It’s Thursday, September 18th. On Friday the 12th I woke up with a pain in my lower back. It felt like any other strained lower back and I assumed I slept in a bad position or something. I went about my day and it was mostly alright until that evening, when I had to take my cat to the vet.
I made my mom come with me because the last time I took a cat to the vet, the cat didn’t make it. Not through their fault and not because of neglect. He had a heart defect. Anyhow, she came with me for moral support. While we were there I complained to her about my back hurting, and how it was getting worse. I couldn’t sit comfortably. Driving to and from the vet was incredibly painful. But I thought it was just because I’m in my 50s and overweight and sit too much and planned to get high and sleep it off.
I skipped getting high and tried to sleep it off. Somewhere overnight Friday to Saturday I started throwing up. Could’ve been from pain, could’ve been since I’d forgotten to eat. I made a deal with myself that if I threw up again I would go to the ER because it all was adding up to sound like kidney stones (I’ve never had them so I couldn’t be sure, but where and how the pain was, it seemed sensible).
Well, I threw up again, and at about 7:30 in the morning I drove over to the ER.
I was there for hours before even being triaged. I kept telling them my pain was a 9.5 at least. I couldn’t sit down without pain so I paced the ER waiting room until I was seen. I had to stand for the vitals and initial bloodwork because I couldn’t sit at all. They put in an IV and gave me a little morphine and I continued to pace the waiting room.
Around midafternoon they wanted me to get a CT scan. I’m allergic to contrast dye and need days worth of pre-medication before I can have it, so they did a CT without contrast. And didn’t like what they couldn’t really see.
“They’d rather get an MRI now and look at it before deciding anything.”
Sigh. OK. I JUST re-pierced my ears, but this is important. I took out the earrings, went to the MRI (I’m walking/standing this whole time because even after two rounds of morphine I was still in a lot of pain) and got one more hit of morphine. Just before the scan started I had to stop. I threw up. “Was it the morphine? We have anti-nausea meds!” It took me a few minutes to make them understand that it was a pain reaction not a morphine one. The good news was that took enough time for the drugs to work and I had an MRI.
After the MRI they took pity on me and let me have some food. A little half cup of unsweetened applesauce, just the way I like it. And about five minutes after I finished, one of the PAs came in and said “Your next stop is neurosurgery.” and I was like “Oh cool, so you’ll drug me up and I can go home and start this on Monday, right?”
“….. they kinda want to do it now.”
“But I just ate something! I can’t do anesthesia now!”
A quick confer and they decided to talk to anesthesiology about how to proceed and then I said “Oh it’s ok. I’m gonna throw up.”
And I did.