Tag Archives for chronic life

Futile Emergency Room Resistance

For the first time since having surgery last August, I landed in the hospital emergency room on Sunday. I was struggling with a pain flare up all day and finally had to surrender to the fact that my pain medications were not doing all they could for me in the pain management department. After trying to be still, crying, talking myself into a space of calm, and trying desperately – but failing miserably – to sleep through the pain, I gave in. When you’re barely moving and still have intense pain in your feet, ankles, thighs, hips, pelvis; and lower back pain that feels like it has tentacles spreading up your back, it’s hard to keep assuring yourself for hours on end that the increasing waves of pain will pass. On Sunday, there was no ebb to the painful tension enveloping my body, so the dreaded emergency room became my last resort.

Before making the decision to go I contacted some of my friends who usually make themselves available to keep me company while I sit through the hours of IV medications slowly dripping into my veins. Unfortunately, on Sunday afternoon, as one would expect, most of them were locked into plans. The ER is uncomfortable enough, but having to face going in on my own always makes it worse. It’s also partly why I held off from going in for so long. Later in the afternoon when I could bear it no longer, I accepted the offer of a neighbour who had come by to drop off some items from the farmers’ market to go with me and keep me company until someone closer to me could come be with me. I’m certain I would have waited hours longer before going if he hadn’t stopped by.

Emergency rooms, especially on a weekend, tend to be populated with interesting characters. When we arrived at my local ER on Sunday, there were people from all walks of life waiting for triage to the right level of care. One woman suffering from obvious mental health issues was shouting incoherently at the top of her lungs what must have been a badly patched together montage of events from what sounded like a tragic life. As she became more animated and the flow of expletives in her ranting increased, the hospital security guards and police were called to subdue her. When I finally made it into the ER treatment area I could still hear her shouting from a distant corner, and I overheard the nursing staff assuring security they could leave because she was securely restrained. It hurt my heart to picture that woman strapped to a hospital bed against her will.

Thankfully, I didn’t need that kind of intervention. However, once the nurse recorded my vitals I knew that my body was in crisis. My blood pressure was 162/82. That’s not the highest it has ever been but it was high enough to confirm for the nurse completing my intake, that my pain was real and I wasn’t in the ER seeking drugs when I said my pain was an 11 or 12 on the pain scale. After a 90-minute wait, I was finally seen by a doctor who had me list the cocktail of pain medications I take daily so she could understand what I was coping with and what she might be able to do to help me. I could tell from how little she said that she was trying to wrap her head around someone with a body as small as mine taking such high doses of pain medications yet still feeling so much pain. I tried to get her mind moving by telling her what treatment(s) I had received in the ER for past pain flair ups, and that seemed to jumpstart things.

My friend J arrived a short while before my discussion with the doctor started. It was good to have her there because she has been through this scenario with me many times before and is sometimes faster at responding to questions about my condition than I am when I’m in that state. J’s arrival also gave my very kind neighbour a chance to slip away and head home. He had sat with me for a few hours then hung around chatting with J and me, for longer than he needed to, to make sure I got some treatment before he went home. His presence reminded me how blessed I am to have so many people in my life who care about me, even when they have no vested interest to do so.

After consulting with the ER Attending Physician on shift, the doctor returned and told me they were going to start by giving me a shot of my old faithful injectable Toradol, and that I should take the scheduled dose of my pain medications, which at this point were about 90 minutes overdue. Unfortunately, I wasn’t paying close enough attention when she said I would receive an intramuscular shot of Toradol instead of an IV drip. For anyone who’s never had a needle plunged into a muscle, unless you have masochistic tendencies, give it a pass. The pain in my arm after that shot rivaled what I was already feeling in the rest of my body. The nurse instructed me to rotate my arm to get the medication flowing through me. I flapped my arm around like a bird with a broken wing for about ten minutes. For all the good that it did because my pain was unaffected.

When the doctor returned to check on my progress, my blood pressure reading had dropped to 160/82. For the first time, the Toradol wasn’t working. She went off to get more advice. What she tried next was an IV with an added milligram of Dilaudid, which is part of my regular pain medication regimen, and Lidocaine. Lidocaine is a local anesthetic that prevents pain by blocking the signals to nerve endings in your skin. It’s usually used to numb skin before painful procedures: think about the shot to your gums before your dentist starts drilling. Within 30 minutes, after the drip was opened, I started to feel some relief, and the sure sign that things were moving in the right direction was my blood pressure began to fall.

With this positive result unfolding the Attending Physician came by my bed to talk to me. He was empathetic with my situation and concerned that I am living with this extreme pain. He wanted to know what treatment(s) aside from pain medications I have received and added a few suggestions for future treatment(s) to my list. He also made it clear that if the effects of the medications I received wore off I shouldn’t hesitate to return to the ER; and that if I did I should tell whoever treated me to try the Lidocaine, as unusual as it may sound. He even asked if I wanted to have an extra top-up of Dilaudid to make sure the positive effects I felt didn’t wear off too soon. However, because I still had a dose of Dilaudid left in my pillbox for the night, I opted instead for another dose of the Toradol.

Once the IV drip stopped and I got dressed, I became acutely aware of how hungry I was. The night’s ER adventure ended at 2:00 AM with J taking me to a nearby 24-hour diner to get a huge Chicken Parmesan sandwich with French fries, and a slice of cream cheese icing-covered carrot cake to go. More importantly, although I had resisted going, my visit to the ER gifted me with the knowledge of an alternative cocktail of medications to bring my pain back to a level where I can cope if I need extra support again in the future.

 

Chumbawamba – Tubthumping

 

This Big Girl Cries When She Hurts

After locking the door behind me when I came home today, I started crying uncontrollably. I used every ounce of emotional and physical energy while I was at my doctor’s appointment and then when I went to pick up my medications from the pharmacy to hold myself together, but there is so much grief and pain building up inside me that I needed to let some out. The past few weeks are coloured with disappointment and uncertainty about whether I’m ever going to get better and those feelings are adding to the size of my ball of grief.

Crying helped to release a small piece of my grief, but I still feel what remains sitting heavily in my body. A glance in the mirror revealed how much the saltiness of my tears irritated my eyes as I looked into the red puffiness that stared back at me. My nose and cheeks reddened with a bright tint from the pressure that built up in my head from the rapid rush of blood. There is congestion in my nose because the overflow of tears that couldn’t escape through my tear ducts had to go somewhere, and my lips still trembled even though my sobbing stopped. My body is numb now because my tears carried so much of my unwelcome emotions away with them.

Sadly, I can’t think of what else I can do to cope with what I was told and the grief it is causing except to cry.

 

Big Girls Don’t Cry – Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons

The Pain Of Paying For Help When You Have Pain

When I became ill, I had to let go of my neat freak habits because it’s not easy to clean everything and have everything in its place when you’re constantly in pain. Being a neat freak is ingrained in me from growing up in households where everything had to be perfect and daily chores were a standard part of my existence. When I was a teenager, I had to reserve a chunk of my weekend time for cleaning, not just my room, but also parts of the common areas of our home. I couldn’t’ relax until I completed my part of cleaning up. That habit stuck with me when I moved into my own home, and it took a lot of unlearning for me to realize I didn’t have to live such a regimented life. Although I’ve loosened up over the years, I’m still very particular – if not outright anal retentive – about how I like to have things done. In fact, I used to find cleaning therapeutic. Sometimes to clear my head or work through a problem I would pick an area to organize or a room to clean. Working out my frustration on bathroom tiles or piles of laundry felt productive and kept my place neat and spotless, and distracted me from worry or stress for the time that my focus was on eliminating dirt. I always felt better and clearheaded after cleaning. Now cleaning makes me feel more pain.

For the past few years, I’ve had to rely on friends and family to help keep my home tidy. I’ve had to learn to be gracious when someone cleans or organizes something in a way that I would never do it. I’m grateful to have clean clothes and clean sheets on my bed, but sometimes I feel myself being critical of how other people clean things or how they put sheets on my bed – not everyone makes hospital corners. I’ve had to stop myself from re-stacking dishes that weren’t put in the cupboards the way I like to see them, which reminded me of a guy I dated years ago who deliberately misplaced things to see if I would rearrange what he had helped to put away. What do you think I did? I definitely didn’t find it funny that he did that to test me. However, I believe it’s a different story when I’m paying someone to do my housekeeping. I should be able to give instructions and point out if something isn’t done to a professional standard. On Monday, I booked someone for three hours to clean and do laundry for me. It was a woman I had booked through a cleaning service a few times before. She now works independently because the cleaning service shut down before the end of last year, and I thought it would be good to have someone familiar with my needs return to my home to help me. Sadly, it didn’t work out that way.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a washing machine and dryer in my home, so my clothes, towels, and sheets have to be taken to the laundry room on another floor. To make things move a bit faster I separated everything into loads ahead of time to make it clear what she could wash and dry together. I even pretreated some items with stain remover and let her know which clothes shouldn’t go into the dryer. She took my clothes to the laundry room, but didn’t’ follow my instructions. I figured this out the second time she brought the wrong clothes back to be hung up to dry. This forced me to have to go to the laundry room with her to sort out the mistakes. This was only the beginning of my displeasure. For some reason she decided to spend most of the scheduled time hanging out in the laundry room instead of returning to my place to clean while things were in the washing machines. When I realized how long she was gone, I called her to ask why she was hanging out in the laundry room. I couldn’t make sense of what she was doing because she had worked for me before and cleaned while the clothes ran through the wash cycle. Surprisingly, when she came back to my place, I actually had to remind her that my bathroom needed cleaning and the sheets on my bed had to be changed. Then she returned to the laundry room to put things in dryers. Again, she took her time returning to my place. When the three hours ran out, she hadn’t cleaned anywhere else, and some of my things were still in the dryer because she hadn’t taken all the dirty things out of my clothes hamper when she started my laundry.

By this point, I was in a lot of pain and so frustrated that I decided to pay her and tell her to leave. Later, I went down to the laundry room myself to pick up the last pieces of my laundry, and folded the other things she finished washing and drying earlier. My home was barely cleaner than when she arrived. She didn’t vacuum. She didn’t dust a single piece of furniture. She never stepped foot in my kitchen. She didn’t’ take out the garbage, not even the pile of paper towels she used while cleaning my bathroom, which didn’t include fully cleaning the toilet bowl or wiping the bathroom floor. I even had to remake my bed, not because I wanted hospital corners, but because of how sloppily she threw on the sheets, pillows, and duvet. Worse still, by the time I finished folding my things, I realized that some of my kitchen towels didn’t make it back from the laundry room, and when I went back to check for them they were nowhere to be found.

I’m still trying to understand how someone could believe it would be acceptable not to clean when that’s what I hired her to do. How could her work ethic and standards change so drastically since the first time she came to clean for me? How could she expect payment of the full rate for her time, which I did simply because I didn’t have the energy to argue with her? How could she lose my towels? I wanted answers to some of these questions so I sent her a text message on Tuesday asking her to phone me when she had some free time. She responded with a text on Wednesday, telling me she couldn’t talk to me. I’m sure she knows what she did, but in case she didn’t I sent her a detailed text message. I hope she’s happy with the money she took from me even though she didn’t earn it and with knowing that I’ll never book her again.

After I became ill, in spite of my severe pain, it took some convincing from friends and family for me to accept that I needed help and couldn’t do everything myself. It was even more difficult for me to agree to hire a stranger to come in to help me take care of my home because my illness is obvious, my pain medications sometimes make me drowsy and foggy, and I was nervous about being alone with someone I didn’t know. Now that this woman attempted to exploit my situation, I feel my lack of trust is justified. That being the case, I still need help but I’m not sure what I’m going to do.

 

The Beatles – Help!