Don’t Panic

The theme of this hospital stay seems to be “Don’t Panic”, like the large friendly words they put on the cover of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Except in my case, I keep being told not to panic over things that I feel pretty strongly are totally panic-worthy.

I come into the ER thinking I had liver toxicity, and it turns out that I have another serious infected pocket of tissue, and yet I am supposed to somehow be relieved by this news.

Then I find out that this new pocket, although smaller than the one that was removed surgically in December, has a “skin membrane” and also has “air pockets”, both signs that it will likely have to be surgically removed rather than treated via antibiotics. Yet the fact that it’s smaller is somehow supposed to make me feel less worried.

The fact that this time, they put a drain in and practically nothing is coming out, whereas the last few times it was so productive they had to use two or three bags at the moment of insertion to contain all the output, is supposed to be reassuring. Even when the nurses keep saying, “This probably means it’s not in the right spot.”

I almost never manifest a fever or other stereotypical signs of infection until it’s at “going to kill you if you don’t get to an ER” level of infection. Yet, the fact that I don’t have these stereotypical signs is supposed to make me feel good. In addition, since nausea is not a typical sign of infection (and yet every time I get an infection my nausea gets markedly worse), I shouldn’t be worried about my inability to eat (yay weight loss, says the nurse) or that the nausea is so strong I scared my nurse into giving me a EKG because of my symptoms.

Even though I’ve already blown three veins, when I start to feel the signs that the antibiotic they won’t be sure I need until Monday is burning through my IV line, I should sit tight and suffer until the line actually blows, because it’s really important. If I ask the doctor to wait to give me the antibiotic that burns my veins out until they can use a PICC line to infuse it, I am going against medical advice. (Yes, for asking.) I am being irrational about blowing out my veins, because using a caustic med before we know if it will actually treat me is rational.

When my pain quality and location changes drastically in the span of two hours, getting bad enough to wake me up after less than a hour’s consecutive sleep in four days, I’m supposed to be reassured that since none of my vitals changed, that everything is totally okay. I don’t know about you, but knowing something got much worse and there’s no apparent reason, scares me way worse.

I don’t know. I used to love Johns Hopkins, but now it’s just turning into another shitty hospital with nurses who don’t give a shit and doctors who hate you because you’re on pain meds. It’s another ER where I get shunted from room to room for 36 hours. I’m expecting Dr WLS to walk through the door any moment now.

And this hospitalization came at a really fucking terrible moment in my personal life. Yes, including the time I was hospitalized two weeks after my husband dumped me. I really needed, psychologically among other reasons, to have a few weeks where my health was not center fucking stage. I needed to spoons to have some big conversations, and instead the things I could have fixed three days ago are starting to fall apart. I’m losing my ability to be rational and objective, and just want people to stop being stupid jackasses, rather than have to spend an hour finding a nice way of saying, “Cut out your stupid selfish behavior you twat”. I need to get the work I’m doing, done. I need to be have the ability to answer emails. I was ready for this shit in December, but not now.

Things really, really suck. A lot. I am very depressed, and very disheartened. You may see me or talk to me and I’m all smiles and jokes, but inside I feel like I did all this fighting for a life that sucks, that I tried to save something that will just continually disappoint me. In a fucked up way, I feel the same way about my life as I did about my marriage in those two weeks before my STBX dumped me; like staying and fighting is the only decision I’m allowedto make, because of what I believe, but my intuition says RUN RUN RUN.

I don’t get it. I could probably handle this if it was something different, new, interesting. Hearing that I may have the same problem over and over again over the next few years is not comforting in the least.

Oh, and PS? They’re talking about more surgery. Possibly in the next few months.

Don’t panic, my ass.

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