Dispatches from Clotland

Having now been in an emergency room—in fact, the same emergency room—for reasons both physical and mental, I can definitely say that you should choose the former wherever possible. Because this time, my stay lasted just eight hours instead of fourteen days. And that reason seems good enough, until I remember that people with physical issues can stay for longer than fourteen days in the hospital, and some never come out. So, my adjusted advice: just choose not to be sick, if you can. Because spending time in an emergency room makes you conscious of how illness, of any type, can be an intensely individual experience. Although you share the emergency room, you’re very much alone.

Alone, and wishing you had bothered to read Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor. Then you would have had a nice literary quote for this blog post.

My problems began a few days before, with persistent chest pain. I thought I had just pulled a muscle at the baseball game I went to on Friday night, because baseball is always guaranteed to give you extra innings of misery. But it would get worse when I would lean forward, and I would wake up groaning in pain. My mom made me call the health line, and although I didn’t have any of the telling signs or risks for a heart attack, stroke, or blood clot, the TeleHealth Nurse made me go to the emergency room. Older female guilt is a powerful force.

Cardiac issues were quickly ruled out, so I waited. It was very early, and the only other person there was extremely constipated. He was annoyed when they called me in first, even though I had arrived moments before. “Just tell them the constipation is causing chest pain!” I wanted to yell, as I walked into the next room. “Then they’ll see you quickly.”

Except, there was more waiting. No ER or Grey’s Anatomy-type crises to see though; someone had broken bones in his hand from punching someone, and someone had probably broken his hand falling off his skateboard. My D-dimer levels, which were supposed to be in the hundreds, were in the thousands. Although I’ve been mostly downwardly mobile as an adult, it seems I can still exceed expectations on tests.

Time in this room was like time in a casino; it didn’t run normally. Like a casino, there was no natural light, no ready source of news from the outside world, and possibly a clock but I couldn’t find it. I suppose I could have just left, but I didn’t. I read, and waited. After test results like that, the next step was a CT scan. This requires a larger-bore needle for the radioactive dye, and my veins were still being difficult. Teams of two nurses would rotate in and out on my arms, slapping and injecting. Six attempts later, a nurse with perfect bone structure managed to get a usable IV in my hand. I fell in love with her.

Most of us patients had an understanding to ignore whatever was behind the curtain. By the nature of the room, sensitive information had to be shared, and by its nature, it couldn’t be a secret. Through the curtains (if you were either lucky, or simply unlucky enough to be unable to sit) you would hear specific details about someone else’s medical issue and they would learn all about yours. I felt like there was an unspoken injunction against acting on any of this knowledge in solidarity, but there I was, sitting next to one of the chatty exceptions to this rule when my CT results came back. There were clots in my lungs, just in time for me to miss the drug benefits from the job I had suddenly quit.

I wish my time as a millennial cautionary tale had ended there, but no. The thrombosis clinic—it’s on the same floor as the osteoporosis clinic, with the result that I lower the mean age in the waiting room by a decade or two every time I walk in—warned me that the blood thinners would increase the flow of my period. What they didn’t tell me is that I would be recreating the elevator scene from The Shining every hour, on the hour. However, I made it through that, and telling a cisgender-looking male TTC driver that I had Carried a bus seat, and napping my afternoons away instead of studying thanks to my low iron, to be sitting here, typing into the void.

I’ve now made it through June, and can’t wait to see what July will bring. Shingles? So don’t be sick, and if you must, try to time so that you have sick leave, medical benefits, and limited need for public transit.

TMI: The Less than Incredible Journey, or a Return Trip to My Ovaries

You probably thought you were safe. A few weeks had gone by, and I had never once mentioned the words "transvaginal" or "ovary" on this blog. You probably thought I would never again invite you take a trip inside my lady business. 

WELL, YOU WERE WRONG. 

And you were wrong because I had a followup ultrasound a few weeks ago, and I want you to share in my misery. So sit back, relax, and take a deeply, deeply unsexy trip between my legs. 

I was a little slow in making my second ultrasound appointment appointment, both because I wasn't eager to relive the minutes I spent as a human joystick, and because my menstrual cycle didn't want to cooperate. Of course, all this misery started when that cycle decided to behave like a spoiled reality show star (i.e., it does what I wants!), so that was hardly a surprise. Eventually things settled down and I went in. The procedure was the same; the technician different, but still Eastern European. After it was all over, I was told that it would probably take 3-5 business days for my doctor to receive the results.

So, I was surprised when my doctor's office called me just two days later to schedule an appointment. "Uh, doesn't she want to wait for the ultrasound results?" I asked the administrative assistant. "Oh, we have them. That's why I'm calling. Can you come in tomorrow?" she replied "The doctor wants to discuss the results with you." This was... not the most comforting way to have a medical appointment made for you. I feigned indifference to my colleagues, but I was mentally preparing for whatever terrible news was surely headed my way. My most coherent plans were, first, not to cry in the doctor's office; and, secondly, to keep this from my work and my parents for as long as humanly possible.

Of course, the actual news was not so grim. "Don't worry!" was pretty much the first thing my doctor said. She probably realized that some assurance was required; I must have seemed ready to watch Terms of Endearment while taking notes. "The large cyst is gone. But they noticed several other cysts..." as she started to read from the notes the... sonographer? scientician? had sent her. The scientician's conclusion? I had "bulky ovaries" consistent with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). EVEN MY OVARIES CAN'T LIVE UP TO SOCIETY'S IMPOSSIBLE BEAUTY STANDARDS.

RIP Cysquo, we hardly knew ye; and for that I am very glad indeed. To have PCOS, though, you need to have more than chunky ovaries. You also need to show at least one of the two related symptoms. My answers to these questions were less conclusive than the ultrasound: Excessive hair growth? ("I'm Ukrainian and Scottish, so it's hard to tell.") Irregular periods? ("Not before the birth control.") So, no official diagnosis yet. But... I feel like if it's an inconvenience, I'm sure to have it. Even with PCOS though, I'm still healthy. Dubiously fertile, but healthy. It's a state whose worth I should have appreciated; whose fragility I also finally understand.

Image: PCOS from Wikimedia Commons. 

The TMI Post: My Unreliable Body

I have never really trusted my body, but at least I felt like I knew it. That knowledge sometimes seemed like a collection of limitations, where I catalogued the things I couldn't reach, the dance moves I couldn't do, and the many yoga poses my body refused to hold. But there was something reliable about its many quirks and failings. I rarely thought about what was below my skin, but when I did, it was along the lines of a classroom anatomical model; the cutaway kind, where you can take the organs out and snap them back in again. Though the skin itself was idiosyncratic (a classy way of saying imperfect), I figured that the organs beneath were ideally shaped, all in their place, and practically made of plastic.

So it was disconcerting to find out last Monday that part of this system had gone rogue.

But let's start a few days before that, when you would find me on my back in a windowless basement room. An efficient Eastern European technician is in the middle of jimmying a rod back and forth in my vagina. I feel like a human joystick; the indignity of having to wear one of those stupid backless hospital robes compounded by the fact that I have to do so while an ultrasound wand is shoved up my hoo-ha. I am somewhat convinced that there will be a fire alarm, and I will have to waddle out into the street with the equipment in situ. This doesn't make any sense, of course, but that irrational fear is soon eclipsed when Magda the Impaler lets out an "hmmm."

A hmm when you're getting an ultrasound is never a comforting sound. Perhaps the technician can't get the ultrasound to work, or she's letting her mind wander towards dinner, but there's one word you start to think of when she grunts, and that word is cancer. "You're being irrational," you think, "it's far more likely just to be fibroids, or cysts, so stop being a drama queen- OH MY GOD, I did wait too long to write that novel."

But I won't hear that from Magda. Instead, the analysis will come from my family doctor a few days after, when I'm trying to shop for groceries on my lunch break. And the news is good! They don't think it's cancer at all. Trying to compare prices on tomato paste while fielding this call didn't seem so foolish when I heard that. But then the news turns good-ish, quickly. There's an it, and it's a cyst that's about 4-5cm in size. I foolishly tell myself that's really not that large--we're not talking 4-5 inches here--until I actually take out a ruler back at the office, and realize that 4-5cm is bigger than any mystery growth in my body has any right to be.

With the knowledge of my >4cm hop-on ("you're gonna get some hop-ons"), I've started to wonder what else my body could hide. For the first few days after that call, I had trouble sleeping. I would imagine the cyst industriously growing as I rested, and my body started to seem alien, like somebody had sewn a Lovecraftian horror into a people suit. Or perhaps I was just feeling alienated. This sac made me confront how little I really knew about my body, though I lived in it and operated it. My mind suddenly felt like a guest.

Since then, my conversations with other folks have assured me that large cysts or even multiple cysts are not uncommon. Some are even functional. I have another one of those invasive ultrasounds scheduled a few weeks from now, and I'm sure that after they'll either decide to excise my hop-on or leave it in peace. What should be comforting is that it's not what that I first thought when the technician went "hmm." My plans and goals, although a little fuzzy, still require the use of a body that's fairly healthy. I still have that, at least for now. I thought of a proverb when I left the medical imaging centre: "Man plans, God laughs." But more applicable to me then was a small edit: "Man plans, cells divide."

Code Red: Of Periods and Stupidity

If you’re one of my male relatives, please stop reading now. You know who you are, and you know that you once had to be educated on the differences between a pad and a tampon, so save yourself while you still have the chance.

Other people: DEAR GOD, MENOPAUSE CAN’T COME SOON ENOUGH.

I used to be a pad-only girl, having always been a little wary of the little white torpedoes. Nine out of 10 health food store clerks would have agreed with my stance. Read some of their literature, and I may as well be sticking a lit cigarette up my cooter, cancer-wise. Not that they like pads any more. If tampons are like cigarettes for your vadge to the Diva Cup and Lunapad-ers, then wearing pads is like sitting on top of ultra-absorbant uranium.

 Still, I’ll plug it up before exercise, their advice be damned.

And when a grocery store was inexplicably out of my preferred brand, OB, I ended up with some ridiculous Kotex product, complete with colourful plastic applicators. I guess my vagina has a preference. OB doesn’t even have applicators, but I had used them before. And yet I couldn’t work these. Day 1: FAILURE TO LAUNCH. Day 1, Take 2: FAILURE TO LAUNCH. And on, and on, with me grumbling all the while about the (likely cisgendered male) idiot who had designed these useless plastic monstrosities, when I would just have to nudge the tampon in there with my fingers ANYWAY, so why not just skip the MIDDLE WOMAN, because it's not like my vagina is more of a blue than a green.

And then, as I used the sixth-to-last tampon, it dawned on me. I had to pull one part of the applicator out until it clicked, and then I would finally have a useful product. SUCCESSFUL DEPLOYMENT.

Hopefully this is the last grade 6 sex ed lesson I'll have to learn this year.