Where Things Diverticulated From The Plan

May as well cover this one.
Fair warning, there will probably be awful pictures, starting with the selfie I don’t remember taking.

The Timeline, As I Somewhat Recall It

Started to feel unwell on Saturday the 3rd of August, day 3 of Gen Con.
Not too bad at first, and I assumed it was a combination of too little water & too many badly-timed poorly-chosen bar food meals causing some issues in, as it it were, the waste-processing zone.

Took some Tylenol ( paracetamol ) to dull the symptoms and upped my water intake a bunch to try to flush the system. It seemed to work.

By the end of my second game of Saturday, at 6pm or so, things weren’t great. I’d been OK seated at the table, but walking back to my hotel I just felt awful, and in some pain; Enough that being able to lean against the wall of the elevator and not move came as a relief.
Fortunately, the game ( Part Time Gods ) was way the hell out at the raggedy end of the ICC, so my hotel was pretty damn close.
Drank some more water, took some more Tylenol, went to sleep for a few hours.

Woke up at midnight.
Went back to sleep again.

On the Sunday I felt better; Not 100%, but the general sensation of “things ain’t right” had decreased, and I assumed that sleep + water + Tylenol had done the job, and I was on the mend.
Well, we know better now, don’t we?

Monday morning, at maybe 2am, is when things got bad.
Woken up by intermittent stabbing pains.
I did look up the bladder & kidney stone symptoms, as well as re-familiarising myself with how orchitis presents, but none of those seemed to fit.
Said pains did not seem to be easing by morning, which I was, to be honest, hoping for.

I’d had plans to hang out with my friend Frank on Monday, and when I mentioned that there might be a problem requiring a doctor, he … Well, he basically took care of it.
Picked me up from the hotel, took me to a hospital ER where he knew they’d have no issues with me being a foreigner, and stayed with me during the day. Also teamed up with our friend Kevin to go and clear out my hotel room once it became clear that I was not going to be checking out in person the next morning.

At the hospital ( Eskenazi ) ER, I was issued with a nifty wristband as soon as I was registered, and got to see an array of medical types pretty quickly.
Getting in was a little interesting, as they had a metal detector and bag scanner in operation, which was a new one on me.

My assumption was that I’d get some antibiotics & be sent on my way.
This was not the case.
Instead I got a doctor who, after saying that he could listen to my accent all day, explained that he was worried about diverticulitis, and sent me off for a CT scan. Somewhere in there there was also a visit from their HIV screening folks ( they try to scan everyone, with the goal of getting the entire population scanned once a year, towards the aim of getting the transmission rate to zero ), and I think there was a visit from someone who took my health insurance details.

At this point we all know how the scan came back.

It was a bit of a rollercoaster, to be honest.
The ER doctor looked at the scans and said, “Yep, Diverticulitis with a perforation”, the surgical team dropped by prior to looking at the scans to talk about antibiotics vs. antibiotics plus “getting a drain put in by Radiology”, then one of them came back to talk about “removing the entire affected section of colon, reattaching to healthy tissue, and you get to poop out of your side for six months”.

It only became apparent much later that the reason he’d mentioned that wasn’t ( as Frank & I assumed ) because he started with the worst option, but because the scan looked really bad, and that’s what they were expecting would happen.

The hospital was slammed, to the extent that they were turning away ambulances, so I spent Monday night in a room in the ER, with a line in my arm, on an antibiotics + fluids drip.
Fortunately, they’d disconnect it at times, so with some judicious timing I could wander along to the bathroom, which is how I noticed the ER rooms with the cell doors, and the guy being walked calmly but firmly back to his room by a group of police officers, with a commentary of “Can’t have you wandering around, brah”.
There was someone in a very agitated state a few rooms in one direction, who was too bust keeping up a non-stop stream of words to do anything like “Sit On The Bed. Sit On The Bed NOW!”. In the other direction, come morning, someone was kicking off on the theme of “Get these things out or I’ll pull them out”, and the nurse was a hairs-breadth away from calling him an idiot, stopping at “You don’t even know why you’re angry” and “You’re being ridiculous right now”. There was also some mention of him having been dropped off by his parole officer, so I get the idea that things were not going well for him in general.

There was some confusion in there as to whether I could eat or drink, and I did get a tray with a sandwich, but wasn’t hungry.
Turns out the answer was that I should not have been allowed the tray, or the Gatorade which I didn’t drink, or any water other than what was needed to swallow tablets.

Tom dropped by sometime on Tuesday, which was both unexpected & very welcome. Not sure how much sense I was making, but we chatted for a while.

I think they forgot about me during a shift change on Tuesday afternoon.
The pain got bad enough that I hit the Call button ( which apparently also had a two-way voice communicator in it, which another nurse had previously figured wasn’t working ). There was some cracking of static after 5 minutes or so, no idea whether they could hear me, and nobody came to check on why the call had gone off, which doesn’t seem like a good thing.
After 15 minutes, I hit it again, and from the sound of it someone was coming to investigate but got intercepted by a person from the wards, who took over in order to get me moved to a room upstairs.
And the painkiller, rather than being Tylenol, was Oxycontin, to make the move easier.
( previously, I think for the move for the CT scan, there was a dose of Fentanyl, which is disconcerting if you’re not expecting it )

The ward room was much nicer, with an actual view.
Also a private bathroom, and a sofa which folded out into a bed for long-stay guests of long-stay patients.

They also fitted a second IV line, for reasons I don’t really understand.
The first attempt didn’t go well, so the second one used a nifty mini-ultrasound to find the vein.

This is getting pretty long, and I’m not really sure who I’m even writing it for anymore, so I’ll stop here and pick it up in a later post.