The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

Delirium

I hit 'save entry' in this journal last night, after rambling about chicken and rice, books and slow-rising pain, and I headed to the shower.

I like the water to be hot, not warm, hot, enough so that my skin goes red and keeps me rosy for a time after. Could not shake the pain, though, even when I took the pill the doctor had prescribed. To direct my attention elsewhere, I went downstairs to where M. was watching a rerun of 'The Daily Show', laughing at jokes he'd heard the week before, and I picked up a collection of short stories by Margaret Atwood in the hope that the pill would begin to numb me, just as I fell in love with the words. After about five minutes, though, I realized I hadn't understood a single word before me, and the pain...it seemed to be escalating.

M. asked if there was anything he could do, to which I impatiently shook my head and told him to go upstairs. I am the sort who likes to suffer alone, always worried that people would interpret my groans and rocking as theatrics, so he went up the stairs and I flipped through the channels without really knowing what I was looking at. Within a half hour, I began to realize that the pain medication wasn't working, and I went back and forth to the bathroom, feeling certain I was going to be sick. Nothing, though. Then, I began to feel incredibly strange, like my body was on fire as well as stuck in a block of ice, and when I went into the bathroom to look at myself, I saw a shade of white I've never seen before. Corpselike, perhaps? A corpse bathed in milk. I called up to M. and asked if he would come to the top of the stairs, which he did, and I asked him in a frightened voice, 'Do I look different to you?'

'You are extremely white. Are you okay?'

'Umm...no.'

I decided to stand on the front porch to catch some night air, thinking it would fill me with calm, but as it was wet and humid, this was not the reaction I had. Instead, my head began to spin, the pain progressed to another level, and I clumsily made my way back into the house where I called up to M., repeatedly, saying 'something's really wrong'.

That's when I began to bounce off the hallway walls, at which time he ran down the stairs and directed me toward the couch where I collapsed. I did not lose consciousness, but I was that close to doing so, I knew it. My body wasn't working but my mind was mulling over my options. I told M. to call Telehealth, rather than the ambulance he was trying to get me to agree to (an ambulance? major theatrics, man), and he brought the phone over to me so I could emit semi-intelligible responses to the nurse's questions. The pain, I'd said, is worse than labour, and I have experienced labour. She asked if I'd thrown up (no, but I felt like it was a possibility, though I've not actually vomited in ten years), if I was cold and clammy (yes, very much so, according to M., and my head was dripping with sweat), if I could stand up (with a lot of effort, and it was uncertain whether I could stay that way). I told her in broken sentences that I've had this 'gall bladder situation' for about a year and a half, but that I've been symptom free for a good while. This had come from nowhere, and it was by far the worst attack I'd ever had, and that was saying something. She told me to go to the hospital, to not 'dilly-dally', just go.

I couldn't drive, I knew that much, and I steadfastly refused the ambulance (it is one cost not covered by the government), even though I have always been semi-curious about how they work. I knew this would mean waking the wee one up, but I told M. he could just drop me off at the door and I'd make my own way from there. It was eleven thirty by this time, and I stumbled out to his car, in the rain, and waited for him to pull our sleeping child out of bed. She didn't wake up even when he put her in the car seat, and I tried not to moan while sitting there, wondering if I was dying. We made our way through the slick and misty streets, hitting many red lights along the way. When the hospital was within our line of sight, I asked M. to pull over.

'But, we're almost there,' he'd said, astonished.

'I'm sorry but we really need to pull over.'

'Are you sure?'

'Pull over!'

And he did, at which point I opened the passenger door and proceeded to vomit on the curb next to the park. And, as coincidence would have it, we were right across the street from M.'s friend C.'s house, so I'll always get to remember where I lost my dinner. Well, part of it, anyway. In between fits of projectile chicken and rice, I told M. that I didn't want to mess up his car, and he rubbed my back and laughed softly. This was the first time I'd ever thrown up in front of him. For some reason, I found this horrifying.

When we finally got to the emergency room, M. put me in a wheelchair and pushed me toward the registration desk. The pain was so bad I could hardly breathe, and instead of being my polite self, I gave annoyed responses to questions I didn't feel were necessary. M. refused to go home, and as the wee one was now awake, he went and got her so we could wait together. I was worried about her, but also, grateful that I wouldn't be alone. I eyed the waiting room and saw all kinds of people, all in varying levels of distress and discomfort. Selfishly, though, I was hoping my condition was serious enough that I could bypass them all, the agony more prevalent than my compassion.

It doesn't work this way, though.

I am absolutely grateful that health care in my country is covered by the government. I have never had to pay for a doctor's appointment, never had to pay for medications administered in a hospital, and can call a health professional for free, twenty-four hours a day. The one drawback is the wait, though. Even though I was in so much pain that I could not sit or stand or even lie down without wanting to cry, and even though my blood pressure was dangerously low, and even though I vomited six more times in the waiting room ladies room, I was not emergent enough to require immediate assistance. M. told me over and over that I would have been seen right away if I'd gone in the ambulance, but I didn't want to hear that. I just begged invisible gods to take the pain away, even if it meant knocking me out. The last time I vomited, I'd accidently hit the walls of the stall, as well as my hair, which made me wretch even more. Then, I cleaned it all up, and ran some of my hair under the faucet, knowing I probably smelled as good as I looked. I looked at myself in the mirror, marvelling at how different I appeared, how distraught and sick, something I'd never seen before.

Mercifully, the wee one was in great spirits, largely due to another four-year-old who was waiting for stitches for a gash in her forehead. The two of them were oblivious to the extremely late hour, making toddler conversation and laughing with their bellies over basically nothing. M. watched them, as he rubbed my back, and I finally told him I had to lie down. Where, he'd asked, and I responded by lowering myself to the waiting room floor. I didn't care about all the shoes that had walked on it, all the germs which might have been living in the industrial carpet, I put my head on his sweater next to a potted plant and told myself that none of that mattered. M. spoke with the charge nurse and explained that I was now lying on the floor, that I'd been vomiting incessantly, that I was twisted with pain, and the nurse responded by winking and saying 'I'll see what I can do.'

By two a.m, I was in a bed. I had told M. to take the wee one home, seeing the blooming bags under her eyes, not to mention, the pain had made me impatient and delirious, saying horrible things and getting angry at my child for being loud and asking questions. He told me to call when I knew what was going on, that he'd come and get me, no matter what the time. After he left, I rocked back and forth on the bed, sitting up, lying back down, moaning softly. I was angry at the people who walked by who looked at me. I was angry at all the other emergent cases that had come in, though I did feel authentically bad for the man who was rolled in from the ambulance, his wife and two daughters looking panicked as they followed. When the doctor finally came in, a grey fox in glasses with a warped sense of humour, he asked me questions which I was surprised to realize I didn't understand.

'I'm sorry,' I apologized, 'but I'm having trouble focusing.'

'Pain's pretty bad, huh?', he asked, chart in hand.

'I can say it's the worst I've felt in my life.'

He managed to get some answers out of me, before telling that a nurse would be in shortly to 'make me more comfortable'.

That sounded pretty damned excellent to me.

She came in, a dour-faced, pudgy woman who was clearly unimpressed to be working the graveyard shift, and she started to swab my arm, telling me that she needed some blood, after which she'd be starting the I.V. Whatever, I thought. I looked at the wall as she jabbed me with the needle, and I 'yowwwwed' when she did.

'I'm sorry, that hurt did it?'

'Well, yeah, but at least it shifted my attention from the pain I've been dealing with all night.'

I lay there as the medication was tubed to my arm, and I asked with a real sheen of desperation how long it would take to work. She said about five to ten minutes, which I interpreted as hours, I lay there, still, wondering if I'd ever be me again.

Eventually, the pain slowed to the point of vanishing.

I don't remember much after that, only that my semi-conscious state was filled with crying babies and whispering nurses in the hallway, as my room was directly across from their lunch area. I know the nurse came in a few times to check on me, and I seem to recall hobbling over to my long sweater on the chair and trying not to disrupt the I.V as I did so, before covering myself in it and the sheet on the end of the bed. I was cold, but I was also pain-free, and my head felt like it had plumped full of air, like nothing made sense and there was no longer a thing called time.

The doctor came in at around five a.m. and told me things I already knew, like it was my gall bladder, that a stone had lodged in the duct and caused spasms, that if the stone had dislodged and gone into the bloodstream I could have died. Lucky for me, he said, it didn't, and instead went back into the gall bladder, which, he added, is 'a totally redundant organ, you know? Why haven't you gotten it chopped out?'

Bedside manner, and all that.

'I've been on a waiting list for a year!', I said impatiently, at which time he produced a new order, one which is supposed to bump up my status.

'Get that thing chopped out! You don't need it. I don't know why we have them in the first place.'

Okay.

I decided to take a taxi home, rather than make M. get dressed and come to get me with our wee one, who was most likely exhausted from the disrupted sleep. The driver was the best kind: quiet. The streets were still slick but the rain was done, and the air smelled like dirt and flowers and lakewater. When I got home, I immediately brushed my teeth (Bulimics, how do you all do it? Seriously, the vomiting thing? What is wrong with you people?), and tried to brush the dried regurgitation from my hair. I tied it all up, and slithered into bed next to M. who immediately rolled over to ask all the anticipated questions. I did my best, but told him to go to sleep, he'd done enough.

I am now showered, half-awake, but eyeing my bed with longing. There is no pain at the moment, but M. threw away all the doughnut holes, knowing that they played a key role in the events. I just can't tolerate fatty or fake food anymore, which is probably why I am so vigilant about it these days, knowing what it does, how it feels when you abuse yourself. So many years of fast food, so many years of grease and salt. It doesn't happen to everyone, no, but others things are certain to develop even if it isn't a testy gall bladder.

I am not looking forward to having my gall bladder 'chopped out', but I have to admit that it is a far better alternative than ever experiencing that level of pain again.

I have to admit that I'm afraid to eat. The doctor told me that next time I should take 600mg of an analgesic, but I had the pain medication last night and ended up throwing it up. I asked about that, too, why was I vomiting? He said that intense pain will do that, make your stomach revolt and bring on the fainting. I'd never experienced that before. It was weird. Also, it made M. realize that I'm not such a drama queen, that the pain was real. Furthermore, I've finally decided that this wasn't anxiety. That's right folks, it was biological, and I accept it.

I have to. It was crusted in my hair.