Hospital Torture

By Hydraus

“It feels like a three hundred pound muscle-man hay-makered me in the gut,” I explained to the emergency room nurse, “and the waves of pain keep getting worse.” She jotted my information down and asked what had happened prior to coming to the E.R. I shook my head with a smirk and said it all started about 9:45 pm at my friend’s house. I came home from a gaming session to get something to eat in hopes that food might settle my stomach down.  As it started getting late into the evening, the soup that I made hadn’t helped settle my stomach, so I took two anti-acids and tried to get some sleep. Two hours later I awoke with a throbbing pain in my torso. After consulting with my mother about the symptoms, I decided to play it safe and go to the E.R.  Little did I know that I was to get first-hand knowledge of the torture of waiting in a hospital.

When I finished explaining what led to this point, my mother and I were asked to wait in the waiting room so that they could process the information. An HOUR later the nurse came out and led me back to a hospital room and put a medical bracelet on my wrist. Before the nurse left, she handed me a hospital gown and asked me to remove all of my clothes and put on the gown. In pain, and now embarrassed at the thought of having my bare ass exposed to everyone in the hospital, I waited for my mother and the nurse to leave the room before disrobing down to my boxers and putting the hospital gown on. If I was going to be in pain, I wanted it to be comfortable… and warm.

Fifteen minutes later, there was a knock on the door and as my mother was walking back in, the nurse stuck her head in to tell me to have a seat on the bed and a doctor would see me soon. This would end up being an increasingly painful TWO AND A HALF HOUR wait before the doctor would arrive.  The doctor finally arrived with my chart and explained that they were going to run tests to find out whether I had an ulcer or appendicitis. When I asked if they had something to tone down the pain, he told me that they couldn’t give me anything because they needed to know what the pain felt like to help determine the cause. This also meant drawing blood for testing, taking x-rays of my insides to see if there was an internal problem, and of course more pain-filled waiting.

TWO AND A HALF HOUR later, the M.R.I. technician finally came in and had me drink barium sulfate that was mixed with lemonade crystal light. He explained that the solution would allow the x-ray machine to take better pictures of my torso.  Another pain filled HOUR had passed when the technician came back into the room with a wheel chair and brought me into another room with what appeared to be a large, gray, metal donut that had a bed going through the center of it. As I lay down on the table, the technician came back in with a hypodermic filled with gadolinium and explained that this chemical would react to the barium sulfate I drank. “It’s going to feel like waves of heat  rushing through your body,” he said, “you might feel like you’re going to pee on yourself, but you won’t and this effect will only last about an hour at most.”

Sure enough the waves of heat came rushing through my body and sure enough it did feel like I might pee on myself. “That was just what I needed,” I said to myself, “to lose my bladder control and pee on the 100 billion dollar piece of hospital equipment.”  When he began taking pictures, I then discovered that the machine was telling me to breath in, hold my breath, and breathe out as I was drawn into and out of the large, metal, ring. For a brief moment, I thought that it must be a hallucination on account of the solution he had injected me with and that he forgot to mention this. So I closed my eyes and thought of other things…like the increasing pain in my torso that refused to go away on account of the doctors not giving me anything to help with the pain.

TWO MORE PAIN FILLED HOURS had passed when he finished taking pictures and helped wheel me back to my room. I asked the technician as he was taking me back about the talking machine and he explained to me that it was the M.R.I. that spoke.

THREE HOURS LATER, the doctor came in to inform my mother and I that I would need to have my appendix removed, which meant surgery.

As the doctor left the room to go prep for the operation, I was trying to remove the I.V. bar from the hospital bed because I was going to fight my way out of the hospital. I was in even more pain, and now terrified. They wanted to knock me out, put me on a table, stuff breathing tubes down my throat, put God knows what in me, and then cut me open to remove what my most of my friends would later call a “baby alien organ.” Unannounced to me, my mother saw that I was panicking and planning to leave the hospital, and so she asked the nurse quietly if they could give me a sedative to calm me down.

After the sedative finally took effect, I was on cloud nine and feeling a hell of a lot calmer. You could have kicked me in the balls and I would have smiled and said nothing. I continued to wait another HOUR AND A HALF, watching Golden Girls on the TV.  In the back of my mind was still the thought that the surgery was going to happen whether I wanted it or not and, that there was nothing I could do to stop it.

 

THREE MORE HOURS had passed before the doctor and nurses finally arrived with a gurney and had me slide on to it from the other bed. As they began wheeling me out of the room, my parents hugged me and said they would be waiting for me when I woke up. A few minutes and many hallway turns later, the nurses and I arrived at the operation room, and as I was pushed near another table, I was asked to slide over on to it. The last thing I remembered as they began prepping me for surgery was the nurse injecting a chemical into my I.V. and saying “Mr. Seth, this is to put you to…..” and then everything went black.

I awoke slowly and with great difficulty in a different room with a breathing tube in my nose, a sore throat from removing the respiration tube, and a sick feeling to my stomach from all of the drugs that were used to keep me calm and sedated. The doctor was at the end of the bed filling out the medical chart when he noticed that I was awake and greeted with me with, “Good afternoon Mr. Seth. How are you feeling?” “Still having trouble trying to stay awake” I replied. Afterwards, he explained to me that the surgery went well, which was obvious due to the fact that I was awake and talking, even if I was still partially stoned at the time. After a few minutes of filling out more paperwork, he then had me stand up and walk around room to see if I was alright.

I wasn’t. Everything seemed fine at first until I felt sick and ran for the bathroom. After a few minutes of throwing my guts up, I walked back to bed to lie down. At that point, a nurse came in with some soup and crackers to eat in hopes that it would settle my stomach. This would happen again two hours later when he had me, yet again, get up and move around. The doctor realized that because I was dry heaving that maybe I might be dehydrated and asked a passing nurse to get an extra bag of saline to rehydrate me.  As the doctor helped me back to my bed again, my friends and family came in and filled me in on everything that happened while I was unconscious. This wasn’t anything new, but I was still happy to see someone that wasn’t a doctor doing guess work with me throwing up.

TWO HOURS LATER, a nurse came in with a wheelchair and told me that I could go home and as quick as I could, I changed into my clothes. At 5:00 pm, I was finally able to go home after TWENTY AND A HALF HOURS of various pokes, prodding’s, unhindered pain, and above all else waiting. On the drive home I was reminded of a line from a song I once heard, “Be it ever so humble there’s no place like home.”