13 February 2003 ~ Near-death...

I may have almost died yesterday.

I'm not entirely sure.

I don't remember most of it.

I started bleeding profusely the other night, and Jake rushed me to the E.R. Jake is a sweet boy. You know somebody loves you when they spill half a pint of your blood out of you because they ran into a curb out of sheer panic for your health and safety. I love this man more than I can tell you.

They dragged me into the E.R., took a bunch of blood out of my arms (uh... I had PLENTY leaking out of me elsewhere; what the fuck?), and told me it appeared I still had a small piece of placental (is that a word? I really wasn't paying much attention) tissue left in my uterus, and that I'd need a procedure called a D & C.

A D & C is the same procedure they use when they do abortions. But my mom told me once that she had to have one, after my brother John was born, to get out some random yucky stuff stuck inside her. So it wasn't TOO upsetting. I called my mom from the E.R. and told her everything. She said it wouldn't be too bad; she'd been awake through her's and everything. She said it hurt, but it wasn't TOO bad. Anyway, my brother John will be seventeen next week, so I'm sure they've come along way since then, right?

They made me stay overnight in the hospital. Jake stayed with me, on a shitty little cot they gave him. I swear, if I was him, I'd have sneaked me out of the hospital and left me in a secluded area of the parking lot to die of blood loss; that's how fucking irritating I was being. I've been telling you all this time that he's just a big sweetie, but he's also a warrior, or he wouldn't be able to put the fuck up with me.

They continued taking my blood, giving my IV fluids, and measuring my urine in bedpans (EW!), until they finally came skipping into my room with their worst instrument of torture: a catheter. CRIPES, I FUCKEN HATE that shit!!!

The catheter thing warrants its own paragraph... Okay... For all of you who don't know, and there ARE a great many of you, a woman does not pass urine through the same hole she uses to have sexual intercourse. That is, even though, in porn videos, you may find a woman stuffing eggplants, zucchinis, small-to-medium-sized mammals, etc. into her crotch -- THAT orifice is quite different from her pee-hole. Yes, that is the technical word for it. The pee-hole, which is right next to the vagina, is about the size of... oh, a grain of sand, and isn't very elastic at all. A catheter is like pushing a watermelon-sized tube into a sand-grain-sized pee-hole. Ow. I yelled. A lot.

I'm not a fan of this sort of medicine; the sort that makes you feel worse than when you came in, and makes you suppose you ought to be grateful for it.

They gave me an ultrasound. I couldn't look at the screen.

They drove me down to the anaesthesia department, or something like that, where they strung up about a billion bags of clear fluid, all different, and asked me a lot of questions.

I vaguely remember a face-mask. And somebody was telling me to breathe... I don't remember anything else...

When I woke up, I was sort of gasping, and sort of gulping. And I asked for Jake, over and over...

Apparently, the surgery had been quite difficult. They'd initially said I'd go home a few hours after the procedure. But I'd lost a ton of blood. When I went into the hospital, they counted my red blood cells at 30 (30 what?); several hours after the surgery, I was at 17. I don't know what that means exactly. But it really can't be good, now can it? They told me I'd lost an enormous amount of blood and I'd have to stay overnight.

Then, I had some sort of reaction to the blood they gave me from the bloodbank. So I got a fever of 103. A fever of 99 makes me delirious, so you can imagine that this did nothing for my general feeling of well-being. Then they gave me Benadryl to counteract the effects, but the Benadryl didn't do anything but dry up my nose and make me incredibly stoned. I swear, people were talking to me and I couldn't understand a word they were saying. I watched gahd knows how much TV without having any idea what was on.

Man... And Benadryl is over-the-fucken-counter...

They said I wasn't allowed to have any more Benadryl.

I slept. And woke. And so on in that fashion for many, many hours. For most of those hours, Jake watched over me. Even though I was shitty company.

They took the catheter out this evening. It hurt like a bitch. They made me walk down the hall using a walker for support. It hurt like a bitch. They made me eat nasty soup for lunch. My throat is still sore where they had to put a tube in me during surgery. My guts are sore where I guess they removed shit from my body. And I guess the medication they gave me has a constipation effect. I can't shit for shit. And my ass hurts.

This is all horribly undignified. I am humiliated about the whole thing. What good did any of it do, anyway? Maybe it was supposed to be my time to die...? As the doctor said, a hundred years ago, women died of this... And who says modern medicine was supposed to save me? Maybe I was supposed to go be with my baby.

But I'd wake up, and I'd peer over the side of that hospital bed at Jake's cot, and I'd watch him mumbling dumb shit in his sleep....... and I'm glad they didn't let me die... Even though I've been in excrutiating pain for the past few days, even though most of my body parts aren't functioning... I'm glad they didn't let me die...

I don't feel good. I guess I'll go lay down...

Now, I really feel empty: not just in my heart, but my whole body, too... I feel very, very broken.

Tomorrow's 4th-anniversary entry will probably be postponed a day or two. Sorry.

~Helena*