A Road Less Travelled

Last Tuesday I got to experience my first ever trip to the ER. This experience included my first time ever doing the following: giving a urine sample, wearing a hospital gown, having an IV put in, having surgery (other than wisdom teeth), spending a night in the hospital… Really, the list goes on and on.

It was also my first time drinking ‘contrast’ for a CT scan. Either the contrast turns my guts blue for the scan while the stuff in the IV turns my blood red, or the contrast turns my guts red and IV turns my blood blue. We never did find out which was which. What I did find out is that contrast tastes like slimy pina colada with a hint of chalk.

The first glass was okay. It went downhill from there. During the second glass a nurse came in to take my blood, and while poking holes in my arm, suggested a straw would help. (With the contrast, not with the holes in my arm, which were actually necessary, or so they tell me.) It went faster with the straw and distraction of having another nurse poke holes in my other arm in a failed attempt to put in an IV. It seems I have difficult veins. 900 ml of slimy fruit/chalk liquid and an IV in the hand later, I settled in to wait two hours for the contrast to travel deep into my intestines so they could do the scan.

I think I may have been sending out my “sweet and fragile” rays, because nearly everyone I met was being nice and helpful. Thankfully, this didn’t progress all the way to the shoulder patting level, but stayed at a calm level of sympathy. Several people also mentioned how healthy I was–apparently they don’t see many of those at the ER….

After I got back from the CT scan I was informed by different sources that it would be from twenty minutes to an hour and half before I got my results. Having down 900 ml of chalky, slimy fruit liquid, almost a cup of sugar-free koolaid the scan tech instructed me to drink, plus the saline from the IV, I decided this would be good time for a trip to the bathroom. I got do the dramatic walking-while-pushing-an-IV-stand bit, which lost it’s drama, well, before I even started, really. I’d almost gotten to the bathroom by this amazing method transportation when the doctor met me in the hallway and told me I had appendicitis.

I felt I was supposed to have some reaction to this. Perhaps swoon and have a weeping fit: “No, not my appendix, anything but my appendix! Take me instead!” Instead, this really being the whole reason we’d come in, my mental reaction was something like, “Huh. Wow, that was fast.” and I continued to the bathroom.

Eventually they took me from a semi-private ER room (there was a guy on the other side of the curtain, whose life and ailments we found out way more about than we wanted to–this may be the subject of another post) to a tiny, private holding room, with sliding glass doors. While the hallway wasn’t busy, the mere fact that the room had sliding glass doors made me feel more like I was in a fishbowl than I would if there had been no doors at all.

Here I met a whole new round of helpful friendly people who told me I was healthy and had nothing to worry about. One of them patted me on the arm as she started wheeling me to surgery, and told me, “They give everyone a pregnancy test, and just so you know, yours was negative.” Um, yeah. I really could have told them that…

She continued to be friendly and chatty, asking questions about my life, and wasn’t that so nice that I lived my sister, and did I help with the homeschooling, and how many children did my sister have? In fact she continued chatting in this vein as they wheeled into the (very cold) operating room with a weird ceiling. I can’t vouch for the rest of the room, but the ceiling was weird and was bristling with lot weird instruments and lights.

Several of these questions were repeated by the staff in the recovery room. In fact, when the nurse spilled the IV bag on me, I was able to reassure her that I was used to it, after all I did live with six children. I managed to avoid getting into the whole ‘not going to college’ part of the conversation, but those still have to be the weirdest circumstances yet for trying to explain what I do with my life…

After a typical night’s sleep at the hospital, navigating the dangers of a hospital breakfast (I managed to find sausage and fruit on the menu, so I didn’t do too badly), and being told by several more people that I was very healthy and was doing great, they said that I could leave whenever I wanted. Feeling no inclination to test their lunch menu, I signed out and left.

And that was my trip to the ER.

Maybe I could write a children’s book….