Broken Doll

Friday morning. Doc calls and says she’s puzzled by and quite unhappy with my second round of blood tests. On antibiotics for ten days and my white count went up.

The emergency room was less an emergency than doc knowing that outpatient tests the day before a long weekend will take too long to get results back. We can do all this in one day — all day.

Lots of waiting, questions, the attending doc throwing out scary terms like “lupus” and “fibromyalgia,” the resident looking at me ever more perplexedly as I answer his questions in the opposite way he expected. More Xrays. Another CAT scan, this time with an injection of contrast dye. Dave the tech sticks in the IV, takes six vials of blood, and makes me laugh. Kim the nurse takes my pulse and temp and blood pressure (three times), brings me coffee and two box lunches without the turkey, and looks out for me and makes me feel at least somewhat calm amidst the chaos.

And five hours later we’ve found it.

More scary words. Biopsy. Surgeon.

David tells me that he thinks 2cm by 2cm sounds small. The size of a peanut. To me it sounds gigantic.

Funny. I’ve been hurting less. Coughing more.

My life is out of my control. No one has any control. I need to be in a safe little box and there isn’t one.

I have so many worst-case-scenarios running through my head. The pain was really severe yesterday so between that and the worry I was practically useless all day. Maybe if I write this down I can purge some of it so I’m not totally useless today.

Sarah’s Fantastic Doctor really is. She was attentive, friendly, made eye-contact, listened without interrupting, asked intelligent questions, and overall seemed genuinely concerned. My last doctor acted like I was just one more thing to get through in his day. This doc acted like she really wanted to help me.

We did a variety of blood work. Scheduled a CT scan for Monday. Doc tells me to try not to worry — I’m young and it’s unlikely that there’s something seriously wrong. I know she’s right and worry anyway. Fighting off random bouts of panic. The process of the CT scan doesn’t scare me, and rationally I know that all this is only confirming what I already knew: this will probably be difficult to track down, and will get expensive. But at this point I don’t know if it would be worse for the CT scan to find something, or for it to find nothing.

Last night I went over to David’s to watch The West Wing. Ended up crying out of fear. He tells me that it’s good that we’ve started the process of finding out what’s wrong, it’s not my job to worry, I just need to let the docs and techs do their jobs. My only job is to be strong and let them work. Comforting words. Very sane and rational.

I’m not feeling very rational.

Phone call this morning. Labs came back. Everything’s normal except for a high white count. No respiratory symptoms, so Doc is somewhat puzzled, but is phoning in a prescription for antibiotics to my pharmacy, and is ordering a chest Xray for this afternoon. The Xray is to serve as a “pre-screen” for the CT scan, which is still on for Monday. Doc thinks maybe some sort of tissue infection. We’ll know more after the Xray and scan.

So, good, to the extent that an infection should be easy enough to get rid of. Maybe bad, too, if it’s possibly some sort of necrotic thing, and it’s already done permanent damage. I can’t regenerate damaged nerves.

I pray. I ask just to be provided for, to be able to get whatever I need to become healthy again. So far the goddess has done right by me — the insurance, the fantastic doctor, understanding co-workers, David, my mom. I’m grateful for that. I just ask that she keeps providing, for whatever I need and however long it takes.

I tell myself: one step at a time.

I am so scared.