Panoply of Pain

1. First, there was a sudden, sharp stomach cramp around noon on Tuesday. This quickly faded into

2. A sudden, sharp bowel cramp. This one lingered and throbbed until it became so distracting that I had to leave my job.

3. In the car, I got the “hot spits” that often come on just before puking. I managed to talk myself into keeping it down while I drove.

4. Fever took hold pretty quickly after I got to my mother’s condo. I had been cat-sitting for her and wanted to make sure everything was in order, as she was due back the next day. The pain of fever is so intimate and overwhelming as to be akin to a lover. That deep-bone ache and those spasmodic, convulsive chills put one out of one’s mind the way mind-blowing sex can—but in a completely opposite way.

5. The bowel cramps very quickly localized to a sharp, angry, insistent, poking pain in my lower right abdomen. Through that long afternoon and night, I sipped water constantly and sat on the toilet periodically, thinking if I could just take a good dump, the pain would go away. My febrile brain worked hard between fitful naps to figure out what I should do. Was it my IUD ripping a hole in my uterus? Was it my appendix? Was it gas?

            More than anything, I feared being that person who calls 911 over a gas bubble. I would never be able to stand the humiliation.

6.  I hobbled from the sofa to the toilet like the number 7 all night. The pain in my abdomen precluded standing upright. I had the presence of mind to continuously sip water, realizing one of the biggest complications from a fever can be dehydration. Around 4:00 am, I cooked a couple of eggs and choked them down. I still hoped all this was just the flu, but I think I was waiting for my mother to get home and tell me what I should do.

7. At 5:00 am, I decided I should take some Aleve. This eventually lessened the grip of fever, but that only deepened my indecision about what to do. There, I thought, I’m getting better. I did a load of laundry bent in half like a crone.

8. My mom got home around 2:00 Wednesday afternoon and immediately knew something was terribly wrong. She suggested calling 911. I balked. Finally, I looked up the symptoms for appendicitis on the internet. I had seven of ten. She called 911.

9. The particular pain of venipuncture recurred over the next several days with fluctuating levels of acuteness. Forest, the RN at the satellite emergency room, was smooth as silk when he inserted the port for an IV in my left hand. A second port was added at the inner curve of my left elbow at Akron General some time later. As my stay progressed, blood was drawn from the veins on the backs of both hands, my inner right elbow and one gnarly vein in my right forearm, not far from the tip of my tattoo. The worst of these sticks was one morning around 3:00 am when Tasha—an incredibly kind and compassionate RN who sat with me another time for about half an hour while I cried exhausted tears—tried to draw from the back of each hand in succession. Each time, a large blue bubble of blood pooled around the needle, but none came out. These pools burned and throbbed in their unnatural fullness. I have large, brown bruises there now.

10. Narcotics were surprisingly painful. I have not taken or been given many, as I have never broken a bone or had an extended stay in a hospital before. Low-dose morphine was first. A wave of hot tightness traveled across my clavicle shortly after Forest slipped it into my IV. After 45 minutes and no effect, he went with Dilaudid. That did the trick. The pain in my abdomen receded a bit, and for the first time in about 30 hours, I began to relax. When I got chills from the combination of narcotics and IV saline, Forest swaddled me in warm blankets, and even though my mother had left, I felt safe and like everything was going to be alright.

11. Wednesday night, around 9:30, I had been admitted to Akron General and was waiting to hear when my surgery was scheduled. The Dilaudid lingered; my fever was down and I felt fairly normal. My family had gone, and a friend had come to see me. We were chatting in my room when I heard someone snapping their fingers while approaching the door. A tall, lanky, young doctor with reddish brown hair in scrubs and a white lab coat came in, followed by a short, sheepish-looking, also young doc in scrubs and thick-framed glasses. The tall snappy one introduced himself as Nathan and proceeded to discuss the procedure I would undergo. Here’s what I remember him saying very clearly: “You don’t look like you’re dying, so we’re going to put your surgery off until 8 or 9:00 tomorrow morning.”

12. Before midnight, the sharp pain in my lower right abdomen had radiated to my pubis bone, then across my entire midsection. I writhed in pain while the nurse tried to get ahold of the doctor for a morphine order. Jagged metallic tines raked across my intestines. Barbed wire wrapped itself around my pubis, tightening, tightening. I writhed and pounded my fists against the plastic sides of the bed, begged for it to stop. The nurse suggested I watch some TV or a video on my phone to take my mind off the pain. Finally, the third syringe of morphine in my IV soothed, allowing me to drift into a feverish half sleep.

13. At 6 am, that same nurse came in to tell me the good news: they were coming to take me to the OR very soon. Weak, feverish and chilled, I listened as Bob joked about being a bad driver while he steered my bed down the hall, onto the elevator, into the pre-op room. He became quiet and somber, put his hand on my arm: “You’re gonna be alright kiddo. They’ll get you fixed up in a jiffy.”

14. As soon as the nurse anesthetist delivered a “valium-like” drug into my IV to calm my anxiety, I awoke in recovery to a cacophony of lights and beeps. A tiny black woman named Denise was calling my name and asking how I felt. “Water,” was all I could croak out. The fever was gone, but as my head cleared from the anesthesia, I felt a new pain: the raw, itchy chafe of three small incisions in my belly.

15. My flat belly that I had worked so hard on for months with planks and sit-ups and an entire set of daily core-strengthening exercises from my physical therapist, and for which I had eschewed bread on weekdays, and which had become flat and tight with little vertical ridges just below my rib cage. I had been so proud of that firm, sexy stomach. Now it protruded with bloat, like someone three months pregnant. When my mom and sister helped me take my first shower in days, I saw it in the mirror and wept.

16. The trauma of a ruptured appendix made my bowel completely shut down for four days. The surgeons said that walking was the best cure, so the same day of the surgery, I began hobbling up and down the hallway of the hospital, slow as a turtle, touching the wall at one end then the other at least twice. I was winded after each walk, which I did three times each day. Soon, this helped reawaken my bowel, giving rise to yet more horrors. Quick sharp pangs would double me over, stopping me in my tracks and taking my breath away. My entire world shrank to the size of my four-foot-by-three-foot bathroom. I rode the toilet like a motorcycle—not a big fat Harley but a foreign-made, high-pitched crotch-rocket: leaning forward, IV arm gripping the sink, right arm wrapped around the metal safety bar, legs tucked back around the porcelain, groaning and gritting my teeth and giving it everything I had.

17. Eventually, one of the nurses had to fix the tape around my IV port. It had been in for more than three days, and the tape was bloody and gnarly. She was a sweet, compassionate RN named Heidi who brought me warm blankets to lay across my belly that helped with the cramping. She started pulling one of the three separate pieces of tape very slowly. I said, “Just rip it off fast; I can take it.” I had become accustomed to a panoply of pain and felt this was kid stuff. “I can’t,” she said, stopping, real pain in her eyes. “It might pull the IV out, and we still need it.” Each piece came off extraordinarily slowly, and I felt every hair on my arm ripped out at its root.

18. Ten days after the surgery, I could no longer stand the itchy bandages stubbornly stuck to my now-shrinking belly. Soggy and hanging loose, they begged to be ripped off. I pulled each one away from my skin, carefully minding the small, scabbed red lines left behind by the surgeon. After removing the third one, just at the top of my pubis bone, I realized it hadn’t been the bandages causing all that itching. They had shaved part of my pubic hair, and it was now beginning to grow back in that wiry, scratchy slowness I hadn’t experienced since my early twenties. It felt like a final insult added to the myriad injuries of this whole thing. Shorn, scarred, skinny as a stick, I collapsed into my own bed for the first time in two weeks and resolved to begin rebuilding myself first thing in the morning, grateful for the opportunity.