Last night around midnight as I sat watching tv there were multiple times that I looked up at the wall and thought I was looking down at the floor from a vantage point on the ceiling. I was hallucinating. As a clarification, I had maybe a smidgen of Morphine in my system…4mg. Let’s start from the beginning:
A few months ago I had two different instances (about a month apart from each other) of severe bloating and what I took to be some sort of end-times-inspired constipation (the pain of which at one point had me ridding my stomach of an all-you-can-eat sushi dinner…which I shouldn’t haven’t eaten anyway). Those two instances basically came and went on their own and took 3 or 4 days to run their course. This previous Friday I woke up with the beginning of what appeared to be my third bout only this time it got really painful…really quickly.
It was weird to be getting it a third time but I had started going to the gym and it correlated with all of this. I was getting really dehydrated which in turn was constipating me (or at least this was my train of thought). Every time this happened my girlfriend made sure to let me know that I should be going to the hospital but I don’t have health insurance and I am not just going to go on a whim of feeling poorly. I need a legit reason if I am going to just give someone at least ten grand.
This time, after about 8 hours of steady intensification, I decided that it was time to go to the hospital finally. The problem, though, was that now i could no longer walk to the hospital I was in such pain. Taking a car wasn’t going to work because I could feel every miserable bump on the terrible city streets I live on. So with tears in my eyes I called an ambulance and waited for them to arrive in front of my apartment.
Thus began an ordeal that I will just call “going to the hospital in the hood”. Why is this? Because when you don’t live in the nicest neighborhoods, you don’t go to the nicest hospitals. The hospitals where I live have at least a 3 or 4 hour wait in the ER (on a good day) so as it turns out taking the ambulance helped bypass all of that crap and got me pretty much walking straight in. Red Carpet. I guess when they figure that you just paid 1,000 dollars to be driven 30 blocks you should be ushered in first. Later in the week i asked a nurse for a morphine shot and just before she administered it she just asked, “You’ve had morphine before, right?” I said, “yes” but I thought Maybe you should check my charts since you invariably have access to them. you. are. a. damn. nurse. So I learned what I needed to and tried to make sure I was regulating myself just incase the brain dead staff in the ghetto didn’t want to check my charts. Luckily I am not on any prior meds and have no allergies.
Back to the story: The Nurse at the EMT entrance was the first of just about every single person in the Hospital to ask me the same questions. Name. Address. Social. Phone. Drug History. ETC. Repeat. I did find it funny how indifferent they all were to weed. I began to realize it was because my neighbors were also quite candid about their admissions of having danced with the Jolly Green Giant. So after hours in the ER, answering the same questions at least twice more, a CT scan and an X-ray…it was decided that I had an Appendicitis: An Inflammation of the Appendix. Turns out though that because I waited around so long to finally get to the hospital my Appendix had perforated, leaked puss into my abdominal cavity, and significantly upgraded the severity of the situation.
On another quick side note, while waiting for diagnosis I had joked to my younger brother that I wanted it to either be nothing…or terminal. My reasoning was that if I died then who cares…no one gets paid. If it is nothing then I will quickly work on paying back what I have already racked up. But if it is somewhere in the middle then I am going to get saddled with $100,000 in bills that I will never find the money for. I accidentally chose door C and got the worst option, landing me five days in the hospital with a surgery to remove my Appendix and Accoutrements.
When all was said and done, I was left with a gaping 4-5 inch open wound that was purposefully left open so that it could close from the inside out thus diminishing the chances of puss getting trapped inside and me getting dragged back for even worse periods of time. That wound has had gauze crammed into it to keep it from closing while also keeping things from getting too…wet. Which brings us to last nights hallucinations…
Because of this purposefully open wound I have been on my back for much of the past five days. I can’t sleep on my back. As I am writing this, it is 1 AM early Wednesday morning. and I have had about 4 hours of sleep since Friday morning…and this includes the 1 1/2 hours I was out for surgery. So I learned an interesting thing about sleep deprevation and morphine, but I have a feeling I was on the verge of starting to see shit just because of not sleeping.
That is my week. I came to really appreciate certain key figures in my life and I acquired another silly drawn out story to bore people with over drinks. I had a friend categorize this as another “near death experience” for me given that I was dangerously close to my appendix bursting which is a rather lethal ordeal because the clean up is very difficult and you die pretty quickly when that shitty little body part that you fed for years turns on you and poisons your blood system. What my friend was referring to is another time 6 years ago where I fell six stories off a building and not only walked away from it, but only spent a day and half in the hospital.
As much as I don’t necessarily care for cats it appears I may have seven lives to go. Who wants to go Skydiving? I’m in. I’m invincible.
