#Because my fifteenth kiddo needs materials

[banannabethchase]

Teaching is spending 9 hours at work with no break time and a 6 minute lunch, then coming home to do an hour of housework, resting for 30 minutes, and then working on your bilingual letter sound instruction plans because you just hit 15 students in your room and hell at this point all of them will benefit from the letter sound instruction.

[heyamandahey]

CAT to ER to ICU

Thursday, April 25, 2019

After dragging my feet through the land of ZocDoc, I booked an appointment with a primary care physician since I did not really have one all these years. When ever I have had health insurance in the past, it has always felt sufficient to see my dentist and gynecologist regularly. I rarely get more than one cold per winter, maybe strep throat if I’m going through a traumatic breakup, but that’s it!

After getting approval for a CT scan through my primary doctor, I informed my office I would be getting a scan over my lunch break, but I should be done in time for our afternoon meeting.

The radiology clinic attended to me in a relatively timely matter. I received some sort of iodine drip to increase the contrast of the scan. They warned it may make give me feelings of needing to urinate or a metallic mouth flavor. My groin got sensationally warm.

CAT SCAN An unfamiliar sci-fi machine lay ahead of me with a Battlestar Galactica Cyclon-like eye beam, menacing red horizontal laser against a dark rectangle at the bottom of a large donut-shaped contraption. Mm, doughnuts. Its shape reminded me how I have been fasting for four hours. I mildly wondered if I would have time to pick up a sandwich before my meeting back at the office.

While the donut structure stayed static, the platform bed I laid upon slid back and forth. Gears inside the torus spun faster than a washing machine. It amazed me we could get imagery of any kind this way, and while I have wondered what it would be like to get a CT/CAT scan in the past, I did not expect to do so at this point in my life. It felt too early.

After getting the IV removed and dressed back in my normal clothes, I waited for my results. I expected the radiologist to sit down with me to explain the situation. The receptionist hands me a few papers, plus a CD that must contain my scan. Hah, CDs. I dimly think about how I have no CD drive at home.

After about fifteen to twenty minutes, a man enters the waiting room to confirm my identity. “Are you Amanda? You poor thing!” Oh, no.

This man had apparently already spoken with my PCP on the results of my scan, and I was to go to him straight away for further instructions. The radiologist continued on to say he has seen my doctor before as well for “a thing on his back” before reassuring me everything would be all right. He raised his hand for a high-five. I returned it.

PCP Visit Dr. Adams did not sit down with me to go over the CT scan as I had expected. Instead he had already spoken with the doctors at a nearby hospital and instructed me to head straight to the ER. I should take a cab. He handed me a square of paper.

All right. Definitely not making that mid-afternoon meeting. Probably no time for a sandwich either.

ER In the cab ride over, I called my parents to update them on my situation, but I kept it light-hearted. “Feel better, kiddo!” my mom consoled. I expected to go in for another test or two. I did not know I would spend the next two nights at the hospital. Upon entering the main entrance of the hospital, I feel my sense of control slowly start to crumble. The gravity of the situation suddenly feels immensely heavy. I had expended my last bit of self-control in convincing my parents that my present condition is not a big deal. In truth, I was no longer sure. I have never been to the ER, let alone received explicit instructions to go into one.  

Security guards lined what I expected to be a receptionist desk, but there is no office worker in sight. Tears start to well up in my eyes. All of the surrounding signs say unhelpful things like Green Pathway or Blue Pathway. None of this makes any sense. What’s going to happen to me? What am I doing? Where am I going? Is my eyeliner running?

One security guard reassured me, “Take your time, take your time. Where do you need to go?” He politely looked away while I struggled to fight back tears. After fumbling something about a thoracic surgeon, I remember that I need to go to the emergency room. Go outside and farther down to the right.

In a fog I enter the next unmarked door. A kind-faced man tells me it is about a fifteen-second walk more to the right. How did I get this bad at wayfinding? A wave of idiocy washes over me when I finally see the huge and clearly-defined letters that read, “E M E R G E N C Y – R  O O M” outside.

After checking in and traversing a few tunnels, all windows and natural light disappear. My vitals are taken in one room. I follow another medical professional through sterile hallways, lined with painted cinderblocks, fluorescent lights, and double-doors accessible only via an identification card. Dozens of hospital beds with grey faces and sullen looks line a central cluster of office desks. Behind each computer screen sat someone in a solid-colored scrub, completely unfazed by the organized chaos.

I am led to Bed #56. Is this corner of the room meant for me, or is someone else going to need this bed? I sat down like it’s a couch. Surely someone will come by to conduct another test or two, and then I can just go home. Maybe I can still make it to my gym class to fit in another workout.

A flurry of people stop by my bed, separated only by a curtain partition. What brings me to the hospital? How did my symptoms start? How long have I had this cough? Let me take those printed materials and CD from you.

Two thoracic professionals show me the results of the CAT/CT scan. Based on previous Google searches, I had expected a 3D-model but instead they’re aerial snapshots, slice by slice. Look at the dark spot in the center. That is my trachea. Like a reverse full moon, as we see pictures that approach the center, it turns almost into a sliver before waxing back into a full circle.

Over the course of the evening I learn that I most likely have lymphoma. There is a kind that tends to afflict younger women in the mediastinum or the space between the lungs. This rather large unknown mass most likely has been pressing on my superior vena cava (SVC), which would explain the neck and facial swelling, as well as my trachea, which would explain the coughing.

I don’t have allergies or cold or cough or sinus infection or bronchitis. I just have a tumor. See, guys? I was never contagious.

ICU Because I am essentially not bleeding to death, I will be moved to the ICU in a couple hours. They have deemed my condition unsafe to sleep at home, and I must be monitored at all times. I may have to stay at the hospital “several days” or at least through the weekend.

It is only Thursday night. I take out my phone to cancel my gym class.

The ICU ends up being on the fifteenth floor, and I receive a room all to myself. I don’t think I have been inside a hospital since I visited my paternal grandmother at one back in the Nineties. I did not think I would be at one regarding my own health for another decade or two. It is already a comforting change to see a window to the outside world, despite my occasional disdain for the sun.

I am scheduled to receive corticosteroid injections every six hours. A blood pressure cuff will measure my pressure every fifteen minutes before midnight, then switching only to every hour until morning. Occasionally my veins are flushed with a saline solution to keep the IVs clear. Its cooling sensation is rather pleasant, and it’s what I generally imagine Marvel superheroes feel when power courses through their veins.

Sleep is sparse, but I find rest. I have been instructed to fast, so I contemplate my next meal, eventually finding the Food Network to quell my hunger through a twisted sense of exposure therapy.

[omnicat]

I can't find the post anymore, but I'm curious by the snippet you posted about Ben destroying Han's gifts. Are you going to post that fic soon? YOu said it's not what it looks like, so I'm really want to know what's going on!

Aaaah. /o\ Yeah, sorry, I deleted it. I got too embarassed having that sentence up with no context whatsoever.

The fic it belongs in is gonna be a LONG time coming, if I manage to finish it at all. I’m 21k into it and still have no idea how far along that puts me. (Historically, this is the point where I panic. 8) )

But I feel better about posting it with a little context, so here you go!

(It’s basically Kylo/Ben having a pre-lovers spat with Rey and being reminded of a couple of incidents with his family as a teenager where he Voltorbed all over his problems for a variety of reasons, not least of which that he kept coming down with sudden-but-inevitable!Supreme Creeper Snoke on the brain. And then he spent ten years apprenticed to aforementioned creep and having his self-destructive tendencies encouraged, so he promptly does it again in his argument with Rey in present time.)

Rey set her jaw, nostrils flaring. “Is that your excuse for being an arse? If you don’t want to teach me, just say so.”

“I want to teach you,” he said, because that idea hadn’t lost its shine even as all the reasons for it had turned to ash in his mouth. If he let himself think about it now… “But I know a rejection when I see one, and both of yours were perfectly clear.”

“What, you’re allowed to change your mind but I can’t?”

No, you can’t, he thought with ruthless, double-edged petulance –

Like he was thirteen again, wrenching himself out of his mother’s attempt at a last embrace and stomping off without looking back, because how dare she, how could she, telling him to go away and not come back until he’d gotten rid of all the parts she didn’t like about him, until he wasn’t Ben anymore, and then trying to act like she still cared about the troubling nuisance she was leaving behind. (And she hadn’t run after him, had told him in the holo-call Uncle Luke soon made him sit down for that she understood it was hard for him and she wouldn’t pressure him any more than she already had. But while his mother gave him his space, Snoke had wordlessly projected the sense of a fierce, gentle, unyielding hug until he stopped struggling and had to muffle his sobs in his sleeve, because what Snoke understood even if Ben didn’t was that this was what he’d needed, proof that it wasn’t false comfort given only out of obligation, that he wasn’t so disposable to his parents that they were trying to trade him in for a better model like he was nothing but an ill-fitting coat.)

Like the fifteenth day after his fifteenth birthday, when a courier had unexpectedly arrived at the temple with a big, brightly wrapped box filled with presents his father was too busy chasing his pre-Rebellion glory days or some shit like that to give him himself, ‘sorry kiddo, we’ll catch up soon, alright?’, and he just felt sick, and he’d locked himself in his cabin and torn and smashed everything his father had sent him apart – the priceless antique books and the leather jacket and the tiny hand-made pet droid and the bottle of liquor and all of it, and the box itself after that, and everything else in his cabin small enough to throw after that – and then he’d cried until morning, until he all but passed out from the splitting headache it gave him. (He hadn’t understood why it didn’t make him feel better, why he’d kept going even as regret clawed up his throat, why he couldn’t make the compulsion to claw at his face and destroy every good thing he had left leave his hands. But while Uncle Luke worked himself into an unprecedented, despairing, screaming mess in the face of his nephew’s hard-eyed silence and bruised hands and destruction the next morning, Snoke had only to brush the surface of his mind from star systems away to understand exactly why he was upset. He’d assured him that it wasn’t his fault his deadbeat lowlife of a father apparently couldn’t even feign affection anymore if he tried to buy his only son off with such material extravagance, and it was only natural for such strong emotion to need an outlet, and if there was no good use for him to put it to, any port had to do in a storm, and what was done was done, so there was no use feeling ashamed about it now. (And wasn’t it awfully convenient for the Jedi code to place the burden of not feeling hurt and wronged on his shoulders, while his father’s behavior was drowned in ‘he didn’t mean it like that’s and ‘but you know he loves you anyway, right?’s?))

Like when he was seventeen and a heavy-hearted Uncle Luke said his parents were on the holo and wanted to talk to him about something, and he caught separation-justtryingit-liars-divorce-heartbreak-homebreak-nowwhatdowedowithBen in his uncle’s mind, and the devastation was so sharp and sudden he couldn’t have said more than “don’t bother, I got the message” if he’d wanted to – no, if he’d admitted to wanting to, because he did. He hadn’t lived with his parents, in their house, for more than a few weeks a year for years, but the urge to beg them not to take even that away from him, to please just reconsider, to come get him and turn back the clock and let him prove that he didn’t need to be here to do better, to let him do something, anything, he would do anything to fix what he’d done to break their family – it was almost unbearable. But they’d made the decision without him. If there was anything he could have said to make them change their minds, they didn’t try very hard to hear it. They never came to take him home together again. (And Snoke had waited, and waited, and waited, until even the things Ben still loved about the Jedi temple at his loneliest and most dejected, studying and training and losing himself in the Force until he forgot his own name, could no longer offset the feelings of desolate loss and being lost, and Ben had been the one to reach for him.)

No, because he had given up everything to save her and she’d turned on him anyway, and by coming here he’d traded away any time he might have had to lick his wounds about it to boot. (Because everything inside him quailed to realize how much power she had found over him in a matter of days. How easily she had lured Kylo Ren away from a loyalty that had taken Snoke the better part of Ben Solo’s life to earn.)

And no especially because he had an inkling what this was really all about, and he wasn’t having it.