"He Said Come to the ER.”

We shouldn’t want to be proven right about what’s wrong with our bodies

This week’s Every Weekday Writing promise and posts brought to you by a person who had two discs screwed-with (pun?) in her cervical spine, and thus should not be typing.

Typing, in fact, is the one thing that hurts her (spoiler: ‘tis I!) the most because it recquires looking down when on her laptop or looking “up” when laying down and so on, SO….

This post is about a story from days before surgery - not yet fully shared- but I deeply hope there aren’t too many unforgiveable imperfections scattered within.

I hope you can relate to it. (Actually, I technically hope no one relate to this but… I know sadly some friends will because = healthcare.)

I hope if you can’t relate to it, you’re happy to see some of these things “called out” and would like them as ‘calls to action’ for others, too.

I hope you get a giggle as we gaggle along (we aren’t geese but don’t sell yourself short. You can be anything you dream!)

And I hope that a doctor reads this and changes hospitals so that more patients have to be less patient with how much it hurts to hurt.

I was in the Emergency Room just a few weeks ago. 

Being there was not that surprising, and neither were any of the findings, but a physician saying the words “you were right”… was. 

“This is just for data collection,” I told her, in no uncertain ‘uncertainty’, “I do not think this is an emergency, but my Primary told me he couldn’t call in the labs. He said come to the ER.”

I understand why my physician would have to tell me that, but when you live with something that’s long term and you know when you’ll get hospitalized and when science says, “Just wait”… You can become overly frustrated, quickly, with the system as a whole. Or the system as a fragment, rather. 

Think about an organ transplant, for example. We wait until it’s so bad that they can swap out the tire. But most of that time is just waiting to get worse. So not every pain comes with a fix to the problem. In fact, most of the time, I agree to ERs only to confirm “data” on pain" so I know where to compartmentalize it in my brain… And that’s it. 

Pancreatitis, as another example, is often treated by not letting someone eat, giving them fluids (sometimes), and maybe some pain meds. We can’t just do a surgery that takes it away. Or, we can… But only if we wait long enough for it to be bad enough that there is some other gun to point into the darkness. 

“This is for data collection,” I say very often as I enter a hospital or urgent care (even though standing lab orders would be much easier, but I can’t tell you how hard it can be to reach a specialist sometimes. My new liver doctor, for example, can’t even telehealth until November)…. And often, the poor staff seems completely familiar with how the healthcare system forces us to use those in the healthcare system against themselves.

“I’m so sorry,” I’ll say to the ER nurse at 2 in the morning, after waiting all night, “I couldn’t get the CT scheduled outpatient in time, in the time the surgeon needed, so they said to go to the ER because that’s the only way it won’t mess up my pre-op with the neurosurgeon”. 

(This has happened more than once.)

“No problem” many will sweetly assure me, “We are used to it.”

I’m grateful for those generous enough to understand how impossible the circus act of hoop jumping can be when you’ve never been very good at cardio… But I always feel embarrassed when I enter a space for emergencies with something that is not an emergency. 

I’ve written this before but I’ll write it again in case someone needs to hear it today: “Emergency rooms are for broken bones and accidents of large magnitude… And that is all.”

Stitches. Hemorrhaging. Blunt force trauma.

But the slow, simmering, scathing trauma of chronic illness or even long term infections, viruses, or sickness are- in a way- not meant for anywhere. 

We call our PCP for an updated lab slip to see if the chronic pain I’ve chronically had for almost 10 years is exactly what I think it is (liver), since my liver specialist metaphorically has left her phone off the hook for that particular week… and we are told to go to the ER. The same with our specialists. They have to to protect us, and they have to to protect themselves… Healthcare can hurt them too.

We go to the ER and the ER says to take two Tylenol, chug some water, and call our specialist. (I’m joking, but just barely.)

Sometimes, I’ll get hospitalized, but it’s almost always when I think I won’t be and have loudly proclaimed it “isn’t an emergency” four times already, and sometimes I won’t when I’ve been told to pack a bag. 

There is no sense in how much we’ve lost feeling for what it feels like to be splintered into this many pieces. 

“Ambivalence” is supposed to be “a state of having simultaneous conflicting reactions, beliefs, or feelings towards some object”…

But that’s not how this feels.

I feel too much about feeling too much, while that which is supposed to care (‘health’ being the first part of the word) is accidentally ambivalent…. and I don’t think there is a name for that emotion yet? I think it’s its own unnnamed thing.

We shouldn’t want to be proven right about what’s wrong with our bodies in this short time we get to live within them…

Something about that is very, very wrong.

Part One. More Tomorrow. (They’re connected!)

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