About nine years ago I experienced a panic attack for the first time in my life. It is an odd feeling, as if the world is enclosing and wrapping you in a straight jacket but not in a claustrophobic sense. It is as everything you see or feel creates an unsettling pressure, the slightest thing creates tension or anxiety. I remember it got so unnerving that I went outside late at night with the hope that the open Arizona spaces and skies might ease the anxiety. Ironically it did not. I felt as if the stars themselves were pasted upon my eyelids. It is something that cannot be fought off mentally or emotionally, although I struggled to use that lame cripple, reason, to no effect. It was a strange happening within and without myself.
Consequently I went to a local hospital and a doctor and social worker met with me. I recall the social worker telling me after I had spilled the beans about all that was happening in my life that I had “a lot on my plate,” which I did. I was given a tranquilizer and in a relatively short time it passed. About two days ago I began to experience similar feelings, irritability, things closing in on me, hypervigilant about these very things, barking at Jane, hot-tempered and I stayed up all night doing this and that until I was able to fall asleep. I was due to have a spinal procedure for my newly diagnosed spinal disease, Stenosis, which produces mind-numbing pain. Today, I was able to get through the medical system and get Atavan which I believe is an anti-anxiety pill. The fact that I just swallowed one has made feel the clouds have lifted. Sometimes the pill’s idea or potentency is enough to clear away some of the angst, yes, the power of mental suggestion.
All this is by way of an introduction to this long blog which Jane feels is something that others may not want to read or be bothered with it. I almost deleted the draft, but I have decided to put it up in any case, with the vague wisp of hope that some other passing soul might find it of worth. I feel compelled to kvetch although it is my own kvetch and may not be of any importance to you. So here is my whine. I’ll pickup where I was a few days ago. . . .
While I write this my left leg from the waist to the knee is hurting. At times I cannot walk but a few steps without seeking some chair, bed or the floor, for the pain within is like a toothache magnified many times. It can be agonizing, it can be excruciating. I’ve given up trying to find words for what I feel when I am having an attack. The word is definitely not the thing itself. Only bed rest gives me some degree of relief, although I get pain while in this position as well.
I just woke up one day and began to experience pain in my left leg which over four weeks has become a sigmificant part of my present day living. The first diagnosis was given by a doctor of orthopaedic medicine. After x-rays he diagnosed a bone spur pressing against the spinal cord; after a MRI it was determined that I had some moderate bulging discs or in plain lingo, as I understand it, pressure was against the cord giving me all this pain. I had spinal stenosis.
The doctor recommended another doctor who would give me an injection into the affected spinal affected, a concoction of coritsone and anaesthetic into the lumbar region to ease the pain if not resolve it for some period of time. It would be a surgical procedure under a fluroscope which I imagine reveals my skeletal structure for an injection. I will need to be sedated for that. Within two weeks I should know if it has had a beneficial response. In short, I have a spinal dengenerative disease in addition to a few other maladies which only make clear to me that I am into deep aging and all its consequences.
Additionally it would be the second time in one month that I would be sedated which only added to the stress.
What is despairing is the confluence of the following — seeing the cardiologist for another echocardiogram and other test for my carotid artery, one of which is gone. I will get the results for this next week. Meanwhile, I hobble about. I may have root canal on August 3oth which makes me cringe. I go from doctor to doctor seriatim this grim August. I wish I could wring this paragraph like a washcloth to give you the total despair I feel at moments.
Having given you the back story to all this, I need to return and fill in the consequences of dealing with the medical system. When the orthopaedic doctor had finished his assessement in the second of two sessions, he at no time offered me pain relief which was mind-numbing and most disheartening.Indeed, I had collapsed at the door of his office. In the first session it took him a few minutes before he lamely shook my hand. I cannot up to now stand to shower, stand to shave, stand for any extended period of time. Jane bathes me which is a regression I do not enjoy. What I have is only my steely mind under crisis, which means I think hours if not days ahead, I think of steps to be taken, of how to navigate the inanimate world and how to hold on to towel brackets when I need urinate. I have been put on notice.
I am struggling to relinguish control which frightens me.
I had asked the doctor if he could me give some meds to alleviate the pain: I asked for medication on that first meeting. His response to me was along the line of suck it up. After that I realized what I was dealing with. I thought of Charcot’s hysteria patients being examined in front of all those doctors in that famous print as he went about examining and evoking their symptons. I was an object to this prick. Indeed he would enter the office without shaking my hand or much of a a greeting. If I had my wish, two mafiosa from Brooklyn would kneecap him with aluminum bats before his morning joe.
At last I went to a pain specialist whose nurse practitioner prescribed two different pills, one a muscle relaxant, the other for pain in addition to a shot to the buttocks of an anti-inflammatory. Although all this mildly alleviated the pain, the procedure next week, hopefully, might make more of an impact. Literally, I cannot walk half a block, or much less. I am home bound, and that is fraying my nerves. The only time I get out is to see a doctor which only compounds what aging is to me: living between doctor visits. I am not alone in this, for sure.
This doctor’s staff were surprised that the doctor who diagnosed my condition had not prescribed meds which he could have since he knew what I had and what kind of pain it involved. However, he would get mightly upset if I said that he was on the lower food chain that related to Mengele.
I thought it might be useful to seek out alternative therapies — accupuncture, medical accupressure (related, I suppose), Reiki, and chiropractic. I got to see a chiropractor and although she is working on the situation I have not received any relief from this, but what relief I may accrue may solely be the fact that I am doing something about the situation instead of being passive. The fact that the laying on of hands would occur encouraged me, self-encouraged me. I need, we all need, for someone to reach out doing dramatic moments to help us. What I did come across was a doctor who was an automaton, A in medicine, F in humanity.
Call it the observing ego, call it what you will, but as I moved from doctor, to doctor, technician to nurse practitioner, I was attentive to how they presented themselves to me and how they responded to what is a kind of physical agony, nerves being pressured against bone. One female technician, in her twenties, blond hair, American pretty invited me into the room with “Take your shirt off, “not so much as a good morning. But I did not do that, as I have a high disrespect of authority. I asked her if she would answer a question or two I had at the moment. Her response was to repeat the opening question. Again, this medical princess viewed me as a hunk of aged cow. We went on.
She was pretty indifferent to the leg pain I was having at the time which I told her about. She was indifferent to that and got a little uppity when I gentlemanly asked her a few questions of what she was doing technically. I wouldn’t be suprised if she found me insubordinate. Jane, I offer evidence here, found her intolerable as well. All technician, a vulva constructed of ox-hide.
A nurse practitioner and a technician at the pain specialist wagged their heads when they heard what I had to share. Both were surprised that the orthopaedic doctor did not give me meds to carry me over before to my next medical assessment. One shared that she suffered from Lupus. And there it is, the capacity to relate one to one. I know what it is to have pain and I can feel for what you are feeling. That is all it takes to calm a patient, me, specifically. And here is an anecdote of what the patient did for the healer.
I needed a MRI and that required that I be motionless for about thirty minutes and not speak at all while my molecules were heated up and photographed in some way. While on this flatbed I later discovered that the 30 minutes were 40 minutes or so, for there was a glitch. Somewhere along the line, Shari, the technician told me that I had so many minutes left. As this was all going on I was thinking on this ironing board. I was in a room that had one exit, a kind of cage with perforated holes in the doors, the tech sitting behind this working on a console. A scene out of an updated Poe story or a set from Alien.
I asked Shari if she was open to suggestions. She said yes. I told her that everybody in a doctor’s office is a therapist, and should view themselves in such a fashion. One pricky receptionist saw me in pain and was just too busy getting and gathering data for her forms than attending to my discomfort.
I told Shari that it would be helpful if the next patient she had was informed when half the time had elapsed, and then be told 15 minutes are remaining, perhaps 8 minutes left. In essence time the session for the patient who is bereft of a watch, music and feeling isolated. Shari listened which was refreshing, we had never met before that. And then she said to me that if what I suggested was followed by her it would be “encouraging” to the patient. I said to her that everything was in that, encouraging the patient in an anxiety-ridden situation. [It is perhaps remarkable, perhaps not remarkable at all, that patient spoke to technician about what he or she could offer as an improved way of delivering a service.]I felt good about this interaction. I had given, and she had taken in.
I needed that for myself, and in the weeks ahead I will demand that.
Leave a Reply