An Anxiety-Ridden Visit to the ER

After checking in to the Emergency Room and the painful ordeal of moving my illegally parked car into the Visitor Parking Deck, I was finally called in to have my vital signs checked by a nurse.  I was sent over to one of the many cots in the ER separated from the others by only a curtain.  An ER Doctor approached me and asked questions.   I had a pelvic exam, ultrasound, and MRI over the next several hours; meanwhile, I was injected with morphine to keep me quiet.  Most of the time I was left alone on my cot while the ER filled up with trauma patients wailing about UTIs and kidney stones.  

My mother sent me a text asking how I was feeling ever since our unresolved conversation the night before.  I thought of not responding, wanting to deal with the situation on my own—I was still in the mindset that I would be returning to work in a few hours, as I updated my boss via email every half hour, apologizing profusely and fibbing that I was held up at doctor’s appointment all morning.  Amidst the waves of pain emanating from my lower left side, I could only wonder about the list of tasks I had ahead of me to finalize for the Arizona primary the next day once I got into work.  Upon my second dosage of morphine around 9 am, I asked the nurse if I could leave soon, making a fuss about needing to get into work before noon.  The nurse looked at me oddly and just said in her thick Eastern European accent, “Do you not want morphine?” 

To which I responded, “No! Please,” as another shot of pain encircled my side. 

I am and always have been way too attached to my mother to ignore her calls or texts.  It is uncanny, but I am able to ignore any other person I know for days if I don’t wish to return their call.  Which is not to say I don’t value my friendships with people; that is entirely false.  I have always had a bond with my mother—tenacious enough to cause me deep anguish when I moved away to college and various other times in my life—a bond which would grow ever stronger in the following months.  So naturally, I texted my mother back that I was in the hospital waiting to hear what was wrong with me.  Naturally, her response was she drove up to New Brunswick immediately.  I will likely mentioned this more than once in this blog:  I am so lucky and grateful to have a mother with the energy and desire to care for me as she still does today, given the gravity of my health status this past year. 

Once it was decided that day I was to have an emergency surgery, my mother took over the situation and handled conversations with the nurses, the medical students, and eventually the surgeon.  All that was suspected was that I had a cyst on my ovary that appeared solid—meaning it could not be deflated through a simple procedure leaving a minimal scar, but I would receive an incision similar to that of a woman having a Cesarean section.  Give the pain I was in, I didn’t care what happened as long as it stopped immediately.  I called my boss at work and told her the news, and that I would not be going into New York for the Arizona primary election, nor would I likely be at work for at least a week or two.