Being the Patient

Speaking of wanderlust, this last weekend held some pretty great possibilities. My wonderful mother is in town, and so we had discussed taking some day trips on Friday and Saturday. But sometimes life needs to remind us that things don’t always go as planned. I’d had an inkling that something would interrupt our plans.

Friday morning I woke up with a few mild stomach pains. “Hmm…that’s odd,” I thought. In absence of other symptoms to indicate infection, I brushed them off. An hour later, the pain had progressed. Soon, I was in tears and Rockstar had decided to cancel his meetings. He encouraged me to let him take me to the ER.

“No! They’re just going to give me a CT and I don’t want unnecessary radiation. I’m sure it will go away.”

Only it didn’t. So, finally I gave in. I’d run through potential problems (gallstones, appendicitis, kidney stones, ulcers, acid reflux, gastritis, pancreatitis) in my mind, but nothing quite fit the bill.

We arrived at the ER in time to get the last available bed. Hallelujah! They mentioned that I had a TV to myself. And if this gives you any indication of my pain, I couldn’t even enjoy the prospect of an HGTV marathon. The techs and registration aid mentioned once or twice that the doctor would be “right with me”. Because I know that that does not necessarily mean anything except for ‘eventually, the doctor will be with you’, I didn’t get my hopes up. Rightly so.

Two hours passed and the pain was on the rise again. I was squeezing the dickens out of Rockstar’s hand, and rocking back and forth on the bed. All I could think was that no one had even come in to eyeball me—to evaluate if I could safely wait for two hours in an ER bay. At least I had the medical knowledge to know that that was probably fine, but I thought about how helpless this wait must feel to most patients.

And as the pain rose, I started to feel helpless myself. The nurse and doctor finally came in. They were very nice, very caring, and I appreciated that. Normally I take pains not to mention that I am a doctor, because I don’t want people to feel awkward taking care of me or like I am demanding special treatment. But the hours of pain changed this, and so I found a way to work into the conversation that I was a doctor, desperate for something to speed up the process to relief.

The nurse told me she’d be right back with the pain medicine, and she left.




45 minutes later, I was without medicine and the pain marched on.

Rockstar looked at me writhing. “Honey, just push your call button. Tell them you need the pain medicine.”

“No…I’ll wait just one more minute. I know how annoyed they can get at pushy patients. And I don’t want them to think I’m a drug seeker.”
I sat there and weighed being the pushy patient vs. enduring pain.

I stared at the red call button. And as a wave of pain came over me, I finally groaned in pain, and pushed it. The nurse came in. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “I had to take a patient to the ICU.”

“No problem, I totally get that. But I could really use something for pain.”

She delivered the morphine through my IV, and the relief spread through my body rapidly. In that moment, my gratitude for modern medicine was immense. And finally, I was able to enjoy HGTV.

Then came the tests: blood work: normal. Ultrasound: normal.

The doc came back: “I know you don’t want a CT scan, but this is pretty strange pain, and I’m worried if I send you home and we’re missing something…”

I consented.

**but perhaps I should have run away!**



Then it was off to the radiation suite, for an injection of IV contrast. ‘Sweet’, I thought, “Now I’m going to have to pump and dump for at least 24 hours’.

They wheeled me back to my room after the scan. It had been hours since the morphine, now, and still no pain had returned.

A while later, the doctor came in.

“Well, the CT scan was normal.”

Of course.

We discussed my mysterious pain, she dispensed some back up pain meds, and I walked out of the ER. I walked past dozens of other patients in beds, feeling lucky to be walking out of there, back to the golden light of the evening, and to my family.

After all was said and done, I was sad to have lost the 74 degree day of adventure I’d so been craving.
But I was glad for many things:
To remember what it is like to be the patient: to be sitting in a room, having no idea what the timeline is and wondering when you’ll get relief. To be scared of not knowing the answer, but worried about the effects of testing.

To remember what it’s like to have to tell many people the same set of information, and to be poked and prodded by multiple strangers.

That I’d been the recipient of kind medical staff.

That I'd had my husband next to me during the ordeal.

To be ultimately okay. To have my pain taken away.

To know there will be other 74 degree days.

I’m grateful that I can take this experience, and use it.
That I can remember what it’s like to be on the other side of things.
That I can take off that soft, worn hospital gown, replace it with a crisp white coat, and with additional understanding in my pockets, continue in my efforts to heal.

**Maybe next weekend, there will be more of this.**