I ended up at the local non-hartford ER on Monday/Tuesday morning, in the very wee hours, in so much exquisite agony i could not move off the chair i sleep on.

 

 

One thing you notice in this definitely unprofessional picture is the presence of a single crutch. I hated being at the ER but if I hadn’t called 911 (after pulling my emergency cord and wondering if anyone would ever come to my door…and finding out that someone had actually called 911 for me after the loud buzzer over my door had sounded for at least 1/2 hour…). When I hear someone’s emergency buzzer, I always knock and try to go to the person, find out if I can help them in any way. i dunno who called 911, but why they couldn’t at least let me know they were doing so I dunno. i felt so alone all night, and then at the ER. it was almost worse, because of course I  was treated like an hysterical psychiatric patient largely, and ignored. Truth to tell, my hip pain was not going to kill me, and apparently the testicular pain of the young man in the other part of the cubicle, could have killed him (so says Dr C, but according to her it would kill via “shock” so she means because of the degree of pain…So I am skeptical. I think the reason he was getting so much attention was because “Everyone knows” that testicle pain is horrendously awful and  shockingly painful…”everyone” because of course MEN have experineced it and let us all know how bad it is. Women have experienced childbirth tearing them literally apart for eons but no one goes on and on about how that pain needs to be attended to at all costs. No we just let them scream…SO, ditto me versus the young man with a testicle that did not apparentlhy need surgery but who was, I admit, the subject of a sadistic surgeon’s ministrations, and manipulations, even as the man denied that the young man needed his help. I mean, why stand there, holding a guy’s twisted ball in your hand, manipulating it in such a fashion that you kmow you are causing breathtaking agony, everyone who hears the sucked-in choked-off breaths of the patient knows it, why do that, what are you odoing? when you then in the next breath announce that this testicle is FINE, nothing that needs YOUR attention as a surgeon, in fact, you cannot understand why it is still causing the man so much apparent pain. But it is…The young man is nearly comatose with pain, and the surgeon doesnt’ even apologize. Only says, Well, you are fine, nothing here that needs me. I will check in with you later, but you are not a surgical candidate as far as I am concerned so you are none of my business.

 

But what I was saying was, sympathetic as I may have been with respects to the  doctor’s sadism and disregard for all human feeeling. Nevertheless, it was apparent that the entire ER had sympathy for testicle pain, and youth, little to none for hip agony in a 60 year old bag of a woman with scars on her legs and arms and face…It was a matter of appearance and what and who was appealing, and I was nothing of the sort. Who did they want to root for or give a damn about? I was just a title 19 patient with nothing to offer, and since I had brought nothing but a key to get back into my aprt with  me, I could not prove otherwise. Could I? Nothing to tell them I was worth anything but scorn and disgust, which they gave freely.

 

I knew in the end, that is., after 12 hours and very little had been done past a CT scan that showed piriformis inflammation, that I had to prove that I could function well enough to be discharged from the ER. I knew it would involved exquisite agony but it had to be done or they would keep me in the hospital because they would claim I could not function independently. SOMEHOW I had to prove I could get my own jeans back on, and dress myself. I knew that if I could do that they could not keep me, and I was desperate not to have to stay there any longer than I had to…which meant in practice that I wanted to leave ASAP.

It cost me more pain that I can ever express. I literally had to suck in my breath and flrce myself to “break my own hip” or feel as if I were doing so” in order to put my leg inside the pants and then manage to pull them up and zip the zipper. But I did it. SOmehow I did it. It felt as if I were literally stabbing myself in the abdomen each time I forced myself to do any abrupt movement like putting my right foot into the pants leg and pulling them up. But it would do not good to go slowly. A slow agony would never do and would only prolong something I could never tolerate. So I did the “white hot poker routine” of forcing myself to make abrupt changes in position and get things over with. And I managed to get dressed and eventually I was discharged and my dear friend Josephine agreed to come pick me up after she was through with her last housecleaning job, which was just then…

 

But where am I going with all this? Piriformis Syndrome, you can look that up. It is all very mysterious and not very common. But curable or at least temporary usually and treatable. So I am not dying and not even very ill, though the pain is mentionable! All I have been writing about, basically, is the pain, the dismissive attitude, and this, what finally transpired: I saw my doctor’s office’s APRN, Sara, who is very wonderful and while young doesn’t make me feel old and despised. She put me on a difficult drug to take but one that promises quick pain relief, if I can tolerate it: prednisone. And Soma for a muscle relaxant, which may or may not work. I will start the former tomorrow morning and try the latter as soon as I finish this blog post and can justify inducing sleepiness. She did not minimize anything, and I felt taken at my word and seriously. Neither as if things were being exaggerated for my benefit nor dismissed for the same reason.

 

I apologize that this blog post has been so boring. I am halfblind with sleepiness, because i have been up since 2:30AM, one, and two, the hospital lost my two pairs of glasses with prisms in them so I am using glasses that do not prevent double vision at the moment. Trying simply to see the screen and the keyboard is an effort that defeats me more often than not. You can imagine the effort to be eloquent or anything else is beyond the beyond.

 

But mostly I think I am just plain overtired, which makes it triply difficult to focus my eyes on any one object, let only make doubled images fuse into a single image. So I will stop for now. Take the Soma and go to bed. Thanks for your forebearance. If I promised an email to anyone, I will try to get to to. Remind me if you want to. I meet with my siblings Martha and Philip tomorrow so I may be busy for ao while but I hope to be in less pain and more able to get back to people who have written me about things.

 

Ciao! Cheers! Shalom!