GUTTED: My surgical journey to hell and (mostly) back

 

I’ve been reluctant to write in any detail about the medical “issues” I have endured over the past 8 months or so (actually, it goes back to November – so it’s more like 10 months). I swear I didn’t realize something was seriously wrong until a week or so after Halloween, when I suddenly felt an agonizing pain in my lower abdomen on the right side. From everything I have ever heard about appendicitis, I assumed that was what it was, so I finally caved and went in to Emergency, knowing it would be an almost-worse ordeal.

And it was. THREE HOURS LATER, after sitting there twisting and writhing in agony (hey, I could have done that at home!), the hospital staff finally got around to me – took some blood, poked around, then suddenly wanted to do a CT scan. This surprised me, as you usually have to wait months for one. 

Then suddenly, things changed.

A nurse came up to me with a very serious look on her face, and in a very serious voice said, “Margaret, you have an infection.” Infection? Of what kind, and how? I’d never heard of an infection brewing in an otherwise healthy bowel.

But no, my bowel wasn’t healthy at all, or at least it didn’t look good on the scan. They let me have a copy of the report, and they shouldn’t have. It was mostly technical gobbledygook, but I did see one word that jumped out at me in 3D: MALIGNANCY.

What it said was, “underlying malignancy must be ruled out”. Ruled out?

They kept me overnight, another shock, and then I was fast-tracked for all sorts of things. Almost right away, I saw a gastroenterologist, then had  an “emergency colonoscopy”, which was messy, agonizing and frightening (nothing like the previous ones I'd had). I seemed to be bleeding from somewhere deep inside. Then, on Christmas Day (Christmas Day?), I got a phone call giving me a date for another CT scan. The scan took place on New Years’ Eve. Needless to say, the festive season wasn’t very festive, and I remember feeling rotten on Christmas Day and trying to act normal, so as not to bring the whole family down. 

Then came the surgery. Jesus God, the surgery! I can’t or won’t go into all the details, because half the time I didn’t even know what was going on or what was happening to me. This upset my kids, who seemed to think I was deliberately withholding information from them. But I was on so  many painkillers that I was barely coherent. They had apparently removed about a quarter of my colon and reconfigured my entire gut, but fortunately, since it was done laparoscopically, all I had were two little incisions held together with surgical glue. 

Quite  literally, I was glued together.

The surgeon initially told me I’d  be in the hospital 2 to 5 days. Instead it was nearly 2 weeks. I had no bowel control. The pain meds didn’t work. I couldn’t eat or sleep. I threw up constantly, even if I hadn't eaten anything at all. I had to use a walker just to get to the bathroom, and I usually didn't make it in time.

It was a hospital stay, in other words, but going home was worse in some ways. I had to camp downstairs on the pullout bed – couldn't do stairs, could not even get to the bathroom under my own steam. Having to use a walker made me believe I was now officially in Old Ladyhood. Or was it worse than that?

Since then it’s been one test, one specialist, one procedure after another. I thought I’d be out of the woods by now, but no. The surgeon revealed that had they not removed the diseased tissue, it almost certainly would have turned cancerous (that “underlying malignancy”) within  a year. I really didn’t feel much better, and had it not been for uplifting visits from my grandchildren (bearing flowers, handmade cards and even Purdy’s chocolates), I don’t know how I would have gotten through it. Like angels, they descended on the house with cheery messages, sitting on the pullout bed and gossiping and just being kids. I wanted to join them, as they were clearly in  the land of the living.

But much of the time I felt suicidal, I really did, and my poor 80-year-old husband had to wait on me hand and foot, which with his own mobility problems he could barely manage. I wasn’t cheerful. I kept saying unacceptable things like, “I think I’m going to DIE!” This went on for weeks and weeks. At a followup appointment, the surgeon told me that full recovery might take six months to a year.

Since then, this has actually come to be good news, giving me more time to feel rotten without worrying that I might never recover.

There were so many low points and bizarre happenings. “They” found a spot on my lung during a supposedly routine x-ray, which made me wonder if I had somehow become tubercular. They did more blood tests, and kept finding more and more things wrong.

The spot on my lung was just the beginning. My kidneys were out of whack, there was something wrong with my thyroid gland, and I had to see a hematologist (blood  doctor? Much as I love Dracula, this was not good news.) I had an ultrasound, both kidneys and thyroid, leaving me bruised and worried. I had to wonder: am I really that messed up, or is all this being done out of an abundance of caution (or because I’m 71)?

Bits of traumatic memory from the hospital keep repeating in my head, and in my dreams: being rushed down a dark hallway on a gurney; being told I needed an emergency blood transfusion (!); having a nurse lean over me and saying, “Let’s hope this is the turning point.” Having a disgusting nasal tube shoved down into my stomach for days on end, so my intestines could have a "nice rest".Then another medical person came in and talked to me about my lung, but it made no sense to me at all. My LUNG?

But the worst of the worst of the worst was when they showed me how to use a colostomy bag. Yes. It got that bad.

I have never had serious  surgery in my life, and am wondering, if I need to go through all this again, if it might be better if I just died. I have slowly gotten more  and more of myself back, but since I already had severe arthritis in my spine and hip (on the right side, of course, where the surgery took place), osteoporosis, and – worst of all – sciatica, I'm still not exactly comfortable in my own skin. And lying flat on my back for weeks on end put pressure on the worst possible place, thus activating these various sources of agony as never before.

So where am I now? I wasn’t going to “share” much of this, as nothing is more tiresome than an old person going on and on about their surgical nightmares. But for God’s sake, why do I have this ability to write (and hey, if I didn’t think I wrote well, why would I have devoted my life to it?) – is it just  for entertainment, or is it there to save my life in a while ‘nother way?

So this is a more detailed account, which I do not think anyone will be interested in reading anyway. Why do I bother? I”ve been carrying all this around for eight months, and trying to minimize the ordeal for the sake of my worried family. I’m no longer screaming at my poor  husband, and he’s no longer having to carry trays of food to me or help me out of bed so I can use the walker. I no longer need to wear Depends so I won’t crap all over myself. But how am I spiritually? Emotionally?

Changed, changed utterly, as Yeats used to say. I don’t know where I am, these days, as suddenly everything is "different". I lost ten pounds during this whole ordeal, and – realizing if I got sick again my weight might plummet dangerously – I set myself the task of gaining it back. THAT was another weird thing in itself. All my life I have fought my weight, thinking I was obese at 130 pounds (and brainwashed by a culture that was pre-body-positivity and horribly obsessed with being thin). I had to force myself to eat, because nausea was one of the most  debilitating things I was facing. And I had to flip everything over, and everything I had tried to do for my entire life had to be reversed so that I could GAIN weight. No, HAVE the candy! HAVE the chips! Whatever would make me fatter. (As my idol Weird Al would say: "Eat it! Just eat it!")

It was Bizarro-land, in so  many ways, a chronically-well person having to live in the Land of the Sick. Though I appear to have dodged the cancer bullet, there are no guarantees, given how my kidneys, thyroid and blood seem to still be out of whack. And if cancer WAS brewing in my colon, it could recur, and this  time I really WOULD need the colostomy bag. Why else would they have shown me how to use it?

I don’t want to edit this or add clever pictures or whatever I usually do. I probably shouldn’t post it at all, but I am beginning to see why old people talk about their medical ordeals. They’re lonely, and they’re scared, and they wonder what sort of macabre death scene they may be heading towards.

One of the worst things about getting old, for me, has been watching as my most cherished loved ones are taken from me, one by one. FOUR close friends died in the space of two years: cancer, stroke, suicide. My sister-in-law, always in the full bloom of health, died horribly of cancer and was down to 80 pounds at the end. I will never see these people again, and I can’t just run out and “make new friends”. It was hard enough feeding and nurturing these relationships over decades, but trying to start all over again seems impossible.

What keeps me going now is my spirituality, but it is nothing like what I experienced before. My "god" is the life force itself, manifested by nature in all its multifaceted glory, particularly in the form of birds. Not just the backyard variety, but in tiny ducklings peeping and cheeping, Canada geese hissing at me, and a glorious blue heron, its enormous wingspan owning the sky. All of which I saw just this afternoon. By the way, Sky Daddy, as he is sometimes called, is no longer my guiding force, and any thought of attending a church makes me shudder. I’ll be there soon enough at my memorial service.

And, by the way, as I lay flat on my back on the pullout bed, I planned my memorial down to the location (the dock at Burnaby Lake, where the birds are at their most sublime) and the songs I wanted (three of Bob Dylan's spirituals: Death is  Not the End, Every Grain of Sand, and I’ve Made up my Mind to Give Myself to You). At one point, half in a fever dream, I became convinced no one cared about me, nor had anyone ever cared about me in any meaningful way at all. This anguish just came up out of nowhere and overwhelmed me. And at  one point I wrote  a suicide note before tearing it up, not wanting to upset the family.

I wish I could  share better news, and today went OK, so if today goes OK, I have to be content with that.  And that’s about it, that’s the report to date. I can coast a bit  now, until I have more surgery (thyroid biopsy!) in October. Then the hemotologist, no doubt wrapped in a Dracula cape like Bela Lugosi.

Can I breathe now? I’d better keep  going, and not look  back – because something might be gaining on me.

Dated, Demented, Dead: what became of my literary heroes

As usual, I was looking for something else. 

I like to go on Amazon  and order books by the pound (a nice thickie for bedtime reading – unlike so many people who  claim to fall asleep to dull documentaries on YouTube, I still read for the same reason). But it can’t just be any book. I like biographies because they’re generally over 500 pages, and generally not too traumatic. 

There are exceptions. I just trudged through two extremely thick books on my latest "furia", Toulouse-Lautrec: an excruciatingly-detailed bio by Julia Frey, and a novel “based on” his life (but only just) which stretched the Lautrec myth past the snapping point. The novel spent 50 pages dragging out Henri’s horrible death from alcohol and syphilis, and the Frey bio did the opposite and just chopped it all off when he took his last breath. Reeling, I came out the other side of these two (both of them, ultimately, hard to get through), looking for another thickie, and maybe an easier-to-digest one.  

I ended up ordering a new-ish memoir by Barbra Streisand called, of course, My Name is Barbra. It clocks in at nearly a thousand pages, so I just had to have it. But in that labyrinthine way one thing leads to another, I ended up in a totally different place.

For some reason, I got thinking about the authors I used to enjoy eons ago, back in the ‘70s when I wasn’t so interested in bulk. Then I had the thought: what ever happened to Erica Jong? You know, THAT Erica Jong, the one who wrote deliciously dirty books that sold a zillion copies. I did read most of them and found them quite trashy, but “in a good way” (as they say). I liked how she liked men: she loved their bodies in an unabashed, sybaritic way, no holds barred. So I Wikipedia’d her, and discovered she is now 83 years old, suffering from dementia, and living in a nursing home. Her daughter Molly Jong-Fast recently published a Mommie Dearest-style expose called How to Lose your Mother. 

Harsh. 

But oh. 83, dementia, nursing home? The last time I saw an interview with Jong, she was in a state of faded glory, her low-cut gown displaying a very wrinkled cleavage. Still playing the bestselling sexpot author at 65. The fame and glamour and all the rest of it did NOT protect her, not from the indignities of age or the acid vitriol of a memoir written by a bitter, disgruntled daughter.

I won’t read the Jong-Fast memoir, because I won't do that to myself before bed -  but while nosing around on Amazon I discovered something pretty hilarious. There it was, a 50^th Anniversary Edition of Jong’s so-called groundbreaking sex-fest, Fear of Flying. The original novel was published and made a huge splash in 1973. But this 50^th Anniversary Edition was published in. . . 2003. I had to look twice, then three times, but I was right the  first time. 30 years had somehow magically been transformed into 50. 

I thought I MUST have read it wrong, but no, all the reviews were from the same time  period. So somehow poor Erica’s masterpiece turned 50 when it was actually barely 30. Did they want to get all those accolades in before Jong was too old to enjoy it (or even be aware of it)? Or before the public completely forgot about her?

I don’t know how I got onto the next one, maybe a “whatever happened to” thing, but I started thinking about the male equivalent to Jong, Tom Robbins. Like Jong, his books were full of sex and whimsy. I remember reading his first, pre-famous novel,   Another Roadside Attraction (in which a hippie couple somehow attain the body of Christ from the basement of the Vatican, and make it the star attraction of their roadside zoo) and his first big bestseller, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. From what I remember, Cowgirls was pretty excruciating even then – the main character being Sissy Hankshaw, a tall, lovely young girl with the perfectly sterile looks of a fashion model, and (inexplicably) thumbs the size of a standard rural mailbox. It has been a long time since I read it, but I do remember there was a spiritual guru living on the hill, a Chinese guy they called – the Chink. And there’s a hideously stereotyped gay interior decorator called Davy who swishes around for hundreds of pages. And those cowgirls, my goodness – aren’t they hot to trot? They only have one thing on their minds, and it sure ain’t the cows!

The movie version of Cowgirls was even worse: just an excruciating ordeal, with Uma Thurman trying to act with massive prosthetic thumbs strapped to her hands. The creakily dated novel was made into an embarrassingly dated film, fortunately soon forgotten.  By that time Robbins was basically writing the same story over and over again, sexy, whimsical, but kind of dumb. He did attempt a memoir which I could not get through at all. It was whimsical in a forced kind of way, and ultimately, simply dull. 

So what ever happened to - ? I looked it up, and discovered that he died on my last birthday at the age of 92. 

That means he was too old to be a hippie, or even a post-war baby. He was a Depression-era baby, like William Shatner, and immensely old. Then – dead.

That’s what happens next. 

But these two wildly-popular authors, no matter how celebrated in their day, just got old along with the rest of us, went crazy, lost their clever literary brains (or their relevance), then expired, or at least left the known world. Kind of sad, but what does it say about me? I don’t want to live to be 92, and at this point I don’t even want to make it to 83, not if I’m holed up in a sanatorium with the rest of the dementia patients. Given the state of my health right now, I am haunted by the feeling I won’t even make it to my next birthday. And that day (February 9) would be the first anniversary of the death of Tom Robbins.  Appropriate? Or, like all these novels that made such a splash and were seen as so daring - just irrelevant and kind of dumb? 

POSTSCRIPT. But there’s this! I am slavishly devoted to anything to do with the Beatles, and every time I see clips on YouTube of their early performances, they show them in their first-ever appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964. My tenth birthday! Like a brilliant flashbulb, the performance left an indelible and radiant impression on my ten-year-old  brain, and it's still glowing even as we speak. 

A good day to be born! But, I suppose, just as good a day to die.  

Don't get me started: AbuseTube, Part 496

 

And let’s not get started on YouTube. I nearly had my channel terminated because they said I was selling drugs. I found an unusual wild mushroom in my back yard, and decided to do a video on it. That’s all. Then it was immediately taken down, with a severe warning that I had “violated community standards re: sale of controlled substances online”. So my channel, which features mainly birdwatching and old commercials, was suddenly a terrible threat to public safety. I had no idea I was a drug dealer all along! I submitted the video for “review”, and got the message, “After careful review, we have determined that your video does indeed violate community standards re: the sale of,” etc.. I have also had numerous comments taken down with warnings saying I was guilty of “threats, bullying and harassment”. I think I criticized one of Meghan Markle’s outfits. Really, I’ve been on the brink for a long time. I wonder what happens to REAL offenders? (I assume FB is going to do the same with this comment, so read it fast!) YouTube won’t allow a lot of words now, but they never tell you what those words actually are. Nor do they spell out the fact you can’t pick a mushroom in your own back yard without being accused of selling ‘shrooms.

This is an example of cross-pollination: copying and pasting a Facebook post in my blog (cuz I'm too lazy to write anything new). But today, it got a lot worse. Today, I realized ALL the comments I had left over the past several days had been taken down. Erased, for no known reason. Normally they'd tell me if  they were going to try to crush my spirit, but not this time. Weirdly, conversations I'd had with other commenters were now one-sided, with all my responses removed. It looks mighty strange to see one person carrying on both sides of the conversation, but there it is - or there it isn't. No reason given, just gone. A new way for YT to torture me?

I don't have the stamina any more to put up with this shit, though commenting is my main source of enjoyment on YT - and now that, apparently, is also gone. The new videos I make and post are completely ignored, implying AbuseTube is no longer recommending or even sending notifications about them to subscribers.  But there's no reason stated, none given, and none available, even though I'm now on Premium (I had  to fork over $150 just  to NOT see ads - pay not to have a feature??). I hate going into settings, as it seems like a minefield from which there may be no return.

I was better off on my Lautrec trek, but these things don't last forever. A few of my old vids are still getting views, not that they need it. I now have 23,000 subscribers, 3,000 videos, and zero people taking any interest in what I do. So why continue? Haven't I had enough abuse from the publishing world?