The Weekend From Hell

The first thing you need to know is that my interactions with modern medicine have, over the years, been relatively sparse, or average in you will, and I consider myself fortunate in that.

Which is what makes this weekend so special.

A while ago now I had a urine test and they found some blood there. With a little research you can find that this is pretty common. Sometimes it's an indicator of something serious, but many other times it’s just one of those things that happen.

So my doctor told me to go get an ultrasound on my kidneys and my bladder just to see if anything what going on there. So I did, sort of. The problem is that I have a very weak bladder that spends most of its time being empty and when it’s anywhere near being full it will only stay that way for may 30 minutes if I’m lucky. The catch is that you need you need to keep it full for a lot longer than I am capable of in order for an ultrasound to work.

So then it was off to a urologist who checked me out and decided that I needed something called a cystoscopy, which is a nicer and less alarming way of saying cancer test. Since I knew this,9thanks to my sister who was married to a GP for many years) I got to have pretty much a whole month to worry about it, which of course I did.

And in retrospect, that was really the worst part of it all. The stuff that goes on inside your head.

Finally the day for the cystoscopy arrived and we truck on down to the big hospital. Now I don’t have a lot of interactions with hospitals. And I was just astonished at how many people were walking around and sitting around in the several waiting rooms we passed through to get to the urology area.

I signed in and we waited a little while and then I was shown to a change room where I was supposed to put on one of these gowns that you wear when they’re doing what they do to you. That was an minor adventure, and I’m still convinced that I didn’t get that right….but what the hell. You can’t win them all.

Then I’m shown into another room will all kinds of scary looking equipment and and a remarkably high ceiling. I talked to the nurse there for about 10 minutes, then my my urologist comes in, says hi and then she tells me that the urine tests I did for this procedure were clear, so this was really just a double check.

So I laid down on the table and she went to work on me. It literally took no more than 30 seconds. Bang zoom. Then she told me I was all clear and good to go. She shook my hand, and said…have a good life. You now where to find me if you need me, and split.

The surge of relief that came over me as I was getting dressed was slow and gradual, and it took almost the whole ride back home for me to process it. While I was doing that, I thought about all the people who probably went through all the same crap and weren’t anywhere near as lucky as me, and considered myself fortunate again.

Until the next morning.

Because the next morning I woke up with a whole bunch of really serious flu symptoms. Achy joints. Headache. Fever. And the feeling like I could just barf my guts out at any moment, which is of course what happened several hours later.

Now I’ve had a lot of bad colds, but nothing like this. The only place I was comfortable (an extremely relative term), was in bed. And so there I stayed, right next to the can. And there I moaned and groaned my way through Saturday and Sunday morning. My wife and my sister decided to go to Toronto to see the kids and so around noon, sleep deprived as hell. I got up, had a shower and actually started feeling better. But that only lasted a while.

Evidently, all my barfing had cause me to pull something pretty serious in my lower back which was the second curse. But this one I knew how to handle, because this was familiar territory, and the reason I always keep a good supply of Ibuprofen around.

The trouble was that the amount of energy is takes to do anything when your back us fucked up is horrendous. So mostly I just sat on a cushion of the coffee table (which was the only place I could feel comfortable, besides bed) and watch basketball and golf.

The barfing had pretty much made me terrified of eating too much so that added hunger to the misery of the weekend. I got into bed as the Ibuprofen was wearing off. And laid there for a couple of hours trying like hell to get comfortable without it, which proved impossible. Finally, after another dose I got to sleep and woke up at around 10:30 this morning. I was stiff and sore and completely pissed off about all of this crap.

But there you go. I’m going to my chiropractor this afternoon and he will fix my back and hopefully after that things will get back to something resembling normal. Although my energy level is making me feel pretty close to dead.

While I was at the hospital, where allthis shit started, I saw a number of people wearing face masks and remember thinking that might be a little paranoid. But after this weekend I am convinced that you definitely need some kind of hazmat suit to go to a hospital these days.

I know a couple of my FB friends who would probably agree with that 100%. Just wanted to share this with you, because, as it turns out sitting in my desk chair is another one of the very few places where I feel comfortable.