Okay so this whole post is mostly embarrassing and gross so if you don’t want to read it I don’t blame you. Due to all of the meds I take along with sometimes being just too fatigued, I often have constipation. It had been three or four days and so I took a couple of Dulcolax. At around 4:30 this morning the cramps started. I got up to go to the bathroom but nothing was happening except more and more pain. The kind of pain where you pray for death pain.
I woke up Grant and curled into the fetal position letting the cool air from the night wash over me. I then started to dry heave heavily and couldn’t even tell Grant to get something for me to throw up in, but he was on the ball and I made it into a bucket. By then he is telling me no ifs, ands, or buts, that he is calling 9-1-1.
I have a strict no E.R. rule unless death is imminent because it usually winds up being a waste of time, but this pain was pretty bad.
There were three fabulous volunteer EMTs. I can’t believe that people would get up in the middle of the night and take drunks, miscreants, or me to the hospital and not get paid for it. My hat goes off to them. While I we were driving the woman took my hands and started to talk to me about Jesus. Normally this makes me uncomfortable, but she said that she sensed I was having a battle with my faith, which is true. I told her that I felt like God and Jesus don’t hear me any more and she said They still do, they always hear me and not to give up. Perhaps she was my EMT for a reason. When she left me she said she would be praying for me.
As I was being wheeled around the E.R. to my cell block, one woman looked at me and said, “Call 9-1-1 for me when you get out of here. You’ve got to help me, these people are sadists!” Then they wheeled me in to my cubicle where I was directly looking at a man who seemed to be getting a bullet taken out of him. There was blood EVERYWHERE and I wondered why his curtain was open.
But I watched fascinated as it distracted me from my pain, not just from my stomach but from my joints and rib cage. I couldn’t get comfortable. Finally the doctor came over to me and said, “Every medicine that you are on causes constipation!” and prescribed some gentle medications for me to stay on permanently, adding “Dulcolax sucks!”
They wouldn’t give me anything for the pain, because everything would make me even more constipated, and they gave me no cat scan or X-rays. The “treatment” basically was non-existent.
My joints and rib cage really started to hurt and I do thank God and Jesus that I had an emergency Percocet in my purse.
When I got discharged, I had no shoes and no jacket. They gave me heavy socks and let me take a blanket home. I looked like an escaped patient. $28 of cab fare later and I was home.
Thus ends another pointless trip to the E.R.
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