I was hospitalized for almost a third of January. In the first hours of 2018, I was put into an ambulance and brought to a hospital where I know no one a thousand miles from home. I arrived with a high fever, continuous, forceful vomiting, and colitis symptoms from hell. A couple of days later, I tested positive for CDiff, a severe colon infection that is dangerous and difficult to treat.
Metronidazole calmed the CDiff enough for me to be discharged. I stayed in Florida several more days, unable to get home because of the storm. I was home only a few days before I was once again brought to a hospital by ambulance with severe colitis. The pain was literally blinding. My vision flashed white at the worst points, lightning coming in waves.
I live with serious chronic pain and almost certainly will for the rest of my life. I am not a stranger to pain. This is the worst pain I have ever experienced. I am not a screamer with pain. I was screaming.
The CDiff was no longer being controlled by metronidazole. I was admitted and we started oral vancomycin four times a day.
I have been sick a long time. I think this was the sickest I have ever been.
I also had some strong emotions to contend with, namely that I was angry. This isn’t the first time I’ve had a major problem with my colon. It has been a consistent problem for years and is usually the reason I end up in the hospital. I have had multiple colon surgeries and so many scopes and biopsies that I sincerely can’t remember how many I have had. Lower GI bleeding is part of my baseline. I have to undertake extraordinary interventions to get stool out of my colon. My colon does not work. It performs none of its intended functions.
When I had my last colon surgery, I begged my doctors to take out the whole thing. I begged them because I knew it would never stop being a problem and would never stop sending me to the hospital periodically. They wouldn’t do it. They took some of my colon but they didn’t take all of it and look where we are now. We’re here, in a place that would be impossible to get to but for the fact that my damaged, bleeding, useless colon is still inside my body. A place we could not have gotten to if they had just cut out this broken piece of me. But they didn’t.
The oral vancomycin worked well for me. I medicated heavily to suppress mast cell reactions to the med, which is a known degranulator. After a few days, my symptoms improved significantly, but my pain was still bad. It took another few days to be able to eat anything and to manage my pain without IV meds.
By the end of my hospital stay, I was very ready to go home. I was cautiously optimistic that the oral vancomycin would work well for me and that the worst was behind me. I packed up all my stuff and filled all my prescriptions and waited in my isolation room for my uncle to arrive to pick me up.
A couple of hours before my uncle arrived, I got a phone call. I was walking around the floor and was in a hallway quiet enough that I could hear a conversation on the phone. I had this weird moment of foreboding when I answered the phone. I know it sounds cliché and theatrical but I really did. I sat down in a chair near the elevator bay and answered the phone and my entire life exploded.
As I sat there talking, something inside of me broke. The pain was immediate and crushing. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t stand up. I couldn’t think. My entire life changed and it will never change back. The life I had was gone in a moment, ripped away by a dark, whipping current. I blame this broken piece because it started there. Another broken piece that can never be fixed, that will poison me every day of my life. Another broken piece that can never be removed.
There are some realities too horrible to imagine. When you try, your mind just shows the future the way your life is now. Your mind cannot envision a life without certain people because it is so horrible that surely such a life cannot exist.
I have so many things to say but my soul is too tired and worn to speak them. The effort required is too great. Instead I swallow them down. They collect behind my stomach, cleaving to my spine, growing larger and larger with each truth I cannot get out. A broken piece of my own making that can never be cut out.