What's Going On

First I have to say, I am so envious and in awe of bloggers who write wonderful posts every single day! I lead a much more boring existence…I am not nearly as prolific or witty. For that, I apologize to my loyal readers who keep coming back to the site!! Thank you all for being part of my life. I am trying to write more often, but this day-to-day stuff just keeps getting in the way!

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There’s Something Happening Here…

It has been rough going since the operation. I just haven’t felt right. If I had stopped to consider it, I would have realized I hadn’t felt right for quite some time. But this is how I deal with not feeling right: I ignore it.

I dragged myself to my den and got some work done each day, but kept falling asleep sitting there at my computer. I went to Physical Therapy, but sensed I made little progress because of the pain. I did my home exercises and started to feel depressingly certain that I would never regain total function.

As I am an obsessive glutton for punishment, I watched YouTube videos of shoulder surgery over and over, cringing at some of what I saw. Oh, not the cutting or the blood or anything like that. That I expected. I cringed at the stuff you tend to put out of your mind. Like how much of me was going to be exposed. Like how my body was going to be pushed and pulled, an unconscious dead weight. That there would be writing on my boob. No, not “Dr. W. was here”, which actually I think I would have found funny. No, these were lines indicating anatomical landmarks. So if the lines were used as anatomical landmarks, guess what had to be showing for the bulk of the surgery?

I cringed at the idea of the breathing tube down my throat, my eyes taped shut, my head strapped to a head stabilizer, my entire body, including my head and face, covered with surgical drapes. Everything covered except for the bits I would have preferred to be covered, however. The more I watched, the more upset I got. But I didn’t let that stop me!!

I also continued to feel crappy, very MS-y, twitching and wobbly. Then, just like last time, my legs blew up like two gigantic marshmallows. And it started to get a little hard to breathe sometimes.

You don’t have to be a nurse to put these pieces together and come up with this brilliant diagnosis: something is wrong here. But I just kept on my jolly way. Well, not so jolly. Just kept on my way.

…What it is ain’t exactly clear…

When I went for PT on Tuesday, my Physical Therapist Chris took one look at my legs and insisted I call my regular doctor before she even touched me. I called Dr. B., who I adore for his gentle and compassionate demeanor. But dealing with his front office person is a nightmare. Even though I told this loathsome creature I had just had surgery, my legs were swollen and I had shortness of breath, she intercepted any discussion with the doctor and gave me an appointment for two days hence.

I was just too exhausted to fight with her. Chris was pretty shocked, but she kind of shrugged. We did our PT session and I lived.

The next day I had an important meeting. I work from home, so I almost always wear sweats. But for this meeting I pulled a suit out of the closet and pressed a nice top to go with it. Went to put the slacks on and found there was a FOUR INCH GAP between the button and the button hole. It would not button. It would not even touch. Not believing my eyes, I dropped them, pulled them up again and, lo and behold, a four inch gap. I just wore this suit on Easter. Comfortably.

Little alarms began to jingle in the back of my head. This was not an ordinary weight gain. There was something wrong here. (Hmmmm…I detect a pattern…)

But in the meantime, I still had to get to this meeting, dressed in a professional manner. I yanked every suit and dress out of my closet. Nothing fit. I stood in the middle of my room, surrounded by clothing and howled:

FUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!

Because everyone knows that makes clothes fit better.

I finally dug up a knit pants set that was presentable at least. And stretchy. But my heart was pounding with fear. This was a pretty alarming sign. When I got home that evening, my daughter and I eyed my legs, which were now about three times their normal size. I was having trouble catching my breath. She looked me straight in the eye and said, you are going to the emergency room. I didn’t argue.

…There’s a man with a gun over there telling me I got to beware…

Here is a scary realization...I am starting to love the ER. They were super nice to me and did every test known to man. Tests that would have taken days, if not weeks as an outpatient, and yet I was home within 3 hours. Findings: no Pulmonary Embolism, no Deep Vein Thrombosis, no cardiac problems, no pulmonary problems. They chalked it up to positional, because I was sitting up for the surgery, and to a reaction to the anesthesia. I wasn’t so sure about that, but I was so relieved to have the other things ruled out I didn’t care.

Went to my regular doctor appointment the next morning. Told him my sad saga. Illustrated with my horrific legs. As he was asking me about what tests they had done, he was flipping through my chart. And there he finds a five month old lab report documenting a major issue with my thyroid being out of whack! A major issue that needed to be addressed then, no delay.

…Paranoia strikes deep…

I am really upset this was missed. For months I have felt like crap, for months I have blamed the MS. Now it seems as though I have a problem with a relatively simple fix that should have been/could have been initiated before the beginning of the year. It is going to take weeks to find the right balance of medications and in the meantime I feel like death on toast.

Although on the other hand, I get to say, in all documented truthfulness, “It’s not fat, it’s glandular”!

I soldier on.

…Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away


It's time we stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
We better stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

-- For What It's Worth
Buffalo Springfield
1966

Burning for you

Was I a Visigoth at the Sacking of Rome? A Viking invading Eire? Did I pluck the wings off of flies? There surely were evil deeds that I committed in a previous life. It is the only thing I can think of to explain my string of calamities.

Last night I went to make, as I have a million times before, a pitcher of iced tea. I do this for several reasons. One, I am cheap. I don't see the point in buying it if I can make it just as easily. If I had a churn and an abattoir, I probably wouldn’t be buying butter or hamburgers either. But that is debatable.

Number two, it's just so freaking easy. Water. Tea bags. The end.

Number three, I like the way I make it. I just like it plain. I don't use sugar or anything.

So I never expected that I would pour in the boiling water as usual, add the tea bags as usual and pick up the pitcher as usual, to have it shatter and shower me with the aforementioned boiling water.

It splashed into my face and chest and onto my left arm and thighs, soaking my clothes. I ran to the shower and jumped in, clothes and all, letting the cold water run all over me.

This is what saved me from being burned even worse, according to the Nurse Practitioner in the Emergency Room.

That’s right, the Emergency Room. Again. I swear, they are going to reserve me a room.

The left side of my face is burned from my eye brow to my chin, including my eye lid. My eye itself is fine. I apparently reflexively closed my eyes when it happened. My left wrist is burned and there are splash marks on my chest. My thighs are burned where the water soaked through my leggings, in lengthwise stripes.

Fortunately, they are only first degree and superficial second degree burns. Painful, but not permanently disfiguring. I have kept cold compresses on everything, especially my face, and it has really helped. I am swollen and blotchy, but it mostly looks like I have a bad sunburn. On one half of my face. Very attractive.

My friends have offered to dance naked around a fire to dispel evil spirits on my behalf. Now that is what I call devoted. Or perverted, depending on your point of view. Especially since there has also been mention of tequila and absinthe.

But despite their love and commiseration, here is what I have to say:

OY VEY!!!! ENOUGH ALREADY!!!!




Blue Oyster Cult. If this music video doesn’t make you laugh, nothing will.

The Accident, Chapter Three

So. Monday comes, after a torturous weekend. I called the first name on my insurance list, we’ll call him Dr. Smith. I told his clerk I had broken my arm on Saturday and had been advised by the ER I had to be seen right away Monday morning. In a bored voice, she told me they couldn’t see me until Thursday. Oh, I think, she didn’t hear the broken arm part. So patiently I repeated myself and said I needed to see someone today. Sorry, she said. I asked if there was anyone else in the practice. No, she said, sorry.

Starting to feel panicky, I was trying not to cry. I thanked her and called the next name on the list, we’ll call him Dr. Jones.

Dr. Jones’ clerk was very pleasant and told me they could see me that morning. I couldn’t drive, so my wonderful sister rearranged her whole day to take me. We get there and the door says ‘Dr. A. Smith & Dr. B. Jones’. Dr. Smith was in the same office as Dr. Jones. I felt like Alice in Wonderland. Their practices were separate but they shared the office and their appointment clerks sat next to each other. But that first woman, Dr. Smith’s clerk, with utter indifference, turned me away without an appointment. She never even asked the woman sitting next to her if Dr. Jones had anything available.

Dr. Jones was very sweet, very attentive and approximately 300 years old. I know, I’m being silly. He was actually more like 400 years old. He asked me how old I was so many times my sister started to giggle. Then he “lost” my x-rays, coming in and out of the examining room over and over, patting his pockets and muttering “They must be around here somewhere!”. I thought maybe it was a little comedy act he was putting on to help me relax. No such luck. He decided I needed another set to be taken by his technician.

The tech, we’ll call her Merciless Cow, told me to lie on the table, which was almost impossible for me due to the pain. I asked if I could have something under my shoulder to support it. The Merciless Cow acted as though she had never heard of such a request before. She finally roughly shoved a rolled up towel under my broken shoulder, took the x-rays while I tried to keep from passing out, then, without warning, she yanked the towel out from under my arm. I screamed so loudly my sister heard me in the waiting room and I actually briefly lost consciousness. The doctor ran and got me water and smelling salts.

He tells me that the head of the humerus bone in my arm is shattered into four fully separated pieces. That I will need shoulder replacement surgery. That I need a CT scan. That he doesn't do that kind of surgery, someone else will have to. But come back to see him, ummmm, Friday. After I have the CT scan that his office is arranging for Thursday.

My sister and I stumble back to the car in shock. I can hear his voice in my head saying ‘shoulder replacement, shoulder replacement’ over and over. REPLACEMENT!?!?!?! I am only 53 years old. Oh my God. I am in agony. My sister looks at me and says, "If you need surgery and a CT scan and your arm is broken in four places, why the fuck didn't he just admit you?!?!" So I start crying, because now I am in pain AND scared and I say I don't know. So all the way home she's yelling "I'm turning around and taking you to the ER" and I'm saying, "No, just let me go home and take some Percocet" and she's saying "You can't wait another WEEK to take care of four broken bones in your arm!!" Crying and yelling, crying and yelling, all the way home. Where I proceed to almost faint again.

Within a few hours, I give in. Mary Kate takes me back to the ER. Surely they will admit me. Surely they will help me. They give me IV dilaudid, which helped me sleep for about 2 consecutive hours, if nothing else. The doctor never even touches or looks at my arm. He does read the x-ray and tells me, you’re going to love this, “I’ve seen worse”. Come closer, doctor dear, so I can kick you in your testicles and then tell you I’ve seen worse.

At midnight, they send me home with oral dilaudid, promising it would help. I am too exhausted to dispute this. I wake up in pain at 2 am and it was too soon to take it again. Dozed. Wake up again at 3, still too soon. Dozed. Wake at 4, took one, dozed until 4:20, wake up in agony as if I took nothing.

So now I sat there doing Lamaze breathing with fiery knives of overwhelming pain slicing down my arm, which was three times its normal size and dark purple. Everything else, my cut and bruised legs and knees, my scraped hands and wrists, my cut face, are nothing in comparison. I am at my wit’s end.

At approximately 9 a.m. Tuesday, my son calls. His friend is engaged to the son of an orthopedic surgeon in my area, try that practice. I call there and that morning finally meet…Dr. Wonderful.

Dr. Wonderful is pleasant, handsome and take charge. He is also beautifully dressed. The whole package. (What can I say, I’m wounded but I still have eyeballs!) “First thing,” he says, “We have to get your pain under control.” Now I want to marry him. He then proceeds to list all the other things I will need: home care, a shower bench and, best of all, after the pain meds, a raised toilet seat. Heaven! It’s funny how your priorities change when you can’t sit down to pee without shrieking. Surgery is probably going to be needed, but not until the swelling and bruising go down over the next few days.

I float out of there on a cloud of optimism, with a fistful of prescriptions and a soft focus vision of Dr. Wonderful in silver armor on a white horse. Someone has listened to me. Someone is taking care of me. Someone cares!!!

I order my toilet seat and shower bench and they arrive so quickly it’s as though the guy had been standing behind a tree in my yard just waiting to be asked in someday. Because I cannot lie down, I settle, loaded with drugs, into an armchair in my sunroom. It is not too bad. I have the TV, a comfy chair, lots of light and as long as I DO NOT move, I am relatively comfortable.

I am blissfully unaware that I will be living in that chair for the next five weeks.

A sunroom during the day is a cheerful, cozy place, even if the weather is bad. Mine is full of overstuffed furniture to cuddle into whether reading or watching TV. A sunroom at night, when it is after midnight and all the lights are out and everyone else is in bed, is a spooky, gloomy place, full of the echoes of the things that happen during the day, a pair of the girl’s shoes under the bench, a book left by the reader that has slid to the floor. It is also unbelievably noisy. I live on a busy street, on a corner. There is nothing to muffle sound and many cars and trucks go by, even in the middle of the night. And I heard every one of them, even with all the windows closed. I would just start to doze off when some rattletrap would lumber by. It was hard enough to try to sleep sitting up, scootched into the left corner of the chair so my right arm was not touching anything but the pillows I had supporting it.

I went for a CT that Thursday. The doctor wanted to see if the pieces were displaced, or moved out of order. If they were all neatly tucked together, I might be able to get away with nothing more than a sling for a few weeks. I have to say, I was utterly certain this was going to be the case. I did not think, not for a single second, that I would have to have any surgery. That seemed preposterous to me. I was young and healthy. Well, young-ish and healthy-ish. My bones would never be so contrary as to be displaced! Honestly! The idea!

I was so out of it by Thursday, I barely remember going for the CT. I know I went to Dr. Wonderful on Friday too, but I hardly have any memory of that either. The medication, pain and lack of sleep were taking their toll. I know the doctor did tell me on Friday that he suspected the bones were displaced to the degree I would need surgery, but he wanted to check the CT results when he was at the hospital that afternoon. If they were, surgery would be early the following week. “Oh, like Wednesday?” I said. “No, like Monday.” he replied.

Hmmmmm. Well, that’s silly anyway. I’m not having surgery, I think to myself. As usual, as I have said on this site before, I was completely wrong, wrong, wrong.

Next: Under the Knife!

The Accident, Chapter Two

After falling and retrieving Bella from her lark through the neighbor’s yard, I staggered into the house. The sweet college boys that were doing odd jobs for me were eating the pizza I had ordered for them. One of them looked at me and said “Did you know you were bleeding?” No one can accuse his parents of wasting their tuition money.

I advised him I indeed was aware that I was bleeding and, additionally, I had broken my arm. They all clamored to drive me to the hospital right away. But my daughter Mary Kate had just run to the bank and, unreasonably, I wanted to wait for her. So, I assured them, I would be ok for the few minutes it would take her to get home. And I went to sit in the den. As usual, I was completely wrong. I was definitely NOT ok waiting.

I sat at my desk with everything in my body throbbing in concert with my heart, which was galloping. The minutes seemed to be weeks long. I was getting shocky and nauseous, there was no sign of Mary Kate, so I gave in and two of the boys drove me to the ER.

I must have looked ghastly, because one of them kept up a cheerful, nervous patter all the way there. Every bump in the road reverberated through me and I focused on not throwing up, which would have been the final ignominy.

At the hospital, I was seen right away, one of the perks of my daughter working there. The boys stayed until Mary Kate arrived. That is when the dam broke and I, someone who NEVER cries, began to weep in horrible, hiccupping sobs.

I could barely answer the questions the doctor was asking me. When I went for x-rays, the tech was incredibly nice and gentle, but I involuntarily shrieked every time she moved my arm. This is just one sample:

Me: sob sob hiccup sob
Tech: Ok, Marie, I am just going to move your arm a little (gingerly moves the arm 1 centimeter).
Me: loud scream I’m sorry, sob, sob, I’m so sorry.
Tech: That’s ok, I just need to move it a little more (even more gingerly moves the arm ½ centimeter).
Me: loud scream Oh sorry, sob, sob, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
Tech: Ok, just let me see how this one came out.
Me: sob Is it broken? sob
Tech (grimacing): It looks like it…
Me: BOOOOO HOOOO HOOOOO

Before this, back in the exam room, I had told the nurse the pain was nine out of ten. Hey, I didn’t want to be greedy. When I returned from the x-ray I said, sobbing all the while, “I have to change it. Can I change it? I need to change it. It’s a ten. It’s a ten. I was wrong about the nine, it’s a ten, not a nine. The nine was completely wrong, it’s a ten. Can I change it? Is it ok to change it? Because I have to change it to a ten…” And I kept going. I NEEDED PAIN MEDICINE.

The doctor eventually came in and mildly confirmed it was broken. So be sure to follow up with your orthopedist on Monday. Like I had a bunion or something. And I meekly said ok, they gave me a sling, a single Percocet and sent me on my way with my smashed arm and mangled body.

Much, much later I started to process the ER visit. The Percocet, predictably, did nothing to touch the pain. I was in agony. Every movement hurt. And, I thought, “my” orthopedist? Like I keep one on retainer? I couldn’t have even told you the name of an orthopedist in my county. But there was nothing I could do until Monday morning. They had sent me home and I had acquiesced. This was Saturday night. I suffered through another day, just waiting for Monday morning, and, I thought, some relief. Silly me.

The next hilarious, fun-filled chapter in The Plucky Adventures of Marie, Casualty Girl:

Marie Tries to Find Adequate Medical Care

Ha ha ha ha