[Note: This post was written under the influence of pain killers. I’m pretty out of it.]
It seems like I can’t go a week without experience some kind of medical trauma, either imagined or real.
On Sunday morning, probably sometime around 3:00, I woke up to go make some pee-pee.
Felt fine, you know? Eyes opened like they usually do. Bladder communicated a fullness to my brain with great success. Everything seemed to be working in that magical chemical harmony that is the symphony of life. Woo-ha.
Things changed a second later, though.
As soon as I stood up, I felt a sensation that I had never felt before. It would be very difficult to communicate the kind and degree of pain that I felt. It was as though I was, very quickly, growing a third arm out of the base of my spine. The thing felt like it was going to explode. It radiated throughout my entire body.
I don’t speak “spine,” but if I did, I think it was saying something like “Kill me… please… kill… me…”
I turned over to my beautiful woman and said, “I think I’m going to go to the emergency room.”
She shot out of bed, got dressed, helped dress me (couldn’t do it myself – very embarrassing), and drove me to the ER.
And there I sat. Squirming around, looking for a comfortable position, wishing that I could have just had something simple like Anthrax. The sort of thing you can take care of with a shot.
Went in to see the doc and got the usual “idunno” response. That’s what you can expect from the ER. I feel like ER docs are just human routers for trauma packets, examining the problem and then forwarding patients to appropriate services.
Here’s what really bugged me, though – It was about 4:00 AM when I finally saw the doc. I was in incredible pain, like ready to scream, and I was expecting some seriously awesome pain killers.
But what did I get?
Morphine? No.
Percocet? No.
Whisky? Not even.
“This is going to hurt a little,” the nurse said. I was on my side, my bare ass exposed, and she was inserting the needle into my leftmost buttockal region.
“What is it?” I asked her. I’m what I like to think of as “pharmo-curious.” The body is a fascinating system, and I love thinking about the ways in which we can chemically alter its state.
“It’s a non-steroidal, non-narcotic anti-inflammatory,” she responded.
I was immediately disappointed.
“You mean you’re injecting ibuprofen into my ass?”
How lame! Ibuprofen is what you give to people with migraines (as I know from vast experience), or to women who are having really bad menstrual cramps. But to the guy who’s had two hours of sleep and is in serious, intense pain, an intra-ass shot of Advil is not, repeat, not cool!
It’s irritating because they stressed the point that it wasn’t a narcotic. Like I care!
The “war on drugs” mentality in this country seems to have been there in the ER, instructing the doc to “do the right thing,” which was to give me a totally ineffective shot in the hopes that I wouldn’t leave her care as a junkie by the end of the morning.
In any sane country, I would have been doped to the gills with all sorts of analgesics that actually would have done something.
Twenty minutes after having about a gallon of Advil injected into my beautiful ass, I was still in just as much pain as before, except that I now had a needle-wound in my butt and the pain to accompany it. It actually made my situation worse.
Anyway, they sent me home with some real pain killers, and those fortunately did a halfway decent job of countering the feeling of a hatchet being ground into my spine.
But I still don’t know what’s wrong. Have a doctor’s appointment on Wednesday to figure this out.
In the meantime, I’m pretty much out of commission. I’m not in as much pain, but the drugs are making me really sleepy.
Blah. Here’s some advice for you: Don’t hurt your back. Just don’t. It sucks.