The Ordeal Begins

This is a cheat blog; basically a copy & paste of a letter written to a friend while I was in the hospital.  Specifically, a letter to a blogging friend, so it ended up having the feel of a blog post.  Admission:  I have been a closet blogger, hiding in the comments sections to try to express what I want without the responsibility of actually having a BLOG (eeek!).

    

I've been wanting to write about this for a while. I've been wanting to write in general for longer than that. But, I never seemed to know where to start.

So I guess I'll just start here.


Recently I was in the hospital, from Sept 27th to Oct 12, for acute pancreatitis. What led up to this was that I had experienced a weird, indigestion (I thought) or heartburn episode the week prior to Labor Day. Bad stomach pain and bloating/pressure whenever I ate.


After a few days of trying Tums with no luck, I had hubby get me some Mylanta and after a few days of that it went away, totally gone by that Saturday afternoon. I was like, “cool!”.

Well, it started happening again the following weekend, on Sunday.  By Weds, when my little Mylanta bottle was gone and had not done anything to help this time, I knew I had to bite the bullet and call the doc, as my hubby had practically begged me to do the first time. Too bad I didn't listen to him then.


So I go to the doc on Thurs and they draw blood for tests b/c sometimes the symptoms I have can be caused by certain bacteria. The results were expected to be in probably Monday. Well on Sunday afternoon I'm half asleep on the couch when the doc calls. She had gotten the results of the blood tests and says my pancreatic enzyme levels are very high so I have to go in the next morning for a CT scan.


I go for the CT scan (after having to drink 2 bottles of that barium shit, *gag**puke*) go back up to doc's office b/c she had them read the x-ray immediately. She takes me back to her office and already I know something is weird cause everyone just gets quiet and stares at me, and even the nurse who is usually aloof at best and a straight-up bitch more often was being gentle and solicitous with me.                      
                                                 
 Yep, sure enough, doc comes into the exam room and explains that the CT scan shows a mass in the pancreas.


A mass.


I think that has to constitute the most-dreaded, most-hated, 4 letter word you would never want to have to hear.


A. Fucking. MASS.


Shit.


So, then she sends me back down for an MRI. Same result. And that's how I end up here in the hospital. The pancreatitis was so severe they had to put me on IV fluids so I could cease eating, and also had me on IV pain meds. The whole goal here has been just to get the inflammation under control and my gut back to "normal", just so the specialist can eventually do his tests to tell for sure if there is a mass and if so, determine malignancy.


This past Sunday, my condition was still so bad they put in a PICC line to feed me intravenously and take me off water even (only ice chips... yay).


And.... here I am. Fighting with this pain, fighting with pain meds making me so sick I kind of would prefer to just die, trying with all my might to not be freaking the fuck out about this because, according to gastro specialist guy, there is actually a good chance there is no mass, that sometimes that much inflammation can appear that way on an x-ray. And, even if there is, it may not be cancerous. I'm trying to hold on to that, and just believe with all my heart that it's going to be nothing after all, or maybe just my gallbladder and I can just have that p.o.s. taken out, done.


And I'm sorry, I know it was kind of weird to dump some of what's happening in a comment on your blog, but the combination of a morphine haze and how your post struck such a chord with me, led me to just impulsively write about what I had come to realize in all of this. I think a part of me also hoped that if I wrote it down, saw the words, it would feel less surreal. It did not.


[My comment to the friend's blog post copied here for background; the reason for the letter explaining wtf I was talking about]


That place of needing to disappear- I know it very well. Oddly enough, I used to get that (along with what I suspect were periodic anxiety attacks) even when I was a child.



It’s funny that now, as I enter the early morning of day number seven in the hospital, and feeling that I have disappeared in some ways, I’m thinking it probably isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. You know, the disappearing.

I also feel sort of forced to consider that the truth is I’ve been living my life as a kind of dry run of “being disappeared” for about the last six years; with my sights set on moving to another, better state as soon as possible, I’ve essentially been a passive spectator in my life, at best. Not unlike “watching both through my eyes and from a place up and to the right…" But it’s only now, in this situation, that I’m actually feeling some desire to want to try desperately to experience the moment(s)…


And facing the possibility that I may in fact disappear in the near future for real, as in permanent-like, six-feet-under-style (or maybe scattered about the mountains — unlike you I have not considered my will in the slightest), I am surprised to find that I actually do have some regret over checking out of my life here because I have been so focused on plans to movedisappear to another, better place, in the future. I’m suddenly thinking of so many things that I still want to do; things that of course I’ve thought about before but brushed off– because I haven’t really been invested in my present life, I didn’t really give a shit (besides working and achieving the ultimate goal; then I would(could) have peace, happiness, tranquility and all that stuff).


But as prosaic as it is to say, a situation like this… the prospect of death becoming real rather than an abstract notion… actually has prompted me to reevaluate my perspective, and to realize that I maybe do want to give a shit in the now, and that I maybe don’t have to hold off on experiencing life simply because I am not yet where I really want to be geographically; to embrace the fact that I am here, and not disappeared.

Oh!  I almost forgot, I would like to dedicate this first post to the awesome, I mean awesome Tawni (really, she shits rainbows!).  Her own embarkment into a new realm of blogging with the COFFEE project really inspired me to finally attempt this myself.  (Coffee is an Acronym)
So, thank you Tawni.  And if nothing else, I think this will be a cathartic and often humorous experience!  ♥