[DISCLAIMER: I am a cancer patient. While I may not have any active cancer/cancers in my body at present, I'm very cognizant that it could return. I am in no way attempting to say that all cancer experiences are like my own. Each person's cancer journey is like a fingerprint given that each is different. While they may have some commonalities, each persons fight with this affliction differers just as each person differs. Some cancers are more aggressive than others, and not all of us who battle this son of a bitch will prevail. This is a long, and ugly road and I pray for my brothers and sisters who trod this road with me. I remember those who trod it before me like my late grandmother, three of my uncles and five of my aunts. My heart especially goes out to all the children who suffer with it who were diagnosed before they began to live and all who will walk on this road in the future. My purpose in writing this is to give insight to my battle with something which I'll loathe until the day I draw my last breath and hopefully which won't be the cause of my demise. While I can't and won't attempt to speak for all cancer patients I will say to those NOT on this road who would tell those of us on it how to walk, shut the hell up.]
Downtown and I'm a few feet away from a bus stop. There is a tiny corner in the facade of a building near a door and out of the sight of cameras, I stood attempting to relieve myself praying no cops drove by. I had found myself having spent the previous night rising every 30 mins to unsuccessfully do the same. I'm took the bus because I was in too much pain to drive. The second bus on which I waited would bring me directly to the VA's emergency room. It arrived more expediently than I thought it would and I painfully lurched into the ER a mere 60 yards away. The bus stop used to be closer to it, but the hospital administrators complained that the busses stopping there somehow inconvenienced them.
Upon entry I told a nurse behind a desk my symptoms and she immediately ushered me into a room with a bed and told me that because I'm a urology patient I needed their on-call doctor to consult. I was curled into a near fetal position on the bed atop some odd pad and within minutes a scared 20 something, freckle faced midwestern blonde in scrubs came in. She asked me my name and some other random information then asked me if I'd ever had a catheter. I nodded and she told me that I'd needed one today. She was an intern. Am I uncomfortable with interns? Not really, her inexperience was glaring and she wasn't filling me with confidence. I needed a Foley catheter. For those who don't know it's a long tube inserted into one's urethra and anchored by a small balloon which stops it from sliding out. There a few attachments involved and apparently our young intern didn't pay close enough attention to making sure one was secure so when she inserted the tube into my bladder she was baptized in an unexpected but predicable gusher of my urine. She stumbled to seal off the opening from which my precious bodily fluids came forth but the damage was done. She sent me home with a bag on my leg which I was to drain whenever it got too full. She also screwed up with it's placement so each time I took a step I found myself in serious pain until it was removed days later.
Flash forward to a recent Saturday. I found myself standing at a urinal trying to empty my bladder and having no luck but instead was hearing men in other stalls joyfully doing what I could not. I envied the sound of streams hitting water and the accompanying sighs of relief they emitted, but simply had to get out of there feeling as if I'd been kicked in the stomach. I braved traffic thinking I was having momentary bladder distress, but by the time I made it home I realized that my enlarged prostate (which would have been large even if I'd never had cancer) was squeezing my urethra shut. It occasionally did it, but not this long or this severely. It was one of the things that happened after the procedure which destroyed my tumors, but had never plagued me before it.
I painfully drove to the emergency room at one point pounding my dash board with my fist, screaming out in agony and was quickly processed on arrival with spiking blood pressure. The on call urology doctor simply told them to give me a catheter and send me home and they did precisely that. A regular catheter drained 24 ounces from my swollen bladder and I was inexplicably given a 24 ounce IV to replace the "fluids" I lost. I questioned this and mentioned that I wasn't dehydrated, I just couldn't pee. I was dismissed.
The following day I found myself going every 20 minutes but barely. By Midnight Sunday I'd completely shut down. I couldn't sleep and every 20 minutes I found myself painfully attempting to perform a bodily function many happily take for granted. At 4am I got dressed and drove back to the ER on a Monday morning and was greeted my a small, muscular Filipino nurse who asked "Weren't you just here?" She ushered me back into one of the familiar rooms and I heard a nurse given instructions for my treatment from the shift's head nurse. I couldn't see her but she sounded like every elderly, no nonsense black nurse who knew her stuff so I felt as if I was in good hands. She was the woman you simply didn't question. From the other side of the curtain the voice asked me "Baby ...you know you're leaving here with a catheter today right?" I answered "Fine..fine." Within a minute the other nurse came I and slowly and painfully inserted the rubber tube that drained 30 ounces from my bladder over the next few minutes. I was amazed at both the capacity and resilience of my bladder as I looked at the translucent bag and the contents with which I'd filled it.
The head nurse came in and to my surprise she was not an elderly black woman but rather a small round, 30ish Asian woman with a wide grin. "Mr. Handy" she said in syrupy Carolina accent "how you feeling' this morning?" I tried not to let my face show my obvious surprise that she didn't look like the character Lavern from the tv show Scrubs or my forth grade teacher. "Much better than when I came in." She smiled and in a reassuring tone continued: "Baby, you're gonna have to keep that in for the next three days while your body adjusts to it. Just come on in on Thursday so urology can take it out okay?" I nodded "Yes ma'am." I know I had to be at least 15 years her senior but her voice was throwing me off and my reply seemed a conditioned response. She handed me a release form and I drove home as many Houstonians started their day. The sun had yet to come up but my mission was to get home and get some much needed sleep.
The cancer journey continues. There are people I know who assume that if you're a cancer patient and you're not confined to a bed and howling in excruciating pain that you should be smiling broadly and dancing and being that "positive" person telling the world how you're "beating" it. There are good days and bad and unfortunately this one one of the bad few, but in the grand scheme of things my situation could be worse and knowing that sometimes is a heavy burden.
No comments:
Post a Comment