Medical Mayhem Update

So, aside from crying like Nancy Kerrigan I haven’t posted much about my medical situation lately. Mostly because it’s confusing and it’s not funny at all. (I can’t even make it funny, and I can make almost anything that happens to me sound funny)

I am suffering from what seems to be a startling panoply of maladies, and after being told for so long that I was “just fine” that seems strange. I will, however, share this latest incident, because it’s not about the main thing that’s wrong with me, and it’s weird and funny insomuch as it has to do with the incompetence of other people.

OK so I can’t breathe. Now seriously, when I tell you that I can’t breathe and that’s not the main thing wrong with me… well. Anyway, that’s enough dramarama. Oh shit, I just realized I never blogged about the Truly Horrific Upper GI Incident™. Well, sit back, this is likely to be marathon then.

So for about a year I have been having intermittent problems & weirdness with my breathing. Like, suddenly I would be driving down the road and realize that I hadn’t taken a breath in a minute or so. Or sitting at my desk and suddenly feel as if I couldn’t catch my breath. Like everything else I chalked it up to stress. But then it got worse. I was not only having problems breathing, sometimes I couldn’t swallow. Sometimes I would swallow and it would go down the wrong way. Sometimes I had to mouth-breathe, and you know that makes you look stupid. Stress? I didn’t know. When I was finally diagnosed with several of the main things wrong with me (surprisingly, none of them mental!) I mentioned this whole “can’t breathe” thing. My internist sent me to have an ultrasound of my thyroid (considering that I have thyroid disease) and also an “Upper GI/barium swallow” to see if there was any mechanical obstruction of my airway. Both tests were scheduled on the same day, early in the morning since the barium one is a fasting type-o test. I was scheduled to go into work after they were done. The thyroid ultrasound was first. Those tests can be sort of relaxing, as medical tests go, since they’re in a darkened room and (aside from the vaginal probe ones) are non-invasive. The gel is kinda gross, but overall an ultrasound is not a bad test.

Then I went for the Upper GI. Holy mother of fuck. That is just not a normal thing. Let me try to sum up my experience.

First of all you have to change into hospital duds. Fine. I outsmarted them and brought a sports bra with me so I didn’t have to go wildly swinging down the hallways all free-breasted. Then I go into the x-ray room. Keep in mind that I still have one leg in a cast at this point. There’s some cute young thing who wants to know if I am pregnant. Chance would be a fine thing, but no, no I am not. She looks at me doubtfully. I wonder if she’s ever heard of abdominal fat before. She goes specially to get and make me sign a form whereon I avow that I am not pregnant. Yeah, well fuck you and your 12-year old gymnast physique.

Then out comes Old Dodgy McCootersons, the most aged doctor in the universe. He asks me what my trouble is. I say “Nausea, problems breathing and problems swallowing. I choke a lot when I eat and drink, and sometimes I choke when I am neither eating nor drinking.” He makes various inane remarks (”So you’re not really having problems swallowing then.”) Then he explains the test (I have to drink a horrible chalk solution while they x-ray me. Literally while they x-ray me I have to be swallowing this muck.) and asks me to step up onto a raised platform which is about 8″ deep by 14″ wide. I explain to McCootersons that I am in a cast and point down to my foot to illustrate this further. He nods and then looks at me while I try to wobble onto the platform. Of course I stumble and grab for the apparatus hanging there, eliciting an excited “Whoa!” out of him. Yeah, well thanks for the helping hand you doltish fuckwit.

I get up there and he jams this heavy x-ray plate holding thing against my chest. In the meantime Nadia Comafucku is mixing up some kind of dire kindergarten-craft-project looking thing with a big bottle of paste, a wooden stick and a styrofoam cup. She hands it to me and McCootersons tells me to “take several big swallows” while they x-ray me. I gamely go for it. Holy fucking fuck of grossness. Jesus, this shit is awful. I have a sensitive palate anyway, there are a lot of things I can’t eat because they make me gag. This isn’t even a foodstuff and my whole being reacts vehemently to my trying to pretend it is such.

They bombard me with some x-rays, then he takes the cup from me and tells me to turn around. I am now firmly wedged between two heavy metal plates. I wait for him to move one so I can turn around. He doesn’t, just stares at me. I give up and start twisting in my hospital gown.

Twist, twist, twist.

Now with really sore tits I am facing the other way. They now do some kind of altered states shit where they lower the wall I am leaning on until I am no longer leaning on it, but now laying on it. I feel like I am at the science center, or some NASA training facility. I am now laying on my stomach, one arm above my head, one at my side. They wedge a pillow under my head, set the cup (now with bendy straw!) next to me and tell me to start drinking and keep drinking until they tell me to stop. I do.

Holy fuck, I am so sick by now. My whole back and left hip are out of whack from laying there with that giant boot on, my tits hurt, I am laying on my stomach and I can’t get any traction to move and roll around like they want me to because it’s slick on the table and I have a CAST ON. And I am also having more problems than usual breathing because…I AM LAYING ON MY STOMACH. They finally pause, I think I am going to die. Then he tells me to start drinking again. I give it the old college try, but it’s no good. I choke on this godless cup of indigestible sludge and then spew up about a gallon of white chalk. All over me, all over the table, all over this pillow wedged under my head. It’s running down the side of my face, it’s all over my arm, it’s fucking indescribably horrible. McCootersons sticks his head out from behind his protective x-ray proof wall and says to me:

“What happened? Did you sneeze?”

What the what?

OK so you take a girl who tells you that she is nauseated, choking and having problems swallowing. You lay her on her stomach and force her to take large gulps of some revolting chalky milkshake for extended periods. What did you THINK was going to happen?

Did I SNEEZE?

Did I SNEEZE?

I can’t answer, I just start crying. Then the gymnast comes out and flips the pillow over and then tells me we have to keep going. She hands me one tissue to mop up the gallon of sludge that coats me. Thanks. Even your ideal for tissue usage is wee. Nice. At this point I mentally project myself elsewhere and just start to swallow.*

When it’s over and I am weeping piteously in my hospital gown on the side of the table, wondering how I will possibly get down from there without falling or doing myself some further injury, the gymnast says to me “are you OK?”

Fuck you.

Fuck you sideways.

Then she tells me to drink lots of water to flush the chalk out of my system. Fuck you even harder if you think this shite is staying in my body for longer than it takes me to find the bathroom. Ugh. I decide that my day is over as of 9 a.m. and I go home, take Valium and go to bed. Later that afternoon the doctor’s office called:

Nurse: We have the test results from your barium swallow. They’re negative.
Me: Negative for what?
Nurse: Negative for whatever they were testing for.

Gee, thanks Helpy McUseless

Me: OK, well what about the thyroid test?
Nurse: (offended) We don’t have those results yet, they don’t come back that fast. Test results take days to come back.
Me: Well the GI tests came back from this morning, and I had them both done at the same time.
Nurse: (snippy) Well I guess I will be calling you back later then.
Me: Whatever. Click.

She did call me back later and it turns out that I have thyroid nodules. “Many, many nodules.” to quote my endocrinologist. It’s like I hit the thyroid nodules lottery. Lucky, lucky me.

But they don’t think that’s why I can’t breathe, so they send me to an Ear, Nose & Throat doctor. I went to him two weeks ago. He sprayed some kind of nostril numzit up my nose and then stuck a camera up there on a tube, all the way down to my throat. That was cool because he saved the movie file and I got to look at it. He pronounced me as having “enormous” tonsils which are “just sticking out there” and may be the problem. He wanted me to go and have a CT scan of my throat. I did. That story, though the original point of this post, is going to have to wait because this it too long already and I am tired of typing it, goddammit.

The only good thing about the Truly Horrific Upper GI Incident™ is that once I told it to my friends they promptly adopted “sneezing” as a universal euphemism for barfing. MyTodd™ for instance makes this sort of comment now: “I hope you don’t get drunk tonight and sneeze in your own handbag.” Since I pretty much live only to amuse others, apparently, that’s got to satisfy me for now.

*Maybe I have past experience in that, maybe not. None of your business.