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mousmeSo this is basically what happened to me since my last post on Thursday morning. Most of the TMI parts will be cut, to protect anyone's delicate sensibilities, because frankly it's gratuitous and not all that interesting.
I spent Thursday morning running around Montreal getting my driver's license and my medicare card renewed. That was relatively painless and quick, for which I was extremely grateful as I was feeling like crap. Of course, I'd been feeling like crap since last Thursday, but had been cheerfully ignoring it as my main method of dealing with illness is saying to myself: "I'm not sick. I'm not sick. I refuse to be sick."
The projectile vomiting kind of put a damper on that last resolve, but as it had been on=again/off-again since last Thursday and wasn't otherwise slowing me down, I continued to ignore it.
I got to work, fired up my systems and tried to ignore the headache/fever/chills/intense nausea which seemed to intensify exponentially with each passing hour. Of course, I had to forego my breaks because my calls went overtime and (as mentioned in previous rants) my company is viewing my taking late breaks as grounds for dismissal as far as I'm concerned.
I did pounce on my lunch break, however (at 5:15, because I'm working the evening shift), but immediately upon rising out of my chair I knew that unless I made a dash for the ladies' I was going to be in serious trouble.
Turned out I was in serious trouble anyway, as along with my breakfast a significant amount of blood came up with it. Joy. So I staggered back to my supervisor's office, where two of them were congregated and speaking of something I assume was work-related. TO my surprise they were actually more than willing to let me leave work (the last time when I had a migraine that was so bad I couldn't see my computer screen because of the black spots in my vision they told me I couldn't leave). I guess when blood is involved people get more squeamish.
One of the supervisors (not mine, but one who knows me and with whom I've worked in the past) insisted on driving me to the hospital as I kept refusing to have them call an ambulance. I called my parents to let them know what was going on, and we agreed to meet them at the Montreal General Hospital. We gave a lift into town to a new girl who, upon hearing that I was sick, proceeded to tell us all about the horror story she had undergone at Fido (one of our competitors) when she had had to have an ambulance come get her at work.
The talk shifted to apartments and cats and the various veterinary treatments that our felines had undergone. Then we went on to amusing pet anecdotes (they were doing most of the talking, in case you were wondering: I was busy trying not to throw up blood on my supervisor's new upholstery) and some stuff I didn't really keep track of.
After making our way around an accident on Côte-des-Neiges (I got to see the aftermath of it in the emergency room, actually), we headed into the ER (or A&E for you British types) where I spent an unproductive ten or fifteen minutes talking with a triage nurse who didn't really seem to know what to do with me. The supervisor introduced himself to my parents and everyone seemed to get along until he left; he told me earlier he was going to visit one of the secretaries at Bell Mobility whose husband had shot her and who was upstairs at the General Hospital awaiting something like a 6th surgery, poor thing.
With that cheerful thought in mind, I very docilely allowed the triage nurse to wheel me into the ambulance room (that's what they called it, anyway) where I waited for another half hour while my parents fluttered around looking worried. Then they hooked me up to one of those funky monitors, and I got to wear one of those chic hospital gowns that don't close in the back. A garrulous French nurse who seemed to take great pleasure in calling me "chère amie" took some blood, poked another thermometer in my mouth, took my blood pressure, and then puttered off again apparently satisfied with his discoveries.
After another hour or two of waiting (during which I found out exactly what happened to the people who'd been hit by a car on Côte-des-Neiges earlier, and luckily it turned out that there were no really serious injuries), a very very tasty-looking doctor named Andreas Krull came around and performed a few more tests, asked the same questions that had been asked before, and then cheerfully informed me that they'd be keeping me under observation overnight because when there was blood involved they were always a little more on the careful side. That was all well and fine with me, except that I had forgotten how damned uncomfortable hospital gurneys are.
Oh, and naturally they wanted to see whether or not I still had blood in my stomach, so I had the singularly unpleasant experience of having a tube stuck in my nose and from there into my stomach. It is horrendously painful, and by the end of the procedure both my eyes were streaming liberally. Truly lovely. I'm just glad they didn't decide to leave it in there overnight as they were discussing, because with that in my throat I really felt as though I couldn't breathe (which is silly because one doesn't breathe through one's esophagus, but I wasn't feeling particularly rational at that point).
They decided that I would be better off in the observation room instead of the ambulance room (where the lights were brighter and there was always lots of activity even late at night). So they unhooked me from the monitors, having confirmed to themselves that I was not immediately in danger of expiring on the spot.
I was placed in bed number 4, between a deaf francophone who was there with his wife and two teenaged daughters (or they might have been in their very early twenties) and an elderly womand named Mme. Vivard.
I grew intimately aquainted with the workings of Mme. Vivard's inner plumbing throughout the rest of the night, which was far more than I ever asked for. The poor woman had been in the hospital for at least two days from what I could gather, and was driving the nurses nuts by calling for them every half hour or so. Mostly she wanted her gurney adjusted so her head would be higher or lower, but she also seemed to have a pretty uncomfortable, if not serious gastric problem, which mostly involved liquid diarrhoea. It was pretty damned nasty.
After about five hours of this, I politely suggested to one of the nurses that they might consider giving the poor woman a diaper so she wouldn't soil her sheets every 45 minutes. Apparently one of the other nursed had suggested this a while back, but as I understand it our hospitals can't really afford diapers and sanitary pads and what have you, so they use them as a last resort. OTOH, this woman was clearly desperate.
It was all I could do at one point not to smother her with her own pillow and escape out into the night à la "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest," because she had a remarkably strident voice for one so elderly and so frail, and she had the annoying habit of banging as hard as she could on the side of her gurney or on the small table they provide in order to get the nurses' attention. Given that they were now all but ignoring her until they finished whatever it was they were doing, the only person's attention that she was getting was mine.
I got to see a new doctor, Dr. Shannon, who reminded me a lot of my dentist funnily enough. He asked me the same questions as before, was very nice, had a lovely bedside manner, and told me exactly what I had been told before. Mostly they were waiting to see what happened overnight to see if they had to do a gastroscopy (they seemed to use the word interchangeably with gastroendoscopy, so I'm not sure what that was all about). For those of you who don't know what that is (although I don't think there are that many of you) it involves inserting a camera through your esophagus and into your stomach to see what the hell is going on in there.
I spent an entertaining night in the observation room. I learned all about the gastrointestinal workings of another neighbour, Mr. Roman, and elderly Jewish man who had a urinary tract infection as well as such severe constipation that they were worried that the contents of his intestines would come back up into his stomach. See the beds were about two feet away from each other, so even though the curtains were drawn I could still hear everything that was being said. Not to mention that I speak French as well as I speak English, so there really wasn't a detail that I didn't understand. By the end of the night I knew all about which tubes went into which orifice and what it did while it was in there. Most enlightening.
I really regretted having a visual mind yesterday. >_<
The high point of the night, entertainment-wise, was Mrs. Kennedy, an elderly psych patient who kept wandering out of her room. On one occasion the nurses took her back, and the second time she came in the nurses had stepped out, so I stopped her and talked to her (she was convinced she'd been in a fire that day that her brother had taken her to, whereas she had actually been in the hospital for a few days) until the head nurse came to take her back to her room. She was a sweet little lady, with a knitted cardigan over her hospital gown, clutching her purse under her arm and trying to explain at once about the fire she had seen and about the fact that she lived just next door and was going to go home for a little while and come straight back. It was sad, really.
I did manage to get a bit of sleep in. They kept waking me up to take my temperature and blood pressure, which was annoying as each time it took me two hours to get back to sleep. Still, it had to be done. I gave them a scare at one point when my diastolic reading was 106 instead of the usual 60 or 65. The monitor blared, lights went off, it was amusingly like a Star Trek episode. I tried to explain to them that I'd been sleeping on that arm while it was bent and so they'd have to wait a bit before my circulation got back to normal, but they were so panicked about it that they didn't listen until they took another reading only to discover that it was indeed normal. I was amused.
Had more blood tests in the morning, and sometime while I had slept the sneaky bastards had replaced my I.V. bag, whereas I had rather hoped they would remove the uncomfortable thing. They later explained that I had been rather severely dehydrated in spite of my numerous attempts during the last week not to become so. So lots of saline solution. Joy.
It was an uneventful morning. Mostly I just dozed in spite of the activity around me. In case you were wondering, my parents did not spend the entire night with me, but stayed until 8pm, went home for dinner, and then my father came to check on me and bring a toothbrush for me around 9:45. My mother came in the next morning to bring me some fresh clothes, which was v. nice. She then puttered off to organise some other stuff (insurance claims and what have you), and left me to my own devices.
I then got to have a nice little interview with Dr. Suzanne Dubé, who asked me the same questions as before, and told me that the doctors had decided not to do a gastroscopy after all. Their myriad tests had revealed that I was anaemic, which combined with a severe gastro-something-or-other bug and the fact that I hadn't really gotten any real sleep in about three weeks as well as the stress of my job, had resulted in my rupturing a large number of insignificant capillaries or veins or somesuch (I don't remember which) at the junction of my stomach and my esophagus. Hence the copious amounts of blood, but it seemed to have settled of its own accord overnight.
I waited for my mother to bring me my coat so I could go home, but she didn't turn up for a very long time. Being me I got impatient and trotted to my parents' place, which is a four minute walk from the hospital, sans coat. The doorman was rather surprised to see me, for which I can hardly blame him. Usually I have my own keys, but my keys were in my coat pocket, you see, so I couldn't get into the apartment, and since my parents had never left written instructions that I should be let into the apartment, I had to wait another hour and a half in the lobby until my mother got home.
In retrospect, going out into weather that was 30°C below freezing without a coat was maybe not the brightest of ideas. My mother certainly was unimpressed. But it was only four minutes and I wanted to get the hell out of that hospital as fast as I could go, no matter how nice the people were. By the time I left I knew all the nurses in the observation room by their first names (for me, remembering fifteen names is quite the feat, FYI).
I spent the evening and night at my parents' apartment at their insistence. They have insisted that I go back tonight too. I am unthrilled with this situation, mostly because my parents went against every single instruction that I gave them Thursday and Friday. My requests were simple enough: please leave my stuff alone. Don't go get my car, and don't go to my apartment. My cats have lots of food and abundant water, they'll be okay for a little while.
So what happened? My father went to my office, fetched my car and had the oil and filters changed, and had it washed. He then went to my apartment and decided to clean it from top to bottom out of some weird sense of obligation. My mother joined him at my apartment about two hours later.
Now, this was extremely nice of my parents, don't get me wrong. However, coming back and screaming at me for two hours about it was not nice, especially as I has specifically asked them NOT to do it. See, the argument wasn't even "I never asked you to do all these nice things." It was "I asked you NOT to go and do all these nice things."
It won't come as a shock to any of you if I tell you that January has not been a good month for me, either emotionally or financially. By dint of going through my apartment, my father found this out (among other ways by opening my mail). So he yelled at me about that too. He has decided that I'm incapable of looking after myself and therefore has pretty much coerced me into bringing all my financial stuff over to him later today so we can "fix" my problems.
Yes, in a way this is good because then I won't have to worry about fixing the problems by myself. But I'd rather have to take three months by myself to fix them and avoid the guilt trip that my father is going to lay on me for the next three years, because essentially I'm now going to have to lick the floor in his presence for as long as he says so. All for a favour he did for me that I specifically requested he not do for me.
The rant/conversation continued this morning (maybe it would be better to call it a monologue, or a tirade), and the only reason I'm not still undergoing it is that I came home to get my stuff and see my cats and take a break. He also had to go out to do the shopping. I can look forward to more lecturing/bawling out when I get home later this afternoon.
So there you have it, folks. Me in a very large nutshell over the past few days. I ought to be home permanently by tomorrow. If all goes well, I should be on medical leave from work for a few days too, so you'll be hearing from me more often.
I spent Thursday morning running around Montreal getting my driver's license and my medicare card renewed. That was relatively painless and quick, for which I was extremely grateful as I was feeling like crap. Of course, I'd been feeling like crap since last Thursday, but had been cheerfully ignoring it as my main method of dealing with illness is saying to myself: "I'm not sick. I'm not sick. I refuse to be sick."
The projectile vomiting kind of put a damper on that last resolve, but as it had been on=again/off-again since last Thursday and wasn't otherwise slowing me down, I continued to ignore it.
I got to work, fired up my systems and tried to ignore the headache/fever/chills/intense nausea which seemed to intensify exponentially with each passing hour. Of course, I had to forego my breaks because my calls went overtime and (as mentioned in previous rants) my company is viewing my taking late breaks as grounds for dismissal as far as I'm concerned.
I did pounce on my lunch break, however (at 5:15, because I'm working the evening shift), but immediately upon rising out of my chair I knew that unless I made a dash for the ladies' I was going to be in serious trouble.
Turned out I was in serious trouble anyway, as along with my breakfast a significant amount of blood came up with it. Joy. So I staggered back to my supervisor's office, where two of them were congregated and speaking of something I assume was work-related. TO my surprise they were actually more than willing to let me leave work (the last time when I had a migraine that was so bad I couldn't see my computer screen because of the black spots in my vision they told me I couldn't leave). I guess when blood is involved people get more squeamish.
One of the supervisors (not mine, but one who knows me and with whom I've worked in the past) insisted on driving me to the hospital as I kept refusing to have them call an ambulance. I called my parents to let them know what was going on, and we agreed to meet them at the Montreal General Hospital. We gave a lift into town to a new girl who, upon hearing that I was sick, proceeded to tell us all about the horror story she had undergone at Fido (one of our competitors) when she had had to have an ambulance come get her at work.
The talk shifted to apartments and cats and the various veterinary treatments that our felines had undergone. Then we went on to amusing pet anecdotes (they were doing most of the talking, in case you were wondering: I was busy trying not to throw up blood on my supervisor's new upholstery) and some stuff I didn't really keep track of.
After making our way around an accident on Côte-des-Neiges (I got to see the aftermath of it in the emergency room, actually), we headed into the ER (or A&E for you British types) where I spent an unproductive ten or fifteen minutes talking with a triage nurse who didn't really seem to know what to do with me. The supervisor introduced himself to my parents and everyone seemed to get along until he left; he told me earlier he was going to visit one of the secretaries at Bell Mobility whose husband had shot her and who was upstairs at the General Hospital awaiting something like a 6th surgery, poor thing.
With that cheerful thought in mind, I very docilely allowed the triage nurse to wheel me into the ambulance room (that's what they called it, anyway) where I waited for another half hour while my parents fluttered around looking worried. Then they hooked me up to one of those funky monitors, and I got to wear one of those chic hospital gowns that don't close in the back. A garrulous French nurse who seemed to take great pleasure in calling me "chère amie" took some blood, poked another thermometer in my mouth, took my blood pressure, and then puttered off again apparently satisfied with his discoveries.
After another hour or two of waiting (during which I found out exactly what happened to the people who'd been hit by a car on Côte-des-Neiges earlier, and luckily it turned out that there were no really serious injuries), a very very tasty-looking doctor named Andreas Krull came around and performed a few more tests, asked the same questions that had been asked before, and then cheerfully informed me that they'd be keeping me under observation overnight because when there was blood involved they were always a little more on the careful side. That was all well and fine with me, except that I had forgotten how damned uncomfortable hospital gurneys are.
Oh, and naturally they wanted to see whether or not I still had blood in my stomach, so I had the singularly unpleasant experience of having a tube stuck in my nose and from there into my stomach. It is horrendously painful, and by the end of the procedure both my eyes were streaming liberally. Truly lovely. I'm just glad they didn't decide to leave it in there overnight as they were discussing, because with that in my throat I really felt as though I couldn't breathe (which is silly because one doesn't breathe through one's esophagus, but I wasn't feeling particularly rational at that point).
They decided that I would be better off in the observation room instead of the ambulance room (where the lights were brighter and there was always lots of activity even late at night). So they unhooked me from the monitors, having confirmed to themselves that I was not immediately in danger of expiring on the spot.
I was placed in bed number 4, between a deaf francophone who was there with his wife and two teenaged daughters (or they might have been in their very early twenties) and an elderly womand named Mme. Vivard.
I grew intimately aquainted with the workings of Mme. Vivard's inner plumbing throughout the rest of the night, which was far more than I ever asked for. The poor woman had been in the hospital for at least two days from what I could gather, and was driving the nurses nuts by calling for them every half hour or so. Mostly she wanted her gurney adjusted so her head would be higher or lower, but she also seemed to have a pretty uncomfortable, if not serious gastric problem, which mostly involved liquid diarrhoea. It was pretty damned nasty.
After about five hours of this, I politely suggested to one of the nurses that they might consider giving the poor woman a diaper so she wouldn't soil her sheets every 45 minutes. Apparently one of the other nursed had suggested this a while back, but as I understand it our hospitals can't really afford diapers and sanitary pads and what have you, so they use them as a last resort. OTOH, this woman was clearly desperate.
It was all I could do at one point not to smother her with her own pillow and escape out into the night à la "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest," because she had a remarkably strident voice for one so elderly and so frail, and she had the annoying habit of banging as hard as she could on the side of her gurney or on the small table they provide in order to get the nurses' attention. Given that they were now all but ignoring her until they finished whatever it was they were doing, the only person's attention that she was getting was mine.
I got to see a new doctor, Dr. Shannon, who reminded me a lot of my dentist funnily enough. He asked me the same questions as before, was very nice, had a lovely bedside manner, and told me exactly what I had been told before. Mostly they were waiting to see what happened overnight to see if they had to do a gastroscopy (they seemed to use the word interchangeably with gastroendoscopy, so I'm not sure what that was all about). For those of you who don't know what that is (although I don't think there are that many of you) it involves inserting a camera through your esophagus and into your stomach to see what the hell is going on in there.
I spent an entertaining night in the observation room. I learned all about the gastrointestinal workings of another neighbour, Mr. Roman, and elderly Jewish man who had a urinary tract infection as well as such severe constipation that they were worried that the contents of his intestines would come back up into his stomach. See the beds were about two feet away from each other, so even though the curtains were drawn I could still hear everything that was being said. Not to mention that I speak French as well as I speak English, so there really wasn't a detail that I didn't understand. By the end of the night I knew all about which tubes went into which orifice and what it did while it was in there. Most enlightening.
I really regretted having a visual mind yesterday. >_<
The high point of the night, entertainment-wise, was Mrs. Kennedy, an elderly psych patient who kept wandering out of her room. On one occasion the nurses took her back, and the second time she came in the nurses had stepped out, so I stopped her and talked to her (she was convinced she'd been in a fire that day that her brother had taken her to, whereas she had actually been in the hospital for a few days) until the head nurse came to take her back to her room. She was a sweet little lady, with a knitted cardigan over her hospital gown, clutching her purse under her arm and trying to explain at once about the fire she had seen and about the fact that she lived just next door and was going to go home for a little while and come straight back. It was sad, really.
I did manage to get a bit of sleep in. They kept waking me up to take my temperature and blood pressure, which was annoying as each time it took me two hours to get back to sleep. Still, it had to be done. I gave them a scare at one point when my diastolic reading was 106 instead of the usual 60 or 65. The monitor blared, lights went off, it was amusingly like a Star Trek episode. I tried to explain to them that I'd been sleeping on that arm while it was bent and so they'd have to wait a bit before my circulation got back to normal, but they were so panicked about it that they didn't listen until they took another reading only to discover that it was indeed normal. I was amused.
Had more blood tests in the morning, and sometime while I had slept the sneaky bastards had replaced my I.V. bag, whereas I had rather hoped they would remove the uncomfortable thing. They later explained that I had been rather severely dehydrated in spite of my numerous attempts during the last week not to become so. So lots of saline solution. Joy.
It was an uneventful morning. Mostly I just dozed in spite of the activity around me. In case you were wondering, my parents did not spend the entire night with me, but stayed until 8pm, went home for dinner, and then my father came to check on me and bring a toothbrush for me around 9:45. My mother came in the next morning to bring me some fresh clothes, which was v. nice. She then puttered off to organise some other stuff (insurance claims and what have you), and left me to my own devices.
I then got to have a nice little interview with Dr. Suzanne Dubé, who asked me the same questions as before, and told me that the doctors had decided not to do a gastroscopy after all. Their myriad tests had revealed that I was anaemic, which combined with a severe gastro-something-or-other bug and the fact that I hadn't really gotten any real sleep in about three weeks as well as the stress of my job, had resulted in my rupturing a large number of insignificant capillaries or veins or somesuch (I don't remember which) at the junction of my stomach and my esophagus. Hence the copious amounts of blood, but it seemed to have settled of its own accord overnight.
I waited for my mother to bring me my coat so I could go home, but she didn't turn up for a very long time. Being me I got impatient and trotted to my parents' place, which is a four minute walk from the hospital, sans coat. The doorman was rather surprised to see me, for which I can hardly blame him. Usually I have my own keys, but my keys were in my coat pocket, you see, so I couldn't get into the apartment, and since my parents had never left written instructions that I should be let into the apartment, I had to wait another hour and a half in the lobby until my mother got home.
In retrospect, going out into weather that was 30°C below freezing without a coat was maybe not the brightest of ideas. My mother certainly was unimpressed. But it was only four minutes and I wanted to get the hell out of that hospital as fast as I could go, no matter how nice the people were. By the time I left I knew all the nurses in the observation room by their first names (for me, remembering fifteen names is quite the feat, FYI).
I spent the evening and night at my parents' apartment at their insistence. They have insisted that I go back tonight too. I am unthrilled with this situation, mostly because my parents went against every single instruction that I gave them Thursday and Friday. My requests were simple enough: please leave my stuff alone. Don't go get my car, and don't go to my apartment. My cats have lots of food and abundant water, they'll be okay for a little while.
So what happened? My father went to my office, fetched my car and had the oil and filters changed, and had it washed. He then went to my apartment and decided to clean it from top to bottom out of some weird sense of obligation. My mother joined him at my apartment about two hours later.
Now, this was extremely nice of my parents, don't get me wrong. However, coming back and screaming at me for two hours about it was not nice, especially as I has specifically asked them NOT to do it. See, the argument wasn't even "I never asked you to do all these nice things." It was "I asked you NOT to go and do all these nice things."
It won't come as a shock to any of you if I tell you that January has not been a good month for me, either emotionally or financially. By dint of going through my apartment, my father found this out (among other ways by opening my mail). So he yelled at me about that too. He has decided that I'm incapable of looking after myself and therefore has pretty much coerced me into bringing all my financial stuff over to him later today so we can "fix" my problems.
Yes, in a way this is good because then I won't have to worry about fixing the problems by myself. But I'd rather have to take three months by myself to fix them and avoid the guilt trip that my father is going to lay on me for the next three years, because essentially I'm now going to have to lick the floor in his presence for as long as he says so. All for a favour he did for me that I specifically requested he not do for me.
The rant/conversation continued this morning (maybe it would be better to call it a monologue, or a tirade), and the only reason I'm not still undergoing it is that I came home to get my stuff and see my cats and take a break. He also had to go out to do the shopping. I can look forward to more lecturing/bawling out when I get home later this afternoon.
So there you have it, folks. Me in a very large nutshell over the past few days. I ought to be home permanently by tomorrow. If all goes well, I should be on medical leave from work for a few days too, so you'll be hearing from me more often.