't say anything unprofessional about the other doctor but basically to para phase it he did say what the hell was this guy thinking because in my condition, having surgery would probably kill me.

   I declined surgery and told the GI doctor that I rather try medication first before we talked about removing a major organ.
   He frowned and a few hours later he prescribed aspirin and blood thinners for me to take.
   I looked at the nurse, refusing the medication.
   "Why do I need these? The GI doctor says I'm bleeding so much in my gut he wants to remove it. Won't this make it worse?"
   She freezes, the pills and syringe in her hand. "Well, he doesn't want you to get a blood clot since you're so immobile."
    I frowned, shaking my head. "No. I don't think this is a good idea. He says I'm bleeding in my gut and he wants to give me something that might make me bleed even more. Does he want me to lose my intestine?"
    Her lips purse together, her eyes narrowing as she thought about the situation. "I'm going to call the doctor."
    She didn't try to bring the medications back. But to this day I wonder...and I hate to think this...but was he just not thinking about what could have happened if I took blood thinners when supposedly I was bleeding profusely...
   or did he want me to bleed more so I would consent to the surgery?

    I was lonely in the hospital. My parents had the girls and Hero Hottie had to work. He came in the evenings to see me. A few nights he spent the night with me when he could. We barely talked. Our marriage was nonexistence.
    But we still hung on.

    I started watching the Food Network. I know...I'm crazy. I wasn't allowed to eat any food...of any sort and here I was watching hours and hours of cooking. I was torturing myself with the one thing I couldn't have. But it kept me from going insane.
   I asked for my laptop. The first time in months I felt like writing. And wrote I did. Suddenly, I knew how to write.
   I realized I wasn't writing before. I was putting words on paper but I wasn't revealing emotions. I wasn't finding the nitty gritty.
    The clarity of what I needed to do to succeed at my writing was amazing. It wasn't about writing what I know...it was about writing about what I feel.
   I had to share myself if I wanted to succeed.
   The good, the bad, the ugly. The stuff that I thought made me less than perfect. The mistakes, the negative, the genuine Me.
   Not the one I tried so desperately hard to live up to. And failed at.
   I didn't have to be perfect anymore. For anyone. And in realizing that; my writing improved in ways I had despaired it ever would.

   In almost dying, I started to realize how to live.

   
   Some days I was so lonely though, I would stare down at the world below, like a princess locked in her tower and watch spring turn into summer. Abu, who had been extremely quiet for a three year old, suddenly showed up at the hospital, talking and chattering nonstop about everything.
   Light glinted in the girls' eyes now. A cloud had been lifted, a spell had been broken and there was hope again.
   I longed for their visits and their phone calls. It was the bright spots in my days. They were the reason I hadn't given up. I missed them so much it made my chest burn.
   And I was determined to get back to them.
   I talked and talked to all the GI doctors and finally find one out of that small group that was willing to work with me and find me a drug that didn't have worse side effects than the Crohn's.
  I talked to another GI doctor who was shocked that I had been put on the Ultram to begin with. In her experience, someone with digestive problem should never, ever be prescribed that drug and in fact, one of the side effects of it was clinical anorexia.
   Weight loss. Massive weight loss.
   Uncontrollable weight loss.

   It wasn't my Crohn's killing me. It had been the Ultram. All this time.

   By day eleven I was tentatively ready to go home. I had been eating solid food for three days and my bowels were doing okay with it. They had started digesting again; a good sign. I had put on five pounds from my liquid diet, which was fair but enough to try sending me home.
   My iron levels were good, thanks to someone's kindness in donating blood.
   I was worried about leaving the safety of the hospital. I was afraid to go home. All that want and need to be at home and I was afraid.
   Fearful that I would get sick again. That I would die anyway. That I would start to get sick again as soon as I left the hospital.

  But my new GI doctor reassured me that if anything went wrong; I wouldn't have to wait for an appointment. They would see me. At the first sign of any trouble.

  Hero Hottie picked me up and took me home to a quiet house. The kids would stay with my parents for a few more days until I was ready to take care of them.
  It was strange walking into my own house. For so long it had been a prison of pain, grief and despair.
  Summer had happened while I was in the hospital and sunlight filled the rooms. Bright and inviting and promising something good.
    I felt like a stranger at first, unsure and hesitant. Who was I?
   I wasn't the same person who had left this house eleven days earlier.

   It would take years to realize just how much change had happened to me. But in the meantime...

   I folded a load of laundry, simply because I had the strength to do so.