March 9, 2009 The $5,000 Enema

I am not what you would call an overly religious guy, but I have been a Catholic my entire life and I do my best to lead my life as a believer. I have certainly believed in Heaven and to a lesser extent, Hell. If there is a Hell, I have always believed that Hell is different to all of us. In my mind, Hell is a place that you will have to relive your greatest fear, over and over. After last night, I am certain that if I should misstep, the die has been caste and I know what my eternal punishment will be.

I firmly believe that should I go to Hell when I die, I will have to experience the pain and humiliation of having a catheter put in place and removed on an hourly basis. I feel pretty sure of this after the latest adventure of my soon to be victory over cancer.

It was one of those days at work that I knew wouldn’t last long. As I mentioned last week, the only real problem other than being tired is being constipated. Like last week, it has such again. Again this week I have started utilizing the prescription that Dr. Obenchain gave me to loosen the stool. However, this time it didn’t seem to be working. By 11:30, I had had enough. I went home, took another shot of the stuff and prayed. However, as the day went on, things just seemed to get worse and the pain increased significantly.

After coming to the conclusion at about 7PM that I now was not passing any urine, it was time to call the doctor. After a lengthy conversation with Dr. Obenchain, it was decided that I would go to the Emergency Room. Within 90 minutes, I had a CT scan, a set of x-rays, a blood test and the before mentioned catheter.

I must admit that this was something that I was not looking forward to, but thought I could handle it. Falling back on my doctor experience from “House”, I realized that there would be some “pressure” involved in getting this done, but I wasn’t a five year old, I could deal with a little bit of “pressure.” Obviously, my definition of “pressure” is different than others. Hopefully, God understands the new set of nouns and adjectives that I put together as the technician (who loves doing code blues) decided to put 2 feet of heavy duty cable in a place that God never intended it to go. I’m sorry, but this is a one way street.

I’m sure the people outside the room must have thought that I was a rather low voiced woman giving birth to a rather large child without any drugs. This was not my proudest moment in life, however, I did survive it.

As quickly as all of that happened, the rest of the night took another turn. We waited and waited and waited. We started waiting at 9:30 and didn’t see a doctor until after 1:30. It was finally decided that they would move forward with the enema. We were then moved to a private room with a restroom. The nurse then began running around putting the magic potion together that would ultimately save my life. After waiting for a few minutes I spoke word s that I had never envisioned. “I can’t wait until I get this enema.” These are words a man should never string together in the same sentence.

I’ll save you all the gory details of the next half hour, but suffice it to say, I survived the ordeal and made it back home by 3:00 AM. Sad thing was, I was still in a good deal of discomfort, but managed to get a couple hours of sleep before we had to leave for my 8:00 AM chemo appointment, The good thing that came out of all of this is the fact that I received some more good results on my blood test. Most items are in line and my creatinine was down to 2.7 which represents another nice drop.