Even though I gave it up for lent I hadnât had any on Tuesday to kinda kick start it.
Iâve had the shakes and a constant headache. I just keep chugging water and pedialyte today for the electrolytes and to kind of flush my system and Iâve had my detox tea. Debating in whatever I want to make today my cleanse day for isagenix. Iâm off and can basically sleep all day which helps get through the first day.
The withdrawal is real. I literally have not stopped drinking since before summer...and this past summer right up until last week Iâve been drinking pretty heavily.
I have 3 meals a day for a week all under 400 calories and zero carbs.
I figured lll keep having oatmeal in the morning for breakfast. As snacks Iâll keep having my almonds or shakes. It was $100 for the week. Not terrible honestly. I donât have to think or prep anything myself. I literally just pop it in the oven and itâs ready to go. I love it.
My next round of Isagenix came in the mail the other day too! So thatâs exciting!
When my wife was struck by mysterious, debilitating symptoms, our trip to the ER revealed the sexism inherent in emergency treatment.
Early on a Wednesday morning, I heard an anguished cryâthen silence.
I rushed into the bedroom and watched my wife, Rachel, stumble from the bathroom, doubled over, hugging herself in pain.
âSomethingâs wrong,â she gasped.
This scared me. Rachelâs not the type to sound the alarm over every pinch or twinge. She cut her finger badly once, when we lived in Iowa City, and joked all the way to Mercy Hospital as the rag wrapped around the wound reddened with her blood. Once, hobbled by a training injury in the days before a marathon, she limped across the finish line anyway.
So when I saw Rachel collapse on our bed, her hands grasping and ungrasping like an infantâs, I called the ambulance. I gave the dispatcher our address, then helped my wife to the bathroom to vomit.
I donât know how long it took for the ambulance to reach us that Wednesday morning. Pain and panic have a way of distorting time, ballooning it, then compressing it again. But when we heard the sirens wailing somewhere far away, my whole body flooded with relief.
I didnât know our wait was just beginning.
I buzzed the EMTs into our apartment. We answered their questions: When did the pain start? That morning. Where was it on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being worst?
âEleven,â Rachel croaked.
As we loaded into the ambulance, hereâs what we didnât know: Rachel had an ovarian cyst, a fairly common thing. But it had grown, undetected, until it was so large that it finally weighed her ovary down, twisting the fallopian tube like youâd wring out a sponge. This is called ovarian torsion, and it creates the kind of organ-failure pain few people experience and live to tell about.
âOvarian torsion represents a true surgical emergency,â says an article in the medical journal Case Reports in Emergency Medicine. âHigh clinical suspicion is important. ⊠Ramifications include ovarian loss, intra-abdominal infection, sepsis, and even death.â The best chance of salvaging a torsed ovary is surgery within eight hours of when the pain starts.
* * *
There is nothing like witnessing a loved one in deadly agony. Your muscles swell with the blood they need to fight or run. I felt like I could bend iron, tear nylon, through the 10-minute ambulance ride and as we entered the windowless basement hallways of the hospital.
And there we stopped. The intake line was longâa row of cots stretched down the darkened hall. Someone wheeled a gurney out for Rachel. Shaking, she got herself between the sheets, lay down, and officially became a patient.
We didnât know her ovary was dying, calling out in the starkest language the body has.
Emergency-room patients are supposed to be immediately assessed and treated according to the urgency of their condition. Most hospitals use the Emergency Severity Index, a five-level system that categorizes patients on a scale from âresuscitateâ (treat immediately) to ânon-urgentâ (treat within two to 24 hours).
I knew which end of the spectrum we were on. Rachel was nearly crucified with pain, her arms gripping the metal rails blanched-knuckle tight. I flagged down the first nurse I could.
âMy wife,â I said. âIâve never seen her like this. Somethingâs wrong, you have to see her.â
âSheâll have to wait her turn,â she said. Other nursesâ reactions ranged from dismissive to condescending. âYouâre just feeling a little pain, honey,â one of them told Rachel, all but patting her head.
We didnât know her ovary was dying, calling out in the starkest language the body has. I saw only the way Rachelâs whole face twisted with the pain.
Soon, I started to realizeâin a kind of panicâthat there was no system of triage in effect. The other patients in the line slept peacefully, or stared up at the ceiling, bored, or chatted with their loved ones. It seemed that arrival order, not symptom severity, would determine when weâd be seen.
As we neared the wardâs open door, a nurse came to take Rachelâs blood pressure. By then, Rachel was writhing so uncontrollably that the nurse couldnât get her reading.
She sighed and put down her squeezebox.
âYouâll have to sit still, or weâll just have to start over,â she said.
Finally, we pulled her bed inside. They strapped a plastic bracelet, like half a handcuff, around Rachelâs wrist.
* * *
From an early age weâre taught to observe basic social codes: Be polite. Ask nicely.Wait your turn. But during an emergency, established codes evaporateâthis is why ambulances can run red lights and drive on the wrong side of the road. I found myself pleading, uselessly, for that kind of special treatment. I kept having the strange impulse to take out my phone and call 911, as if that might transport us back to an urgent, responsive world where emergencies exist.
The average emergency-room patient in the U.S. waits 28 minutes before seeing a doctor. I later learned that at Brooklyn Hospital Center, where we were, the average wait was nearly three times as long, an hour and 49 minutes. Our wait would be much, much longer.
Everyone we encountered worked to assure me this was not an emergency. âStones,â one of the nurses had pronounced. That made sense. I could believe that. I knew that kidney stones caused agony but never death. Sheâd be fine, I convinced myself, if I could only get her something for the pain.
By 10 a.m., Rachelâs cot had moved into the âred zoneâ of the E.R., a square room with maybe 30 beds pushed up against three walls. She hardly noticed when the attending physician came and visited her bed; I almost missed him, too. He never touched her body. He asked a few quick questions, and then left. His visit was so brief it didnât register that he was the person overseeing Rachelâs care.
Around 10:45, someone came with an inverted vial and began to strap a tourniquet around Rachelâs trembling arm. We didnât know it, but the doctor had prescribed the standard pain-management treatment for patients with kidney stones: hydromorphone for the pain, followed by a CT scan.
The pain medicine started seeping in. Rachel fell into a kind of shadow consciousness, awake but silent, her mouth frozen in an awful, anguished scowl. But for the first time that morning, she rested.
* * *
Leslie Jamisonâs essay âGrand Unified Theory of Female Painâ examines ways that different forms of female suffering are minimized, mocked, coaxed into silence. In an interview included in her book The Empathy Exams, she discussed the piece, saying: âMonths after I wrote that essay, one of my best friends had an experience where she was in a serious amount of pain that wasnât taken seriously at the ER.â
She was talking about Rachel. Â
âWomen are likely to be treated less aggressively until they prove that they are as sick as male patients.â
âThat to me felt like this deeply personal and deeply upsetting embodiment of what was at stake,â she said. âNot just on the side of the medical establishmentâwhere female pain might be perceived as constructed or exaggeratedâbut on the side of the woman herself: My friend has been reckoning in a sustained way about her own fears about coming across as melodramatic.â
âFemale pain might be perceived as constructed or exaggeratedâ: We saw this from the moment we entered the hospital, as the staff downplayed Rachelâs pain, even plain ignored it. In her essay, Jamison refers back to âThe Girl Who Cried Pain,â a study identifying ways gender bias tends to play out in clinical pain management. Women are  âmore likely to be treated less aggressively in their initial encounters with the health-care system until they âprove that they are as sick as male patients,ââ the study concludesâa phenomenon referred to in the medical community as âYentl Syndrome.â
In the hospital, a lab tech made small talk, asked me how I like living in Brooklyn, while my wife struggled to hold still enough for the CT scan to take a clear shot of her abdomen.
âLot of patients to get to, honey,â we heard, again and again, when we begged for stronger painkillers. âDonât cry.â
I felt certain of this: The diagnosis of kidney stonesârepeated by the nurses and confirmed by the attending physicianâs prescribed course of treatmentâwas a denial of the specifically female nature of Rachelâs pain. A more careful examiner would have seen the need for gynecological evaluation; later, doctors told us that Rachelâs swollen ovary was likely palpable through the surface of her skin. But this particular ER, like many in the United States, had no attending OB-GYN. And every nurseâs shrug seemed to say, âWomen cryâwhat can you do?â
Nationwide, men wait an average of 49 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain. Women wait an average of 65 minutes for the same thing. Rachel waited somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours.
âMy friend has been reckoning in a sustained way about her own fears about coming across as melodramatic.â Rachel does struggle with this, even now. How long is it appropriate to continue to process a traumatic event through language, through repeated retellings? Friends have heard the story, and still she finds herself searching for language to tell it again, again, as if the experience is a vast terrain that can never be fully circumscribed by words. Still, in the throes of debilitating pain, she tried to bite her lip, wait her turn, be good for the doctors.
For hours, nothing happened. Around 3 oâclock, we got the CT scan and came back to the ER. Otherwise, Rachel lay there, half-asleep, suffering and silent. Later, sheâd tell me that the hydromorphone didnât really stop the painâjust numbed it slightly. Mostly, it made her feel sedated, too tired to fight.
If she had been alone, with no one to agitate for her care, thereâs no telling how long she might have waited.
Eventually, the doctorâthe man whoâd come to Rachelâs bedside briefly, and just onceâpacked his briefcase and left. Heâd been around the ER all day, mostly staring into a computer. We only found out later heâd been the one with the power to rescue or forget us.
When a younger woman came on duty to take his place, I flagged her down. I told her we were waiting on the results of a CT scan, and I hassled her until she agreed to see if the results had come in.
When she pulled up Rachelâs file, her eyes widened.
âWhat is this mess?â she said. Her pupils flicked as she scanned the page, the screen reflected in her eyes.
âOh my god,â she murmured, as though I wasnât standing there to hear. âHe never did an exam.â
The male doctor had prescribed the standard treatment for kidney stonesâDilauded for the pain, a CT scan to confirm the presence of the stones. In all the hours Rachel spent under his care, heâd never checked back after his initial visit. He was that sure. As far as he was concerned, his job was done.
If Rachel had been alone, with no one to agitate for her care, thereâs no telling how long she might have waited.
It was almost another hour before we got the CT results. But when they came, they changed everything.
âShe has a large mass in her abdomen,â the female doctor said. âWe donât know what it is.â
Thatâs when we lost it. Not just because our minds filled then with words liketumor and cancer and malignant. Not just because Rachel had gone half crazy with the waiting and the pain. It was because weâd asked to wait our turn all through the dayâlonger than a standard office shiftâonly to find out weâd been an emergency all along.
Suddenly, the world responded with the urgency we wanted. I helped a nurse push Rachelâs cot down a long hallway, and I ran beside her in a mad dash to make the ultrasound lab before it closed. It seemed impossible, but we were told that if we didnât catch the tech before he left, Rachelâs care would have to be delayed until morning.
âWhatever happens,â Rachel told me while the tech prepared the machine, âdonât let me stay here through the night. I wonât make it. I donât care what they tell youâI know I wonât.â
Soon, the tech was peering inside Rachel through a gray screen. I couldnât see what he saw, so I watched his face. His features rearranged into a disbelieving grimace.
By then, Rachel and I were grasping at straws. We thought: cancer. We thought: hysterectomy. Lying there in the dim light, Rachel almost seemed relieved.
âI can live without my uterus,â she said, with a soft, weak smile. âThey can take it out, and Iâll get by.â
Sheâd make the tradeoff gladly, if it meant the pain would stop.
After the ultrasound, we led the gurneyâslowly, this timeâdown the long hall to the ER, which by then was  completely crammed with beds. Trying to find a spot for Rachelâs cot was like navigating rush-hour traffic.
Then came more bad news. At 8 p.m., they had to clear the floor for rounds. Anyone who was not a nurse, or lying in a bed, had to leave the premises until visiting hours began again at 9.
When they let me back in an hour later, I found Rachel alone in a side room of the ER. So much had happened. Another doctor had told her the mass was her ovary, she said. She had something called ovarian torsionâthe fallopian-tube twists, cutting off blood. There was no saving it. Theyâd have to take it out.
Rachel seemed confident and ready.
âHeâs a good doctor,â she said. âHe couldnât believe that they left me here all day. He knows how much it hurts.â
When I met the surgery team, I saw Rachel was right. Talking with them, the words weâd used all dayâexcruciating, emergency, elevenâregistered with real and urgent meaning. They wanted to help.
By 10:30, everything was ready. Rachel and I said goodbye outside the surgery room, 14 and a half hours from when her pain had started.
* * *
Rachelâs physical scars are healing, and she can go on the long runs she loves, but sheâs still grappling with the psychic tollâwhat she calls âthe trauma of not being seen.â She has nightmares, some nights. I wake her up when her limbs start twitching.
Sometimes we inspect the scars on her body together, looking at the way the pink, raised skin starts blending into ordinary flesh. Maybe one day, theyâll become invisible. Maybe they never will.
Iâm angry and sad and so bloody relieved sheâs even ALIVE. I was preparing myself for him to say they faffed around all day and killed my wife. Because they donât take women seriously. Women endure the pain of childbirth. We know what real pain is. We know when something is WRONG!
iâve told thi story before but when i was sixteen years old and perceived myself as female i got severe appendicitis and had to go to the ER and the male doctor in charge of the ER looked at me, asked if i was pregnant, argued with me when i said i wasnât, dumped me in a room and left me there without any treatment at all for twelve hours, came back in a few times to angrily interrogate me about my pregnancy, got angrier and angrier with me as i continued to refuse to admit i had ever had sex and continued to deny that i was pregnant, did not give me any treatment at all because i wouldnât ~stop lying to him~ about my pregnancyâŠ. the shifts changed and a female doctor came in and ACTUALLY LOOKED AT ME and swept me into the operating room in time to find that my appendix had already ruptured and its rotten contents had infiltrated my entire abdominal cavity; i had to stay in the hospital for two months while the secondary infections raged through my body, because a man saw a teenage girl and refused to think ANYTHING but âlying, pregnant slutâ
You say there and watched me pull all the decorations out of boxes and bags, watched me put the tree up and hang everything on it and when I ask you to help me clean up you say "you didn't make the mess". The "mess" will sit here then until the end of time. You'll get annoyed with it first believe me.
So my thanksgiving is ending with me crying on the bathroom floor curled up into a ball wrapped in a heating pad. Still no answers about my insides and what the fuck is wrong with either my digestive system or uterus/ovaries or both. The pain for this period has been excruciating. I've been loaded up on 1200 mg of ibuprofen every four hours and have been using he heating pad non stop. The bathroom visits are more and more frequent and more painful (cramps) every time I have to go. Still not sure why the severe pain/cramps is always followed by the cold sweats, nausea, BM, the shakes and my vision going a tad blurry but that's what's still happening. The heating pad kinda helps I guess. I don't know anymore. All I've done today has been sneak away to the bathroom to cry and keel over in pain. This one I hemorrhaged a lot and clotted really bad. Not sure if that means anything. I can't take this.
The difference between fucking and making love? None. Just like everything else sex should have balance. You should always passionately kiss your partner and stroke their hair while looking into their eyes, give a smile, let out a low growl and then pounce. The hair you were stroking so gently should now be twisted in your hand pulling their head back giving you access to their neck. Bite it. The eyes you were gazing into so lovingly, should wince just a touch then roll back from pleasure. That mouth you were kissing so passionately, should be split open letting out long moans. Kiss everything from top to bottom. Their chest and stomach? Be gentle the skin is tender there. Then make a trail with your tongue and bite your way back up. Remember the skin is tender, it's the perfect opportunity. When you're on top of them, fold your hands in theirs and look at them. Let them know they're the one you're continually thinking about while you're body is feeling this amazing. Then take those hands that are locked together so tightly and put one around your throat and one on your ass. If your partner is on top of you, hold them as close as possible. Hug them, kiss them, wrap yourselves in one another. Then push them off and make them throw your legs over their shoulders and go to town. Scratch them, hit them, choke them, pull their hair. When you've both finished and you're just lying there, enjoy the tender moment when you're both covered in each other's sweat, when it's a bit too hot for any contact but you stay there anyway...in that perfect little nook of their arm. Then start kissing that arm you love so much right down to the fingers. Bite their fingers, suck on them. Look at them with that devilish look. Press your lips hard on theirs. Pull at their hair, whether it's on their head chest or face, pull at it. Run your fingers through it and savor each texture and taste of them. Enjoy the noises, the flavors, the smells, everything. Fuck each other. Make love to each other. Simultaneously. Once people learn how to do both sex will feel less like a chore or an obligation. Sex will be the best thing you've ever experienced, as if you were on ecstasy every time.
Thankful for the people in my life who make it go smooth and thankful for the ones who come in and fuck shit up. The ones that keep it smooth are my rocks the ones that fuck shit up do it in the best way possible. They keep my life fresh and keep me on my toes. They make me feel things I otherwise wouldnât feel, and think about things I otherwise wouldnât think about.
The stable side and the free side.
Balance.
This man and woman I've known since I was little always come into the place where I work to have breakfast but they never come in together. The husband always either comes with his friends or this one lady who everyone mistakes for his wife because they always go to breakfast together. The wife is always with a bunch of her friends. The times I see them together they're adorable and if my grandparents are right they've been married well over 50 years. I would love to get to that point of trust or just knowing that you guys are THAT in love to let my husband go to breakfast with a woman who isn't me almost everyday.
Friendly reminder to check youâre not holding tension in your body. Let your shoulders drop, unclench your hands and jaw. Take a deep breath. Much better.
Can you just let me fucking write?Â
I feel like Jack Nicholson in the Shining right now.Â
When he curses Shelley Duvalle out telling her to get out of the fucking room while heâs writing..jesus christ.Â
Like I said I wanted to write/blog/read whatever so I guess that means turn on the television extremely loud, bring your weights out from the spare bedroom into the living room and start working out, all while trying to have conversations with me. Then you get pissed when I give you one word answers or ignore you all together because I donât really care what youâre saying right now. I TOLD YOU WHAT I WAS GOING TO DO AND THAT I WANTED TO WRITE. Which would normally mean I WANT FUCKING PEACE AND QUIET. Could I go into another room? Of course. BUT THE WEIGHTS ARE IN THE SPARE ROOM. STAY IN THERE AND WATCH TV AND EXERCISE. WHAT THE FUCK.Â
When he does his schoolwork I am silent as a mouse and make sure I donât turn the tv on and if i listen to music or watch videos I put in headphones, its called consideration.
