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December 2000 The last six days have been a real fiasco. I managed to lose 7 pounds in 5 days. Want to know what my secret was? When the doctors know, I'll let you know. Basically, it started Wednesday afternoon. I was feeling kind of ill, but then at night I started throwing up. Thursday came, and so did more vomit. And Thursday night, and then Friday. Needless to say, 72 hours had gone by and nothing stayed down. This includes, by the way, any medicine, which was quickly halted Wednesday night. So by Friday, not only couldn't I keep anything in me, but I couldn't walk straight, open my own bottle of ginger ale, or climb stairs. For the first time in a long, long time I didn't take my medicine, and my, have the symptoms changed. Now I'm a mess. Before I was just a theoretical mess. Note: CreakyJoints is the only arthritis web site that doesn't make its members nauseous with grotesque medical details. And when these details are given in this diary, it's in as joking a manner as humanly possible. So then the weekend went by. Doubling up on my Prilosec (for treatment of a possible ulcer) stopped the throwing up. Crackers, jam, that kind of B.S. stays down now. But obviously I'm not back to par, I'm still nauseous, and still no medicine is in me. Energy is gone, and, I'm so afraid . Okay, maybe that's a little much. It's sort of my way of making a joke out of what is ahead. The doctor here at school ran the blood and all that jazz, and said that it looks as though it's medicine related (Celebrex), but they don't know for sure. A way to find out is by doing a procedure called an endoscopy. (That's when they put a tube down your throat to your stomach. I have NO idea what the hell it does once down there.) Unfortunately, I couldn't take my eyes off of the doctors bow-tie, so I missed half of what he said. I kept thinking to myself "it's not every day you see a man wearing a bow tie…how colorful and pretty is that?!" That's what happens when you're a wise ass and your health is on the line. But back to the endoscopy: I'm not sure if that's what's going to happen. A wise man once said "you should never put anything down your throat that isn't nutritional or recreational..." So I think I'll take his advice for the time being. There is a reason I haven’t been posting too many of my diaries in the last three weeks. Frankly, I’ve gotten pretty sick, and while I know it’s my job to post what’s inside my head, the last three weeks I’ve really needed to go into my shell and figure out what’s going on. My stomach is still acting up, and I am still off of all my medicine. This is the longest I’ve gone without meds since I was 12 years old, and it certainly is a weird feeling – both for my body and for my brain. Let’s start with the body. Basically, without medicine I’m a physical mess. I can’t walk straight, and when I try to, my hips and my knees start killing me. That’s after 4 or 5 steps, so I always think to myself “the first three steps are free”. When I sit for longer than 5 minutes I start to get this really bad pain in my lower back. I learned this the hard way by going to the movies (“What Women Want”…decent flick), where I was literally tortured for two hours of really bad back pains. Not to mention I pissed off everyone around me because I kept moving around so much. And alas, thy hands. Thy wretched, misbehaving hands. They hurt whenever I want to do ANYTHING…be it type this diary, use a fork to my moms dinner (which as a college student, I have come to really appreciate), or even hold open the water I am drinking as I write. Perhaps this is the hardest limitation, as the pain has prevented me from doing any of these things. I don’t move anywhere…don’t climb stairs when I don’t need to, since that extra pain just isn’t needed. But it will get better. A visit to the ever-encouraging doctor yesterday (now that I’m home for break) was promising. I will have my endoscopy on Thursday, and hopefully will be able to know if I have an ulcer, how to treat it, and when the hell I can start my medicines again. With any luck, by the weeks-end I’ll be back on meds, and this time next week, complaining about the usual achiness of my joints, instead of now where we’re talking about real meat-and-potato pain. By the way, endoscopy = tube with camera put down throat to look inside stomach. Yeah baby, yeah. I’m looking forward to that one more and more. Hopefully the guy will find the Hope Diamond that I accidentally swallowed as a kid. And then there’s the emotional and the psychological side of life without medicine, having to bear pain by making even the simplest of moves. But you know what? It happens. The most depressing thing is knowing that this is how my body is – without medicine, and that meds are only a temporary fix for a long-term problem. But in the end, there are people like Elaine Allen…a “visiting” Professor of mathematics. This is a lady who teaches math – clearly my WORST subject – and managed to connect with me and get through to me, while understanding what I was going through. I think this is why she earns the “Seth Award” for the month of December, because she really helped me out and made my life bearable these last few weeks. (Hopefully I can get any remaining brownie points by writing that…?!) School has been a real drag because I’ve just been such a physical mess, but this months recipient of the “Seth Award” really helped me out. Everyone needs someone in their life like that – someone who helps, makes you laugh, and won’t hesitate to give you an A+. Luckily, the endocsopy went well yesterday. Well enough that I was working in the office by noon the same day. Shayne had to come pick me up though, since I was so doped up. Speaking of being doped up, I don’t remember anything about the procedure or even what happened an hour or two after. So much so that I don’t even remember walking to the car, and driving home with my mom. Apparently I called Shayne to tell her how it went, and then an hour later when I got home, I called her again. Didn’t remember a thing – not even that I called her. While I was “waking up” in the recovery/resting room, my mom was by my side. I said to her (and this is allegedly) “if this is what it’s like to be on drugs, I’m going to try pot tonight”. She didn’t appreciate. But I have to think about my eventual senate run before I try something like pot. But the moral of the story is that the procedure went well, and I felt REALLY good. Like good enough to tell my mom to her face that I wanted to do drugs. Now that’s serious stuff. Oh, and the results: no ulcer, thank goodness. He found some thingies (whatever they’re called), and said that they’re probably benign, but took a biopsy just in case (since it’s not every day someone is down in there). He was 99% sure that it was just a severe unsettled reaction to the medicine, causing me to puke everywhere for 6 days. Delicious, huh? So it’s back on the meds, slowly but surely, starting tonight. I’ll tell you what I DO remember about the morning, because this is something that will forever stick out in my memory. And NO drug would make me forget something this great. No I’m not talking about a hot nurse (though that wouldn’t have hurt), and I’m not even talking about someone’s gown falling off. I’m talking about the one thing that can make a teenage guy laugh without fail. It would be the six or seven patient’s recovering in the same big room – but not from an endoscopy like me – from a colonoscopy. A colonoscopy is supposed to be lots of fun: it’s where they put the camera up the other end to look inside your colon. The point is, when they do it they usually blow lots of air up there with them so that the camera can get into where a camera probably shouldn’t be. All the air that goes in, has to come out. So I was just gaining consciousness in this recovery room with about 8 of the loudest farters I have ever heard in my entire life. And I have two brothers and a brother-in-law, and I still say this. What made it so funny was the fact that opposite and next to me were tiny, tiny old ladies! Like the short old lady from Golden Girls (Estelle Getty?). I kept cracking up, and the nurses wanted to know what was going on. When I woke up I asked what rest stop bathroom I was in – because it sounded like that, times ten. Eventually my laughing got so bad that the nurses started cracking up too, which is really unprofessional, but they’re used to dealing with 80 year olds, not 19 year olds. So it wound up being a really funny time. And the doctor came over to talk to me, and every time someone farted, I would grab the handles of the bed and shake myself. Partly as a joke, and partly as a means not to laugh. I don’t think that he appreciated it. This just proves that even someone with as much pre-procedure anxiety as me could wind up having a good time. If I ever need another, I’m bringing along ear plugs and clothes pins for all the nurses. They were great to me, and I had a lot of fun with them. I think I’ll enjoy some of my vacation time now by taking a nice mid-afternoon nap. |
