Medical Rant

I feel like I’ve been through the wringer with the medical runaround lately. First of all, I spent a good couple of weeks incapacitated with headaches and high blood pressure, filled with anxiety that another stroke was coming. I couldn’t drive, I lay in bed and at one point didn’t eat for 2 days. After seeing all my doctors, they decided that it was stress and fatigue. It had been the lead up to the stroke anniversary and I guess I had put a lot of pressure on myself about it.

Then the aha moment. I have a documented history of low tolerance to medication. Everything I take is started at a low dose and is increased only incrementally. I filled out a new prescription at my local pharmacy for my chronic pain medication. Turns out I was taking 300mg more than I should have been. My headaches coincided with taking this, which I didn’t discover until I had been on them for 3 weeks. By the time I did, my body had become used to it and the headaches were easing off.

It was a relief to realize I had not really regressed. The anxiety of having another stroke was diminished significantly after this episode as well. The doctors all assured me that the chance of having another one, specifically because of the type of stroke I had, was very slim. I have felt much better since. And am so back on track with my exercise and in general, with my life moving along.

The next highly irritating occurrence was with Blue Cross. I had extended travel insurance that should have covered at least part of my one-week stay in hospital in the Bahamas. The agents are now telling me I didn’t actually have extended insurance (3 months travel at a time) I only had the basic coverage (15 days). So the upshot is, I have already paid the hospital bill in the Bahamas, so it’s a done deal and I won’t get any money back. Bastards.

I moved back to Canada because of OHIP (that’s socialized medicine to my US friends). I have been happy for most of it, I know how the system works now, though I am still trying to work it to the best of my ability. If I was still in New York I can’t even fathom the total of what this would have cost.

So factoring in the overall potential cost of everything up to this point easily makes the the Bahamas hospital bill seem negligible, but it’s irritating nonetheless.

Blood on the dance floor

Writing is cathartic for me. I think that is clear. The ink is blood. All my angst, anxiety and thoughts pour out from the pen and spread out in a streaky mess. It still feels tactile even through this medium.

The result of course is what I’m writing sounds raw, emotional and intense. Indeed, they are some of my innermost feelings and thought processes. They end up on the pages and not in my head, which is turning out to be the answer to how I handle things. It feels like I’ve passed the emotions to another place, so I no longer have to ruminate on them to death.

Real life, my life off the page, now seems manageable. Low moments are less. Zen moments are pursued. Now I try to smile through everything. When I frown I am so aware because I can actually feel my stress level rising. Not that it’s a bad thing to “feel” but I just want to smile at this point and not feel stunned.

The X is actually the person who recently said that I should try to do things that make me happy. Sometimes he does say things that I see pertinence to, so here I go.

Cliché # 102: The pursuit of Happiness

Expectations

Sometimes I commit myself to an idea in such a way that it can be detrimental. I convince myself so empirically of something that it goes beyond my assumptions or even my lame attempts at prediction.

I know exactly why I do it. It’s the morbid factor that I’ve always had, the what-if scenario. I wed myself to the most horrible idea so that any variable of the truth doesn’t hurt me. It’s a protection mechanism. But the truth is, it causes immense stress.

After having this history of being taken aback (the stroke and separation were bombs) I felt the only way to move forward was to think this way. As day-to-day dramas play out, I found I was less surprised if I had already thought of that worst-case scenario.

It is negative, no doubt, and perhaps even bitter. It’s based on my expectations of others, something I have tried to drive out of myself, but it’s difficult. I expect him to call, I expect her to behave this way, I expect them to think this of me. Not only is it disappointing, but also I find myself creating quite a drama out of it when it doesn’t go my way. It’s actually kind of bratty when I come to think of it in this light.

Slowly I am learning to take a step back and see things in a broader scope. Yet another cliché helps immensely-walking in someone else’s person’s shoes. It’s true though, when I think of something from all possible sides, it’s rarely as bad as I imagined. In fact that expansion of thought gives way to some incredible ideas and a more innocent way of thinking.

There was a time when I thought the best of everyone, that at heart, most people were good. So a pat on the back for naïveté and a welcome back.

Part Three

I only found out recently how the kids felt the next morning when they woke up without me. My younger one said “ I cried.” I never knew that. All I knew was that they went to school but were later taken to the airport and put on a plane for Nassau. My mother and the kids ended up staying with friends. She thought it wasn’t a good idea to let them come to the hospital so they spent the first few days shopping and going to the beach.

Initially when I arrived at the hospital the doctors were talking about migraines, possible sinus infection or a nervous breakdown, I was too young for anything else. The first night there I had a major pain attack in my head and I recall the nurses rushing in and giving me a shot. I had all sorts of i.v.’s going. The most painful was the Potassium one. It burned and after having it on and off for a month, it ultimately scarred the veins in my arms making them hard and painful.

When my X walked into the room, I was aware he was on his way from Europe, I was happier than I had been in months. His face was a real joy for me. He stayed with me, stroked my hair, and made me feel like everything was okay. Even curled up and slept with me overnight on the tiny hospital bed within the tangle of i.v. tubing. On the third day he even took me into the shower and washed my hair for me. It was one of the few times I remember pure and utter love from him. That was short lived.

My mother and my X took turns using the phone outside the room. He came in at one point, the color drained from his face. “What’s wrong?” I asked, but he replied “Nothing.” When he left again I asked my mother what was up with him. She told me he was really hurt.

A month before I had started seeing T. I use the term “seeing” loosely. It was a phone relationship for the most part, an intense one, that had included 3 days together. I never thought it would be serious enough to tell my X, otherwise I would have. Even worse, T was peripherally connected to my X as a work colleague and had just spent his last two days in Europe, the period when I had the emergency and entered hospital, working with him. He had just found out.

The truth is that over the next few months this relationship morphed and grew into something that was wonderful and painful at the same time. The X and I fought on and off about my new attachment, and I questioned it too, but not until much later. T ruled my life and my other relationships until fairly recently when I made the decision to walk away.

The next day the kids came to visit me for the first time. My older one, M, was like me, just asked nicely how I was then pretended like I was perfectly fine. My younger one, D, stood at the end of the bed tearing up, not wanting to come near me. I realized my voice was probably scaring her. It was very high pitched. I would find out much later that was due to a paralyzed vocal chord. Someone described it as my “Minnie Mouse” voice.

She eventually came toward me and sat on the edge of the bed, but wouldn’t look at me. It weirded me out, but I coaxed her and soon she was better, not her normal self, but close enough to get her to talk a bit. D and I have always been emotionally connected and her reaction to my illness is still there, the concern, the worry, the anxiety over whether I will leave her again.

Both my mother and my X were concerned that the hospital hadn’t done the tests right. They pressed them to do an MRI below the neck as all the previous tests had been done only on the head. As I was wheeled over to the MRI room the kids ran in to say goodbye. They were leaving with him to return to work in Europe. They would stay with him for the duration of my illness, a couple of weeks, the doctor had assured us.

He had also made arrangements for my mother and I to fly back to Toronto and go to a hospital there. We would leave in two days. Just after I said bye to him and the kids, we were given the results of the MRI. I had had a stroke. It was called Wallenberg’s Syndrome, a tearing of the arteries leading to my brain stem. A clot had formed in the right one, the worse damaged of the two. I would end up in hospital for 3 months.

Part Two

I sensed the nurses come in and out of my room. I knew it was serious by the way the acted, their silent manner. I even knew one of them from church. There was nothing they could do. I would be taken to the near-by clinic to see the doctor, the only one on the island, and he would decide what to do.

One friend stayed with the kids, they were still unaware, and the other picked me up and carried me to his van while one of the nurses sat beside me with an oxygen tank. It was old, like she had been dragging that sucker around to emergencies for years. It was part of her job detail surely, but it looked like it had never been used, just all banged up, like they bought it from the MASH prop house.

A few years before a very good friend had died on the island from an asthma attack. The consensus about her death was that the medication they had in the island clinic was old, and while she waited for a nighttime emergency flight to be arranged, she tragically died. I had actually held a fundraiser in her name to equip the island ambulance sufficiently.

My mind was lucid, while I thought of these things. I lay in the fluorescent light of the empty clinic, a converted house, and tried to respond to the doctor. He was Indian and I had trouble understanding him, I thought it was his accent, but now I’m not sure. I began to throw up.

They informed me that a flight was coming to take me to the hospital in Nassau. It would arrive in an hour. There was nothing they could do for me there. I made that plane and tried to feel relieved about that. The interior was gutted and they lay the stretcher directly on the metal floor. I felt really out of it. My friend and that same oxygen tank nurse came with me.

When we landed in Nassau and the ambulance was waiting there. It was the first moment I was aware of time, sunrise, the sky was so beautiful. They rushed me into the waiting vehicle, but I remember thinking I just wanted to look at that gorgeous, streaked sky a bit longer.

When I got to the hospital it was a rush of tests. I was slid in and out of machines, I was poked and prodded, made to swallow horrid tasting things. I really didn’t care, I just felt numb. I was told my mother was on her way from Toronto. I thought, “So quickly? But it can’t be that serious for her to come all this way.” It was serious and she was there by 11AM.

Part one

The morning of May 15, 2008 I called my then husband and told him it was over. We had been separated for 2 months and we had intended to give it 3 more to be sure. But I felt sure. He would later say that it didn’t sound like my voice. Needless to say, the rest of the day was highly emotional, I cried a lot, that is until the kids came home.

We were on a small island in the Bahamas where we spent a fair bit of time. As a result of the breakdown in our relationship, we decided that the kids and myself would stay there for the remainder of the school year.

We spent the early evening watching Juno, I felt exhausted. I really hadn’t been sleeping well and the emotions of the day had played out physically. I just lay there in what felt like a sleep deprived stupor as we all watched the film.

While they watched I got up to get something from the kitchen. The iPod was playing one of my favorite songs, Jose Gonzalez with Zero 7. I pirouetted my way back to the bedroom where the TV was, but never made it.

I felt my neck kind of snap and I instantly saw black spots. It reminded me of times before when I’d fainted except my neck really hurt. I lay on the couch and called friends to come over just in case I fainted. While I lay there I thought I had no reason to faint since I had just ate dinner. They came very quickly and fed me mango, gave me Tylenol, iced my neck and kept an eye on me. Eventually they put the kids and myself to bed, and told me to take another Tylenol if I woke up, and to call if anything happened.

1 AM, I got up to use the bathroom, my neck was really hurting, so I grabbed the bottle of Tylenol and took it over to the bed. As I swallowed the pill I noticed my right arm get very heavy, then the pain from my neck made its way slowly over the back of my head, on the right side, en route to my eye socket. I had never felt pain like that in my entire life. Even during childbirth, which I did naturally with my second child.

I had the cell phone beside me and I speed dialed my friends. I was able to say "It’s happening again." “Should we bring the nurses?" He asked. I knew the island protocol well and said yes. By this point it was my face, the right half, that was immobile, I felt like it was melting, my arm was heavy and I was unable to move it.

While I lay there waiting, my heart beating insanely, I thought to myself, wow, this is it, I am going to die on this island. This place where so many seminal moments had occurred, my wedding, my second child taking her first steps, my marriage falling apart. It made sense. I wasn’t scared. I just focused on the only light that was on, behind the slatted doors of the closet, trying to keep my eyes open. I was glad the kids were asleep in their rooms with the AC on and had no idea what was going on.

this week, ugh.

This week I keep replaying the events in my head. Woken up at ungodly hours, unable to sleep. I didn’t think it would be like this, but it’s all I can think about. Tomorrow is the anniversary and then I don’t want to think about it in this way again. I hope that facing it head on, delayed though it may be, will be the cathartic thing to do.

The plan is to be out socially tomorrow evening, either with friends at dinner or with my eldest daughter at the movies. But nothing will distract from the dark midnight hours. I know those will come but I feel ready for them in a way that I am strong enough not to let them take me over.