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.
