#nanowrimo Writing Interrupted

by Lillian Csernica on November 16, 2019

I don’t know about you, but I’m having an extremely difficult year. Deaths and departures. The usual endless chaos at home, making sure we have enough aides and nursing staff for Michael. Courtrooms and Emergency Rooms and making room for my writing amid all the uproar.

And now, right in the middle of #nanowrimo, my gall bladder decided to declare war.

I was going to post a gallbladder graphic here, but no.

I spent most of the week between last Friday and today at a local hospital after I took myself to the Emergency Room for really nasty stomach pains. Many tests and much painful prodding revealed that my gall bladder was well on its way to causing me serious damage.

The hospital drama blew my mind. They wanted to send me home to make an appointment with the appropriate doctor in “three or four days.”

I’ll say one thing for this year. It’s put some serious steel into my spine. I repeated back to the doctors everything they’d just told me and demanded to know how they could send me home when they KNEW a medical crisis was imminent. I don’t know if I was persuasive enough or intimidating enough or just plain loud enough. They admitted me and the surgery took place last Saturday.

They discharged me on Sunday, less than 24 hours later, with no apparent regard for me still being on the big time painkillers you can’t get outside of hospitals. I hadn’t walked the ward, my gut motility had not resumed, none of the fundamental criteria for even considering discharge status. Yes, I could breathe, and no, I wasn’t bleeding to death. Apparently those two were sufficient.

And so they sent me home. They also forgot to give me back the bag of my regular medications I’d brought from home. You never know when some of your meds won’t be available in a particular hospital. I didn’t notice the glaring absence of my meds at the time because I was busy recovering from major abdominal surgery.

Two and a half hours after my husband drove me home, he was on the phone to 911. The pain had me in such a vicious grip I could not inhale without trying to scream. In the ambulance I was in such bad shape the paramedic didn’t bother with an IV. She had me ingest liquid painkiller by the simple expedient of soaking some gauze in the liquid form, sticking it up my nose, and commanding me to inhale as hard as I could.

The Emergency Room was not happy to see me again. I’m afraid I rather lost my temper with the doctor on duty who tried to tell me the CT scan they’d just done showed everything looking fine after surgery. Why then, I asked, after you people took out the organ you claimed was causing the problem, am I now in far more intense pain?

That doctor did what I’ve seen other doctors do in similar situations, which was hand me off to the next doctor up the chain of command. This worthy gentleman read the chart, examined my surgical sites, asked me a few questions, then shook his head and said, “We sent you home too soon. I’m admitting you.”

And so I spent Monday and Tuesday heavily medicated. They managed to lose one of my medications AGAIN, would not call the prescribing physician, and came within inches of me organizing a posse of lawyers to storm the bureaucratic barricades.

All this right in the middle of #nanowrimo. Did I get any writing done? As a matter of fact, I did. Armed with a notebook and pen provided by a writing buddy  who truly went above and beyond for me, I lay there and tried to keep my writing between the lines while this dear and treasured friend coaxed me through at least two word sprints.

My word count is currently at 14,220. I have to write 12, 452 words before midnight tonight in order to catch up. That’s 50 pages. Ouch.

I’m having a blast with these new Kyoto Steampunk stories when I can shut out everything else and concentrate. Right now I’m tired and I’m hurting and there are so many other things that needed to be done last week and five days in the hospital have left me even farther behind.

So cheer me on, people. Please. Help me get all the way to 50k.