So, I’ve had a rough few weeks.
Last month, I randomly fell… fell hard.
It was Sunday night, I just had a massage, I went to the fridge to get dinner and my ankle didn’t move like I needed it to, and I went down… sideways. I tried to grab on to something as I went down but everything happened too quick. I landed sideways — on my left side, tangled up in a broom somehow. It hurt. I didn’t move for a couple of minutes because I wasn’t sure what to do. I heard things popping and felt things crunch, which of course is good and bad since my sensation is so off.
As I’m lying there in pain, not quite sure whether I’m ready to move, I wallow in self-pity… I have flashbacks of my x-boyfriend screaming at me, telling me how athletes fall all the time and it’s no big deal, and I wish he could trade places with me to see how easy it is to get up when his left leg isn’t working … and then I see the pool of blood around my elbow and I just get really, really scared. It’s all over my arm and I am terrified something horrible has happened and I am all by myself. I don’t feel anything at my elbow and it is gushing blood. It should hurt but it doesn’t, and that scares me even more. I get up very, very slowly and cautiously, I’m in pain, but I’m able to move so that’s good, I tell myself. I haul myself up to the chair and I call my cousin who has extended his summer plans by a month. When I hear his voice, I am so releived and so upset that I just start crying because I acn’t get any words out. All the words are stuck. So he comes over and assesses everything. Since his dad is a doctor, I use him as a proxy, hoping that I don’t have to go to an emergency room. He patches up my elbow, make sure I can move and then hangs out to make sure I’m ok.
The next morning I wake up with blood all over my sheet because the banadage didn’t hold. I move very, very slow. My back is not happy and I’m sure I’ve bruised my tailbone at a minimum. I drive to physical therapy because I don’t have a doctor anymore, and I don’t trust any of the anymore anyway. They of course tell me to get my butt over to emergency care because I might have a broken tailbone and a broken elbow. Ugh.
I get all the x-rays done — they do not even bother to x-ray my tailbone because they tell me there is nothing that can be done even if it is broken so it’s not worth doing. They do x-ray my elbow, however, as my injury interferes with my ability to feel pain. It’s not broken, but it is full of puss and infected already. Eww. They give me a tetnus shot and send me home.
Here’s where it get worse…. the next morning I wake up with a fever because the tetnus shot has made me sick. I nam dehydrated and dizzy and have flu-like symptoms. I make it downstairs but then everytime I get up I get dizzy. I make it to the toilet and then I can’t leave the bathroom for 30 mins because I am too dizzy. I am disoriented for most of the day and I don’t eat. At 5p a neighbor comes over to check on me and she freaks out because I am so disoriented. She makes me drink like a gallon of water and then I feel a little better. My cousin comes back over to get me dinner and I eat.
I call the emergency room where I got the tetnus shot the next day to find out about my reaction but no one returns my call. So I acll my massuese, whoose wife is a nurse, and he has her check to make sure that I shouldn’t go back in…. she tells him my reaction is extremely rare and my immune system must be incredibly weak. I’m not entirely surprised by that comment.
Anyway, it’s taken me about a month to recover from that, and it was emotionally exhausting as much as it was physically exhausting.
It’s so hard not to be angry at the people who did this to me, to not focus on the fact that they convinced me that I’d be fine, when it was simply not possible.
And I ask myself, why would any experienced surgeon tell his patient that they would be fine if a 4″ tumor was removed from the middle of their spinal cord and then remove it anyway when it was obviously not possible? I never volunteered myself as a free experiment yet I have to clean up this mess because I made the mistake of trusting the wrong people … and I paid for it with my life.
Yesterday I passed a guy in the hallway who skiied the trees Sunny Bono style and has gone from being an athlete to hobbling in a walker with a boot on his leg. He hasn’t gotten much better because his muscles spasm up too much for him to move. And he said to me, you are doing so wonderful, congratulations! And I am once again deeply humbled and deeply greatful, that after being dumped in a wheelchair by a megalomanic neurosurgeon, that I am getting better at all.
Onwards & upwards.
Tonya
