TL;DR : Spent 9 days (most in extreme agony) in the hospital because my dumb ass eats sunflower seeds by crunching up the seed in the shell whole and sometimes spitting out the resulting mess and sometimes swallowing it.
Warning: There is going to be soooo much TMI in this story around the diagnosis, procedures and complications.
Prologue:
---------
April 8 - April 15:
-------------------
I started eating about one 5.3 ounce bag of sunflower seeds a day. Not in one sitting or anything just throughout the day munching on some as I was working at my computer. They were relatively low-carb (10 grams for the bag) and decent protein (16 grams for the bag) and I was munching on them in lieu of being tempted by higher carb snacks.
I would just munch the seeds in the shell whole most of the time, spitting out the resulting clump of chewed up shell about half the time and swallowing it about half the time. This would have been fine for a small amount of seeds as a one-off snack every so often, but as I was about to find out the quantity I had actually chewed up (and swallowed) over the past week or so was stupidly dangerous.
Part 1: Why won't this prickly personality just leave?
Thursday, April 16:
-------------------
~1:30am: Some discomfort at the back door... but more like just really constipated. I feel like I have to take a dump, but nothing is coming out and there is some pain when I push. Figure maybe I'm mildly constipated, just need to spend a little time sitting on the throne to work this problem out.
~2:30am: It's been an hour. No progress. Feeling significantly more pain and by that I mean more pain than I've ever had before in my life when trying to poop. Morbidly curious, I put some soap on my index finger and tried to see if I could help move / dislodge things with my finger. At the inner rectum I feel a hard, spiky mass. Couldn't estimate the size except it was much larger than the door it was trying to get through. So... that would be the source of my pain. The spikes were digging into flesh sort of anchoring it in place and doubly preventing it from exiting because the spikes weren't just acting as anchors for the mass but were also having the secondary effect of not letting the rectal tissues expand to let the mass through even if it wasn't anchored.
So for my next step I tried working my finger against the tip of the mass it could reach, managing to scrape off about a pinch of the spiky material. It is splinters of wood anywhere from 2 - 10mm long and 2mm wide. I know this because I saved some and still have them. More on that later. It was the indigestible chewed up sunflower seed shells. Hoping against hope that I could make enough progress this way to unblock things and pass whatever was in there I spent the next few hours in the shower with running water and soapy index finger working more material loose. I managed to get a few teaspoons worth of the seed shells out over that time.
I gave up around 5:30am.
I had only slept about an hour from 12:30 to 1:30 when the initial discomfort had woken me up. There was no sleep in sight since things were relatively painful, plus now the whole area (inside and out) was hurting due to the process of working some of the mass through with my finger.
I called my primary care physician's office later in the morning and they were all booked up for that day but had a slot for me to come in the next day (one of the other doctors in the office, my primary was still booked up solid that day as well). I described to the nurse what was happening and she suggested pain relievers and laxatives until my appointment.
This is about when the uncontrolled leaking / seepage started. The inner rectum is an involuntary muscle. You use your outer rectum to hold things back consciously when you have to go but are not in a situation / location where you can go, but when you do that you are fighting against your inner rectum which will just squeeze and spasm and try to move whatever mass is sitting by your backdoor out into the world no matter how you feel about the situation. Some amount of material (mostly brown liquid) was working its way through when that was happening. And pain. Lots of pain. Contracting and squeezing against the spikes.
Friday, April 17:
-----------------
The next 24 hours from noon-ish on the 16th until 1:00pm on the 17th were a haze of pain, jumping in the shower regularly to try to deal with the part of the blockage that was pressed up against the inner rectum, taking Tylenol in higher than recommended doses more often than recommended and of course no sleep.
I managed to work loose several more pinches of seed shell material, but was in absolute misery. I could not sit, I could only lay on my side or stand. Anything else was too painful. Moving around was difficult. I basically walked between our bed and the bathroom.
My wife drove me to the doctors office for my 1:30 appointment. I was having significant difficulty walking due to the pain. The hallway to the doctors office was a long, slow painful shuffle. Sitting down once in the office was still not an option so I put one knee up on a chair while standing on the other leg. That alleviated some of the pain.
Once called in they needed to get my vitals. They wanted me to sit down to get them. After some trial and error I ended up moving two of the chairs in the exam room several inches apart with a hamstring on each one supporting my weight so that nothing was pressing up against my nether exit. Once that finished I lay down on my side on the exam table trying to figure out what was worse, the pain I was currently in or the embarrassment I was going to feel from the exam / procedure that was unavoidable. Then I started thinking about the pain the exam itself might cause.
The doctor was running late so he did not actually see me until about 2:15pm. By 2:25 I had gone over everything and he had stuck a gloved and lubed finger up my rear to assess the situation. We talked through all the alternatives and I opted for the direct path to attempt to end the pain: have him try to manually remove the blockage.
He started by applying topical Lidocaine around in and around the general area where my pain was located. He then proceeded to shove a finger pretty far in, crook it through the part of the mass closest to the exit and pull out a small wad of splinters. That was exactly as painful as it sounds even with the Lidocaine having been administered. I survived a single repetition of that maneuver before tapping out. I told him I simply could not tolerate that amount of pain again.
He said there was a nuclear option for the pain (he wasn't allowed to put me under in the office). He said a direct Lidocaine injection (i.e. via needle) into the nerves around the anus would definitely deaden the pain significantly more than the topical gel had. I 100% heard "injection", singular. He said it would be painful going in, but would eventually render the whole area very numb. Since we had already started down this path, I said "Let's do it". I had taken three Lidocaine injections in my knee 30-odd years ago when I had knee surgery. I knew it felt like liquid fire going in but had quickly numbed. I thought I knew what I was getting into.
Five minutes later a needle was injecting Lidocaine into the flesh of my rectum. That single needle reset my entire idea of the 1-10 pain scale. I screamed through teeth that I had clenched around a pair of clean socks that I brought with me. I had brought an entire change of clothes in a backpack in case anything messy happened. Since I thought I had an approximate grasp of the level of pain the needle was going to introduce based on a decades past knee surgery, I prepared by biting down on the extra pair of clean socks. I'm not really sure how much that muffled my scream, but it could not have been much.
30 or so seconds later as the pain started to subside and I released my death grip on the side of the exam table the doctor said "Only three more to go."
Let's face facts... I was hysterical at this point. If this had been a scene from an old-school movie where I was a person who was freaking out, the doctor would have slapped the crap out of me while screaming at me to calm down.
I cried while asking "Thee more?"
He said "Yes, to deaden the nerves we need a total of four shots". Again... I had originally heard "injection". Singular.
I was completely unable to imagine the amount of pain that three more shots would be. I wasn't even sure I could quantize what I had been through with the first injection.
I was sleep deprived, in constant pain and only knew that we had to keep going to get this mess out of me to stop the pain. I told him that as long as he didn't mind my screaming and that the screams weren't going to freak anyone else in the office out we needed to keep going. So we did the next two injections in relatively quick succession with my screaming through a mouthful of sock while clenching up, having a mini-seizure and resuming my death grip on the side of the exam table.
After the third shot I requested a 5 minute break before the fourth shot. I honestly was in a panic and thinking of making a run for it. Again, I was in a sleep-deprived state of intense pain that was going right off the top end of my pain scale with each Lidocaine shot. There were no coherent thoughts in my head at that point.
We eventually did the fourth shot, the same process as the first three with me screaming and crying.
After the fourth one was over he apologized to me. He said he knew that the shots must have been pure agony, but it was the only way to deaden the pain enough to move forward with the rest of the clean out procedure.
The rest of the procedure involved him using his fingers to break up the mass as much as possible, followed by an enema. Rinse, repeat. Many times. For the better part of an hour. Lots of splinters of seed shells were coming out. Wads the size of marbles on up to ping pong balls with each enema.
What needs to be pointed out here is that while the nerves in the direct vicinity of the inner and outer rectum were deadened, that wasn't the case for the nerves having to do with the space further up inside. While not as directly sensitized to the nature of the spiky mass that was being repeatedly jammed up against them and forcibly broken apart by digital manipulation, they were acutely aware the pressure of the process at all times and occasionally let me in know in no uncertain terms that they were also feeling some pain.
I had a simple signal for the doctor each time the pain became unbearable during the digital manipulation process: I would simply scream "STOP!" as loud as I could and we would move on the enema portion of that cycle.
Also, I don't want to act like any of this process was a surprise at the time it happened (other than the 3 extra Lidocaine injections). We talked through the whole thing as well as other options and time-frames. I knew there would be collateral colon damage as a result of this method, but the options were really limited and this seemed to be the way to clear it all out as quickly as possible.
So at the conclusion of the hour, most of the mass roughly a little larger than a baseball had been removed. The doctor went back for a final feel around to make sure there weren't any more chunks that needed to be removed via enema and the unthinkable happened: a second mass dropped down from farther up in the colon. I felt it happen. He let out a defeated euphemism involving a popular deity and confirmed what I had felt. "A second blockage just dropped."
I really don't know what further details to give here. We mutually agreed to plow ahead, with neither one of us really sure we could do it (at least that was my opinion).
Fingers, pressure, pain, enema... over and over for a second session.
The second mass ended up being the same size as the first. Yeah. I was well past delirious by the time it was over. My wife had been waiting in the office lobby the whole time. It was after 5:00... everyone was gone from the office except for me, the doctor and one nurse / assistant who had hung around to help close.
The doctor prescribed a pain killer (Tramadol) to go with a regimen of Tylenol. Also on deck were Lidocaine cream for topical numbing and Hydrocortisone both in cream and suppository form to help with healing all the damaged tissue.
Additionally he put me on a course of polyethylene glycol 3350 laxative at six times the usual dose (a double dose three times a day) in an effort to get whatever stragglers might be left.
As my wife helped me walk down the hallway I wasn't aware of being in very much pain. I was relieved that the ordeal was over more than anything and broke down crying for the umpteenth. My wife got me to the exit of the building and went to bring the car around to me (no way I was going to make that walk across the parking lot).
The ride home was uneventful and after getting me situated on my side in bed, my wife made a run to the pharmacy to get all the things the doctor had prescribed.
Apparently I slept for about an hour. I have no memory of that but my wife says I was snoring. My first sleep since the pain had started shortly after midnight 40+ hours earlier.
By the time I woke up from that nap, the Lidocaine injections were wearing off. That was most likely what caused me to wake up. Tylenol and Tramadol got me to a place where I could at least think and communicate, but it was still plenty painful. A good 5.5-6.0 on my new pain scale.
The next 12 hours from Friday night into Saturday morning were a series of nod-offs followed by immediately waking up to pain. I know from watching the clock that I was never out for more than 10 minutes.
Part 2: An unwelcome visitor returns...
Saturday, April 18:
-------------------
Around 5:30am I realized (well, more finally admitted to myself) that I was in the same kind of discomfort that I had been in prior to the events at the doctors the day before. I spread some of the Lidocaine cream around and a little bit in and waited for the small sting to go away and for the numbing to begin. After the pain had subsided a bit I used a Hydrocortisone cream coated finger to see if my worst fears were being realized. The answer was unmistakably clear and to the point: Yes. Another spiky mass was parked at the exit and my body had resumed the useless involuntary contractions trying to push it out.
Everything about this process up until this point had been about "how do I deal with the pain?". That all changed the moment my finger felt the spikes Saturday morning. Literal despair set in. I knew I could not do the same process as we had Friday. That was a one-time deal (or at least not immediately repeatable) because of the collateral damage to my insides that was caused by doing it that way. The doctor and I had talked about that very thing when looking at my options.
I had no frame of reference for the mindset I now needed.
In "The Matrix Reloaded" the Oracle tells Neo "We can never see past the choices we don't understand". At that moment I couldn't even see any choices. I could not understand how I was going to get through the next 5 minutes, much less make a decision to do anything about the problem. Mind you I was not in overwhelming pain at this point. Between the pain reliever pills and Lidocaine topical cream the actual pain was dialed back a bit from the day before, but mentally I was shot. I had no will to even try to solve the problem. I was caught in a loop trying to process the thought that everything I had gone through was for nothing. I had voluntarily chosen a path of the worst pain I had ever been in because of the chance that it might be an immediate solution.
I was frozen, crumpled in the shower without any coherent thoughts for about two hours. Just the fuzzy idea of the current situation and how nothing had really changed since yesterday cycling over and over. Straight up denial about the fact that I needed to take action of some sort. Somehow I convinced myself that I could exist indefinitely in that state while the world went about its business.
Around 8:00am my mind cleared enough that I realized I needed help so I went to wake my wife up. She was actually sleeping in the guest bedroom at this point because we had known that I would be tossing and turning all night and at least one of us needed some sleep to make rational decisions. I stumbled down the hall and she took one look at me and knew something awful was happening. I told her there was another mass and she helped me back to our bedroom / bathroom.
I had decided that we should just go to the ER when my doctor called me (around 8:30am) to check in. I explained the situation and he could obviously tell I was close to / over the edge with respect to my mental state. He said he just could not imagine that there could be that much more material given how much had been removed the day before. He managed to calm me down and talk me through a 24 hour plan of giving the laxatives a shot of clearing out the remaining mass as long as the pain was bearable with the painkillers that he had prescribed.
My wife had bought a small 6-ounce enema kit when she had picked up my prescriptions on the off chance that it might come in handy during the recovery process. So armed with some newfound resolution from my doctor's pep talk, I was determined to take what action I could with what tools were available to me.
I used a sort modified version of the procedure the doctor had used Friday. Instead of trying to brute force tear the mass apart (and thus causing even more injury to my insides), I pressed the tip of the enema applicator up against the mass and squeezed really hard on the bottle. The theory being I could dislodge a little bit off the mass with a strong stream out of the bottle. It did work, but it wasn't getting very much out at a time. Just small pinches of material with each application.
The next step I tried was pushing the bottle more forcefully into the mass while squeezing in an effort to break it into smaller pieces. This wasn't nearly as effective as I had hoped. I was able to get something like a thimble full of material out every 5-6 enemas. For the record, I was smearing the applicator with Hydrocortisone each time in an effort to get some medication into the affected area while this was going on.
So Saturday was another day of repetitive pain, humiliation and constantly wondering how I was going to get through the next 15 minutes. Basically I alternated 1 hour in the shower doing repeated enemas and 1 hour in bed laying on my side, occasionally drinking double doses of laxative and popping Tylenol and Tramadol at the prescribed intervals. That was my day. All day and night until around midnight when I could no longer bring myself to get in the shower.
I had probably removed something like 3 tablespoons of material total during my all-day hour on, hour off repeating 6 ounce enema process.
Another sleepless night passed with me twisting, turning and doing anything I could to find a position that caused less pain than the position I was currently in.
During all this I needed to wear adult diapers. I had long ago lost conscious control of my rear-end. It leaked brown liquid at regular intervals especially when the inside was actively clenching. We put an absorbent pad that my wife had also bought earlier on the bed and I wore two layers of diapers during the times that I was not in the shower so as not to make a mess of things.
Sunday, April 19:
-----------------
After another early morning consultation with my doctor, we decided I needed to get my ass to the ER. My doctor recommended a hospital where he thought the Gastrointestinal staff would be my best option, but we once again covered the fact that they probably wouldn't take any action (except try to manage my pain) until Monday.
I was once again at least temporarily mentally stabilized by the fact that defined action was going to be taken and that while it was still my problem, other people would soon be actively working to fix it. At least that was the idea.
We arrived in the ER at the hospital around 9:30am. I went through all the intake procedures and then was back in the ER waiting room until about 10:45am when they came and walked me to an ER exam room. I laid on my side on the exam table with my wife waiting nearby until I was briefly examined and questioned. They then sent me for a CT scan of my abdomen.
After that I was put back in the ER waiting area until someone could look at the results of the scan. That was around 12:40pm. After 2 more hours an ER nurse came and *tried* to put an IV into my right arm. The first try was unsuccessful. Her second attempt for some reason was exactly at my inner elbow. The discomfort and awkwardness of that exact location would be a source of frustration for me for the next few days, but more on that later.
In the moment it allowed the staff to shoot some painkiller right into my bloodstream which helped with the wait to actually get into a room and hopefully get on the path to do something meaningful.
Multiple doctors came to talk to me and hear the story during the time I spent in the waiting room, finishing up with the head of Gastroenterology. His only real contribution to the situation was to advise me that my all day enema session had probably not been the best idea.
Finally around 8:30pm I was back in an ER exam room. I wish I could tell you something about those 8ish hours spent waiting for a room, but honestly I was exhausted, in significant pain and now on top of everything else the only food I'd had in 24 hours was an 11 ounce protein shake in the morning which admittedly was better than nothing but by 8:30pm didn't really register with everything else that was going on.
They told me I would have a sigmoidoscopy the next day (Monday), gave me 4 liters of GoLYTELY to drink before then and basically told me to tough it out until they could do the procedure. I was given to understand that this would be an all-in-one git-er-done thing. They would get all up in my business with the official tools for doing so and get me cleaned out. But first the GoLYTELY. GoLYTELY is an industrial strength laxative. I needed to drink the whole 4 liter bottle before the procedure the next day. Awesome.
So another sleepless night. I was in the ER. I was hooked up to a pulse ox, a heart monitor and an IV. Everything was beeping and whirring. The f---ing IV alarm would go off every time I bent my arm too much (because of the placement of the IV, bending my arm occluded the IV). The f---ing pulse ox alarm would go off every time my breathing was interrupted from holding my breath during the intense pain from the involuntary clenches. The heart monitor alarm went off every time I accidentally knocked the wire connector loose while turning in bed or when an electrode came unstuck from me for similar reasons. During the intervals when the noises in my own room weren't loud enough to keep me awake, all the other noises from out in the hall / down the hall in the ER were quite enough. People yelling. Other machines beeping. Gurneys banging into walls. Various carts and machines rolling down the hall and banging into my door, other doors or the wall.
Your basic normal overnight in the ER. But this was now my fifth night with no sleep except for the hour I got on Friday evening when we first got back from the procedure done in my doctor's office. I think the fact that I was so exhausted from lack of sleep may have helped me deal with the ongoing pain. I'm not sure what kind of pain killer I was getting at this point. I wouldn't start getting the real good stuff until after the sigmoidoscopy.
When not trying to stop one of my machines from beeping I watched YouTube videos on my phone all night. I could not now tell you what they were. Everything was still happening. Spiky mass at the backdoor, lots of internal clenching, lots of leaking into a diaper and sometimes leaking out of a diaper necessitating a cleanup effort. Less and less dignity left. Less and less sanity left. Sleep-deprived, in pain and trying to choke down 4 f---ing liters of intestinal Drano which was obviously only adding to the leakage problems and as far as I could tell by continually working it's way through the mass cleaning out any material that wasn't wood it was turning the blockage into a solid mass of splinters rather than splinters embedded in fecal material.
They put a portable toilet in the ER exam room I was in since there was no way to unhook from everything and get across the hall to the ER toilet in less than 10 minutes.
Part 3: Where I get put under so they can shove machinery up my rear...
Monday, April 20:
-----------------
Another sleepless night, although this one had lots of distractions. I was entertained every so often by the various yelling going on in the ER wing both from patients and staff. Although at one point there was a very racist patient saying some things and complaining about the staff in ways that I don't feel the need to relate here. There was finally some kind of security / LEO intervention with that patient that involved threats of a stun gun being used.
I occupied my mind by trying to pay attention to and learn as much lingo as possible from the staff communications.
There was also the regular distraction of the general intercom / loudspeaker announcements regarding incoming ambulance and helicopter transport. The same system was sometimes used to notify everyone of "runaway" patients in various states of dress. Once I understood that I wasn't going to get any sleep anyway, all of the announcements and verbal communications of the staff that I could hear became quite interesting. Someone would open my door and pop in and check on me every so often and I was as physically comfortable as the situation would allow. They had given me pillows and blankets and I was able to make the 4 foot trip to the portable commode for the most part when necessary to allow for liquid discharges from my rear end.
In the mid-morning a junior member of the GI team came to consult with me and poke at my abdomen. She let me know that the sigmoidoscopy would be taking place later today and that they were trying to work me into the schedule around the previously scheduled regular procedures. It was around this time that I finished off the 4 liters of GoLYTELY that I had been given the previous evening. I was also informed that the reason I was still in the ER was that there were no regular hospital beds open at this time. Under normal, less crowded circumstances I would not have been in the ER while awaiting the procedure. They would have already moved me to a regular room.
The multiple times an hour of involuntary internal clenching of the spiky mass had become a regular part of my life at this point. I guess in some ways I had grown used to it. I don't know how to put it, but the constant nature of it was somewhat mitigated by the constant nature of all the ER distractions I've mentioned. It made it possible to tolerate the pain with a level of resigned acceptance. Plus I had some mental relief from knowing they were going to do a medical procedure for which I would be put under completely. I was really looking forward to that.
At 1:30pm I was taken to the sigmoidoscopy preparation area. Various doctors, nurses, anesthesiologists, etc., came by to give me all the warnings / consent forms, explanations and what have you. Eventually they wheeled me into the procedure room and after a little bit of adjustment of my position on the bed I went under anesthesia.
Around 5:45pm I was fully awake and aware and had been given the rundown of the results from the sigmoidoscopy. They had encountered a fair amount of material and used the scope to bust some of it up and other methods to remove some of it. Since the MyChart has all the notes in it, I'll copy those here:
------------------------------------
4/20/26 sigmoidoscopy findings copied from attending's report:
FINDINGS: There were multiple sunflower seed shells throughout the colon. A long time was spent trying to retrieve debris from the rectum. The colon was flooded with water with limited benefit.
A Roth net was used to retrieve sunflower seeds shells, this was unsuccessful.
Careful manual disimpaction with significant lube was used with a significant amount of shells removed.
Colonoscope was able to be traversed up to mid descending colon where there was still liquid stool limiting view as well as sunflower seed shells.
------------------------------------
So they had removed a bunch of shell debris, but plenty still remained.
What I can say is that in the immediate aftermath of the procedure I was not feeling the same internal pressure / pain that had been there most of the time since Wednesday night. The relief was the same I had felt in the time period immediately after the manual removal that had taken place in the doctors office on Friday.
I was wheeled back to my ER exam room.
Then as if none of the things I had been through so far were embarrassing enough I had an absolute lower-intestinal blowout around 7:00pm. I felt an immediate surge of pressure in my rear. Whatever was in there was coming out NOW and there was nothing I could do about it. I got my feet on the floor and was simultaneously mid-motion of the twist and shuffle required to get my butt into the seat of the portable commode while yanking down my diaper when the explosion happened. I am not even sure that if I had been appropriately seated on the commode that it would have all gone in. No way to know for sure since I was still in the process of sitting down with my butt a good 6-8 inches off the seat and at an angle rather than pointing straight down. But given what actually did happen I am positive that things would have fountained up and around my butt, hips and lower back and escaped the relatively shallow commode pot right under my rear end.
A mix of chewed up seed shells (a noticeable chunk of which was about the size of half of a ping pong ball), excrement and brown liquid was expelled from my butt with a force I would not have believed possible. I guess there was some kind pressure buildup involving all the materials mentioned as well as gas from all the activities so far. It hit the wall, floor, parts of the commode and covered distances and angles that the staff actually marveled at during the cleanup process. There was some higher on the wall a foot or so behind the commode than could possibly be accounted for, but it was obviously from the event. There was some in the corner of the room 5-6 feet away. My back and the back side of my legs had deposits and droplets on them.
The ensuing clean-up effort removed any remaining traces of dignity that I had held onto to that point. Lets just say it was efficient, involved changing every bit of bedding and clothing and three staff mopping and scrubbing the walls and floors while I was completely exposed for a bit to get cleaned up and changed into a new diaper and gown.
By the time I was cleaned up, hooked back up to all the beeping, buzzing machinery and back to lying on my side in the bed it was around 8:00pm. That was when the nurse brought in another 4 liter bottle of GoLYTELY and told me that according to the doctor's orders I needed to down this second jug by noon the next day. So I lay there and tried to mentally prepare for that journey all over again. This time she had brought some powdered drink packets for me to add to the mix.
As the last vestiges of pain killers from the procedure had worn off I had another long, sleepless night in the ER ahead of me where my main goal was to somehow ingest that second 4 liter bottle. Monday night was largely a repeat of Sunday night in my ER room with the exception that my inner rectum wasn't actively trying to push a spiky mass out multiple times an hour.
Tuesday, April 21:
------------------
At 6:00am I was wheeled out of my room to get an x-ray of my abdomen in some other room. It wasn't super close but still only 3 minutes away or so. After I got back to my ER room I was visited by a different junior member of the GI team. I explained to her that I could already feel the beginnings of another blockage. In my mind the current regimen of laxative I was on was actually causing it in that the material was being shepherded to the exit and collecting there without the prospect of being able to be passed (with the exception of the post-procedure explosion from yesterday).
And the pain was definitely starting to come back. If the whole area hadn't been as super-sensitive as it now was thanks to all the happenings, I knew what I would feel if I could have gotten a finger near the inner rectum. I let her know that I was going to be in considerable pain in short order. She said she'd talk to the head of the GI dept and get back to me for the next steps, probably another sigmoidoscopy in the near future.
She left and never came back. In fact I never saw her again for my entire stay in the hospital even though I saw the other female junior member and male junior member multiple times after that.
Around 4:00pm or so I got a visit from the hospitalist (pretty sure that's what he said). He was a doctor assigned to / in charge of the whole general floor / area. Once again I got to tell my story. As I was telling my story I realized the junior GI person from the morning had never come back and had never passed on any news about next steps. I also was starting to definitely climb the pain scale and I hadn't had any pain killers in a while. I had a mini break-down retelling things to the new doctor, realizing how much pain I was actually in currently and coming to the other realization that the GI junior from this morning had never come back to inform me of next steps.
The new doctor (after looking over all the notes of my history and hearing my personal version of it directly) prescribed oxycodone and hydromorphone as needed for pain relief. Probably most people have some idea of what oxycodone is. They gave me the immediate release pill version which took a bit of time to kick in (20-30 minutes) and lasted a few hours. I was on oxycodone pretty much 24 / 7 after that. I was allowed to have it every 6 hours. There were a few stretches where I went longer than 6 hours between doses, but not many. Pain was my constant companion. Everything down there hurt inside and out.
Around this time the GI team did direct the nursing staff to start me on my third 4 liter bottle of GoLYTELY. Again to be finished before noon the next day.
Also at some point in the early evening after the visit from the hospitalist, I was transferred from the ER exam room I had been in since Sunday night to an observation room which was quite an improvement from a noise pollution point of view. I was pretty down to muffled announcements and my own monitoring machines intermittent beeping complaints.
The wired heart monitor was swapped out for a wireless one which could be tucked in the gown pocket (the wires still went from the electrodes on my chest and abdomen to the wireless monitor, but the connection from there to the actual hardware screen was wireless. A huge improvement.
I was given my first dose of hydromorphone in the OBS room as I was in significant pain, but not allowed another dose of oxycodone yet. The hydromorphone was the injection kind that went right into my IV and into my blood stream. It went to work damn near immediately. It was magic. It caused a near total absence of pain. Hydromorphone is apparently about 7 times more powerful than morphine. The big drawback (as far as I was concerned) is that the pain relief lasted 45 minutes to an hour at most. It was for taking the edge off things when my pain level was in the unbearable range. With the hydromorphone injected into me I was able to stand and move around on my own a bit in the OBS room. I think this motion slightly dislodged the blockage as not long after shuffling the few feet back and forth from the bathroom in the room to the bed, my sleep-deprived pain-wracked body was numbed enough to go ahead and have another go at a blowout. I had a little more time and mobility, and this time wasn't as explosive and I got the overwhelming majority of it into the toilet in the bathroom. There was some amount of shell particles but nowhere near the amount from the previous blowout. When I was done I was back in pain and I could tell that the (or a different) blockage was back in the usual spot.
However, I did have good painkillers to work with for the rest of my stay and the nursing staff kept bringing me flavor packets for the never-ending supply of GoLYTELY it was apparently my destiny to drink.
Oh the magic of oxycodone and hydromorphone, a call button, and a room and nursing staff away from the ER that was aware of the exact intervals that I was allowed to have which. I actually slept from 1:30am - 4:00am and 5:00am - 6:00am thanks to the timing of the pain killers. I would have slept past 6:00 except...
Part 4: Synthetic opioids are my new best friends
Wednesday, April 22:
--------------------
The portable x-ray unit showed up at my OBS room at 6:00am. I was woken up and moved around a bit as they took multiple shots and finally they left... but I was good and awake by that point.
I finished up the GoLYTELY shortly before noon.
I received a consult from another junior member of the GI team in the early afternoon. He told me there would be no procedures today, but probably one Thursday. They were genuinely concerned about the damage inside (the collateral damage was ulcers in the colon). and wanted to give me a few days between sigmoidoscopies. The bastard didn't leave without giving instructions for ANOTHER F---ING 4 LITERS of GoLYTELY to get down before noon Thursday. If you haven't been keeping count they had me drink 16 liters of industrial strength laxative over a 4 day period.
But at least I had learned how to mix in a ton of flavor packets (most Crystal Light). I found dumping in a combination of the Grape, Orange Sunrise and Lemonade all in the same 4 liter bottle made the mess drinkable. Like I could chug directly from the bottle 10-15 gulps at a time. My new superpower.
Later in the afternoon I was transferred to a real room. A real room of my own. One had finally opened up. It even had a window.
I was taken off the heart monitor and pulse ox monitor. No more beeping machines!
Which brings us back around to a particular thorn in my side for the whole visit to this point: the damn IV that the ER waiting room staff had stuck directly on the inside of my right elbow. Because of where and how they lodged it in there, I could not bend my arm very far without occluding the IVs when they were attached. And I could not bend it far enough to touch my face / head with my right hand in any case. It had been a much lower priority inconvenience with everything else that had been going on, but now it was center stage... and not because of anything I said.
My assigned nurse noticed it and said something to the effect of "What the hell, why did they put your IV there? Does it hurt?". I just nodded. It actually was causing a fair bit of discomfort, it just wasn't in the same league with all the other pain that I had been experiencing. And probably between the oxycodone and hydromorphone I really hadn't given it much more thought because I'd become skilled at adjusting my glasses and headphones with my left hand and arm. She called in a couple of other assistants of some kind (I never saw them again) and they took that IV out and gave me a new one more conveniently located closer to my wrist.
With my regimen of oxycodone and hydromorphone I managed a few more hours of sleep Wednesday night from around 1:00- 3:30 and 4:00-5:30am
I need to talk about my hallucinations. They had started on Tuesday and were just different. I have hallucinated before, most memorably when I had pneumonia as a teenager. I had a full audio / visual hallucination at that time, having conversations with people who were not there (family members). I figured it out one afternoon after my mom had come home from work and I asked her something related to what we had talked about when she had come home at lunch time to check on me. She had not come home at lunch that day figuring I was well-entrenched in my daily routine of not moving from the couch in the living room during the day where I could sleep, had access to a TV and phone and could make the short trip to the bathroom and kitchen as needed. So the full-blown interactive conversation we'd had at lunch was a figment of my imagination no doubt related to how screwed up I was at the time from the effects of the pneumonia in addition to the medications I was on.
The hallucinations I started having in the hospital were way different. My mind was just going somewhere else whenever the clenching / contracting pains would start and I have no idea what it means or why it presented this way. Whenever the waves of pain from the clenching would start, I would get this collage-like image of still frames from movies and TV shows in my mind. I could clearly see them. I still remember some of them.
There would be like 4 images glued together. The images were not related to each other except that they were all from TV or movies. As an example one such collage was a meld of the opening stopwatch from "60 Minutes", an image of the "pivot" scene from "Friends", an image of Bart at the chalkboard from "The Simpsons" and Wash playing with his dinosaurs from "Firefly". There were some that made more frequent appearances than others (lots of images from "Matrix" movies and "The Legend of Korra" and "Better Off Dead"). As it was happening, it was all that was in my mind. If I closed my eyes I could clearly see the images... I guess it was more like a small quilt of images because I would clearly see each image as if I had a TV screen in multi-view. Does anyone want to psychoanalyze that?
Part 5: Who needs to pee?
Thursday, April 23:
-------------------
Thursday morning I got off on the wrong foot when I tried to use the toilet before the portable x-ray unit got there (scheduled for 6:00am) and they arrived early while I was still in the bathroom. So they just left.
For breakfast I was allowed to have liquids. They gave me beef broth and coffee and some juice. The broth was magic. I asked for more and found out I could get chicken broth as well. So I asked for some more and the nurse told me no problem. A few minutes later I was slurping down the extra broth having already finished off my initial supply of liquids.
The nurses had no information on when x-ray might be back, so of course my body let me know that it needed to make another attempt at passing some of the liquids right around 8:00am which of course is exactly when x-ray showed up to try again. Ugh.
Third time being the charm, the x-ray team came back around 9:30 and finally got my daily abdominal x-ray done. Now I just needed to wait on word from the GI team on what and when the next step was.
Around noon the nurse informed me that the GI team wanted to proceed with another sigmoidoscopy today, but first they wanted an enema done. I asked her what the logistics of the enema entailed since I had little to no control over what was going on in back. She explained that it would be done with me laying on my side on my bed. That worked for me. I asked if there would be any manual disimpaction prior to the enema and she said she was only allowed to administer the enema.
I requested we approach this with my hydromorphone administration window in mind, and she agreed. She got everything prepped and ready to go then administered a dose of hydromorphone and said she'd be back in 5 minutes. Since the nurse was not allowed to disimpact the blockage that was there, I did a little of that work myself after the hydromorphone
kicked in but before she came back. I did my best to push and prod and break up the blockage until she came back.
During the enema, a decent amount of loose seed pieces and three clumps the size of the 1 oz clear medicine cups they bring your pills in at the hospital were eliminated, so my self administered disimpaction did some good. Theoretically.
The combination of my effort, plus the enema ended up being really painful. The material that did come out came at the cost of even more pain in that area. I mean it was still basically wood splinters. I realized within 5 minutes of the enema being over that from a pain point of view, that whole process had been a mistake in delayed pain. I was soon again at my maximum pain threshold but nowhere near a window for receiving either oxycodone or hydromorphone. I grit my teeth, and rocked in place on my side for a little while before realizing I just couldn't take it. I told the nurse I was about to freak out from the renewed pain and she talked to the doctors and they gave permission for an extra dose of hydromorphone at that point.
I was still on the tail end of my hydromorphone relief period when GI came and got me for the sigmoidoscopy. I ended up being put under right around the time where things were beginning to get excessively painful again.
I woke up from the second sigmoidoscopy around 4:00pm needing to urinate as bad as I ever have in my life. I know I have used up my allowance of things being designated the most extreme that they have ever been in my life, but it was true. I had to go. Now. I pleaded for a urinal from a nurse in the recovery area who finally brought it to me. As I arranged things so as not to make a mess (I was laying on my side) I overheard a snippet of conversation. Apparently they had given me a full IV bag during the sigmoidoscopy, but had not put a catheter in. So I was currently holding in that whole bag plus everything I'd had to drink earlier in the day prior to the enema.
Then came the sucker punch... as I tried to finally let loose, nothing came out. I don't know how to explain the feeling that I had to simultaneously pee worse than I ever had in my life, but also absolutely nothing was coming out when I tried. I shifted in bed a bit, I rearranged things to be a little less at an angle, nothing worked. The nurse came over to talk to me and explained that sometimes the pain blockers (or combination of them) can cause situations where you can't evacuate your bladder on demand. She said she didn't want to wheel me back to the room until something happened. Eventually after about another 5 minutes I managed to pee out 200ml, but it stopped mid-flow. I still really had to go but that was all that was happening for now.
When we got back to the room, I explained to the nurse what was going on and she went and got a bladder monitor / ultrasound thing. She did a reading and it showed >999 ml. Apparently anything over the 400-500 ml range for someone in my condition was cause for a catheter to be used. I was in a whole different state (note state, not level) of pain by this point needing to go but my body just said "nope... going to hold on to this for a bit."
So the nurse went and got a catheter and put it in. Yup. Just like that. Just as uncomfortable and awkward as any other time a catheter is put up in your business while you're just laying there trying to decide what is worse, the indignity of the situation or the actual pain.
Yay... tube finally all the way in. Boo... nothing coming out. "That's strange." the nurse said. "Let me try a different catheter."
Excuse me? We're going to do that again? Right now?
She came back again a minute later with a different catheter. Got the old one out. Put the new one in. Both experiences were just as awesome as the first one going in. Still nothing flowing out. Yikes.
The nurse said this had never happened before and she was going to call for a Urology consult and they could do the third attempt at a catheter. Excuse me again, but what the f—?
She removed the second catheter (by this time I was an old hand at having things shoved into and pulled out of almost any area of my body).
As we waited for the urology consult I was able to start peeing a little on my own into the 1000 ml urinal I still had from the recovery room. Got about 600ml before she came back in to check on me and tell me urology was still going to be another 15 minutes. Since I had squeezed some she decided to do another bladder ultrasound. Still > 999 ml. WTF?
I was able to go again a few minutes later before the urologist arrived. 500 ml more expelled. The urologist did the reading this time from the ultrasound. 864ml. I'd put out 1.3 liters in the last hour and there was still almost a liter in me. The urologist said that now that the volume was below 999 she was willing to wait another 15 minutes before trying to put in the (third) catheter. That was all the motivation my body needed. I soon (maybe another 5 minutes) was able to put out another 550 ml. When she returned and did another measurement the ultrasound reading was 607. I was slowly managing to get it out of my bladder faster than my kidneys could put it in there. She again extended the wait-and-see time by another 30 minutes and I managed to let out another 450 ml in that time and the next reading showed 410. The urologist said as long as this keeps up we don't need the catheter, but I need you to keep using the portable urinals(s) (they had brought me two more) so that we can keep track of the volume of output. So for the next 36 hours I had to pee into these things, and then the next time a nurse visited she would log the volume and pour it out. Exciting times.
Once all that BS was over and I'd had my liquid dinner I managed to sleep from 10:30pm to 1:00am with the help of my best friends oxycodone and hydromorphone.
Friday, April 24:
-----------------
I woke up around 1:00 from pain that wasn't excruciating but was enough to keep me from sleeping. I was eligible for an oxycodone pill. It took effect in 30 minutes or so and I slept from 1:30am to 5:00am.
I knew better than to go back to sleep and miss the 6:00 appointment and I could handle the pain as-is for the time being. I waited until after my 6:00am x-ray to ask to have any more oxycodone. I was still pretty tired and managed to actually fall asleep again *without* hydromorphone and slept from about 6:30am to 8:00am.
My day nurse filled me in on the results of the sigmoidoscopy (which I could have seen in MyChart had I been thinking clearly enough, but all the bladder stuff knocked the procedure results to the back burner in my brain).
Basically, they had removed a fair amount more of the seed shell pieces, seemingly about the same amount that come out in the enema and were of the opinion that the remaining seed shell mass could be passed by the usual method and that needed to be the strategy because of all the tissue trauma inside and out.
I was now prescribed to be on Mirilax instead of GoLYTELY. 3 double doses of Mirilax a day. That was perfectly doable when mixing each dose of Mirilax with a packet of drink flavoring. Orange Sunrise was the best, but the Lemonade worked too.
At regular intervals Friday I felt the need to go #2. I would pass a significant amount of gas and then a few tablespoons of tan mush would exit. There was some shell material. And pain. Pain each time either gas or mush or both was passed. Enough pain that we stayed the course on getting oxycodone whenever enough time had passed since the last dose. hydromorphone was occasionally used depending on just how on fire everything was after any given passing. There were also generous doses of Lidocaine cream and hydrocortisone cream.
The night nurse worked with me to get things synced up so that I could have an oxycodone closely followed by some hydromorphone around 1:00am in an effort to get multiple hours of sleep.
Part 6: The end is in sight
Saturday April 25:
------------------
I woke up around 5:30am, did the usual wait for the x-ray and then managed ti get another 1.5 hours of oxycodone assisted sleep.
Around quarter to 8:00 I received a text message from Brian asking how things were and for the first time in several days I felt like I was able to talk to someone, and wanted to. I guess I can't describe the feeling, but I really didn't want any visitors when the path forward was still up in the air and there didn't seem to be any answers. I didn't want any positive affirmations when there was no telling what might happen next and I sure as hell didn't want pep talks from people that couldn't possibly know if things were going to get better or not.
Anyway, I talked with Brian for about 15 minutes until he got to work and gave him the short, short version of everything I've written so far. I asked him not to share the story with anyone until I could get the full version out myself.
After we hung up, my multiple broths and coffees arrived for my breakfast, followed quickly by my day nurse who told me I was actually allowed to have solid food now according to the GI team. Stay on the 3 times a day double doses of Mirilax and keep the GI team updated on what was coming out of my rear end.
So I got a second breakfast (guess I'm part hobbit) of an omelet and some sausages. Solid food!
Another day of managing pain mostly with oxycodone... maybe 2 doses of hydromorphone after particularly painful trips to the bathroom.
Also the nurse encouraged me to move around if I could, so my wife escorted me to the Starbucks a few floors down as well as a garden area and the lobby near the main entrance. It felt really good to get out of the room on my own feet instead of being wheeled somewhere in my bed. It really helped my state of mind.
I hadn't fully realized it yet, but I was on the other side now. The worst was over, and things were getting easier.
After I had dinner (spaghetti and meatballs and a small salad) and my wife had gone back home I decided I was long overdue to talk to others in my family to let them know I was in the hospital, so I called my brother. We talked for more than an hour and I broke down a couple of times recounting everything that had happened. It was very helpful. I was able to be purely frustrated about the situation finally as opposed to just trying to figure out how to survive the pain minute-to-minute. I consulted with him about how much to tell our mother and when.
Saturday night was about the same as Friday. Timed up my doses of painkillers and got another good 3.5-4 hour chunk of sleep.
Sunday April 26:
----------------
Sunday ended up being another day of being able to expel mushy feces a little bit at a time throughout the day requiring less pain management. Each session in the bathroom would be a fairly forceful gas emission followed by varying small amounts of mushy poop with small amounts of seed particles in it. These sessions were followed by 5-10 minutes of manageable pain. Manageable in the sense that I could get through it without needing painkillers.
I had solid food for my meals, but was kept on the prescription of the three double doses of Mirilax.
I would use the time immediately following recovering from going to the bathroom to get out of my room and walk around the hospital some as I knew I had at least an hour or so before I would need to use the bathroom again. Things had become much less messy, much more predictable and significantly less painful.
Sunday was in essence just a boring next step in recovery.
So I'd like to take this space to cover down on another distasteful aspect of being in the situation I was in... the daily and sometimes twice daily (depending on the results of the first one and any required medications) blood draws for labs. They could not use the IV to get the blood for the labs, they had to stick me and draw a couple of small vials.
For the first several days the staff who did the blood draws would stick me in the same place... the most convenient spot for them the way my bed was set up was my left arm and they would aim at the rather large, accessible veins right near my inner elbow. It wasn't particularly painful or anything... It was just a blood draw. But they would use approximately the same spot. By 4-5 days in I had a noticeable bruise there. When I was given a real hospital room the staff that came to do the draw noticed the bruise and asked if everyone previously had been drawing blood from the same place and I said yes. She told me that would stop as of now and made some notes to that effect and proceeded to draw blood from the back of arm and much closer to the wrist. I think that was more of a mental relief than a physical one, but who knows. What I did know was that the bruise stopped getting bigger.
Along the way what the many blood tests revealed was low potassium and magnesium levels from the lack of any food for several days combined with the massive amounts of GoLYTELY and liquids. I was given pills to cover the lack of said minerals. The magnesium and potassium pills were nasty, huge pieces of chalk. It took some doing getting down when I needed them. Really, the pharma companies have some work to do there. At least coat them with something.
In addition to all the blood draws my vitals would get taken multiple times a day (heart rate, pulse ox and blood pressure). Mind you this was very much preferable to being hooked up to machines 24 / 7, but they took the measurements on their schedule, not mine. Many times what little sleep I was managing to get would be interrupted by either a blood draw or a vitals check. It was less distressing the last few days when I was actually managing to get multiple hours of sleep overnight, but earlier in my stay getting woken up from a rare daytime doze-off when the combination of pain-killers and exhaustion had finally caught up to my body enough to allow a brief moment of unconsciousness was just more stress. At times it was almost depressing. Like couldn't you have just come back in 15-20 minutes after sticking needles in other people? The pain wasn't going to let me be out for too long, please just let me have this 20 minute respite, you know?
Sunday evening I called my mom and gave her a bullet-point rundown of the facts. I was more upbeat and trying to see the humor of the situation when describing some of the goings on. Ever since the Friday a week earlier in the doctors office it had been my intention to write a r/TIFU post about this experience and I was trying to frame my recitation of the story to my mom in that light. The constant pain looked like it was gone. That is, the remaining shell material didn't seem to be enough to collect into a blockage that needed to be manually dealt with. It was in fact coming out a little at a time in the bathroom. My mental state had improved quite a bit. I had been able to joke about my situation and just accept the abject lack of dignity and modesty when the hydromorphone cleared my brain of pain enough for brief periods. I had been able to make my regular nurses laugh with me at the ridiculousness of my situation from time to time when the pain relievers were in full effect. Contrasted with my behavior when the pain was in full effect and I was sleep deprived I probably appeared to have some kind of multiple personality disorder.
For anyone that is reading this that doesn't know me, I try to make light of just about every situation. I think over the course of my career I've had many co-workers who think I didn't really take my job seriously (that could not be further from the truth) because I was willing to make light of whatever crisis or situation we were dealing with because that's how I cope. I've had friends who thought I wasn't taking their current life complications seriously because I saw the opportunity to make a joke or pun about it. Every so often I am completely clueless about how inappropriate making a joke might be at any given moment.
That is all to say that I lost that ability for long stretches at a time during my stay in the hospital. And the realization of that affected me as much or more than what I was going through. I'd reached my breaking point and was no longer able to cope with the bad stuff in life by my usual methods. My conversation with Brian and Steve and my mom made me realize that talking through what was going on with others naturally presented me with more opportunities to joke about what was going on. I probably should have allowed folks other than my wife to visit me rather than turning them away when they messaged me. I might have been able to be in a better state of mind more often and for longer periods of time. Plus the close friends I do have mostly possess the same impulse to crack jokes in the same kind of generally inappropriate circumstances that I do. Probably that's a big reason that we're friends.
Being able to laugh about the ridiculous hopelessness of a situation is sometimes the only available recourse, and should be taken advantage of when possible. I think I tried to make light of my situation as often as possible but really missed the opportunity for other people to help me do that and it was largely because I couldn't see past the remaining shreds of dignity I was trying desperately to hold onto. Somehow I was trying to hold onto a state of mind that was preventing me from dealing with the situation in what would have been in retrospect more in line with my normal self. I thought letting other people see me in the condition I was in would make things worse, not granting the possibility of them making light of the situation and helping me laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.
Part 7: Time to get the hell out of Dodge
Monday April 27:
----------------
Here is one big anti-climax: I was discharged Monday afternoon.
Monday was a regular day in terms of x-ray, labs, vitals and meals.
I was continuing to have regular bowel movements, continuing to be in less and less pain during any given situation. I don't think I had any oxycodone and certainly not any hydromorphone from bed-time Sunday night through the morning and early afternoon Monday.
GI cleared me to be discharged from the hospital prescribing me to maintain the regimen of laxatives and hydrocortisone cream and suppositories. And now I've just remembered that I haven't mentioned the suppositories since I was initially prescribed them after my doctor's office encounter. So. The GI team at the hospital agreed with my primary that I needed to have one of those shoved up my ass every 12 hours during my stay in the hospital (and for a week after). The nurses always offered but I was very motivated to do it myself for pain management reasons. I knew how slow I needed to go and when to back off and when to proceed to get those suckers up in there all the way. And when it just wasn't possible and I needed to delay the attempt by an hour or two because of the pain.
What, you thought the TMI was over?
Hey, at least I didn't make a 'discharge' joke.
Epilogue:
---------
In the week following my discharge every day was like the last few days in the hospital sans people drawing my blood, taking my vitals multiple times a day and giving me an abdominal x-ray at 6:00am every day. I would wait anxiously for some kind of bowel movement so that I could do something outside immediately after. Take Obi for a walk, make a quick trip to the grocery store or pharmacy by myself, etc.)
As each day went by I regained more and more control, although the amount of laxative that I was still prescribed made things challenging from time to time. The laxative regimen was eventually reduced to twice a day then once a day as I write this and will be discontinued completely on May 20th. A week after that I'll have my final check-in with my primary care physician and hopefully be given the all-clear based on the fact that everything seems to be returning to normal.
Speaking of returning to normal I would like to touch on 3 concerns. First, I am putting some weight back on. I lost between 10-12 pounds during the hospital stay. Prior to being admitted I was between 153-155 pounds on a day-to-day basis. When I weighed myself on Tuesday morning (the 28th) I was 143 pounds. Yikes. I don't think I've weighed that since I was probably 12 or 13. Some of that was dehydration in the wake of being discharged and first being at home and still being on a significant course of laxatives, but some was definitely muscle loss / atrophy.
I know there is some definite atrophy because I have managed to get several bike rides in since May 3rd. This has been somewhat tricky timing since I need to wait until just after bowel movements to be secure in the knowledge that I can be about and about for a few hours w/o needing to rush to the bathroom. While I do continue to have more and more control each day, frequently the need to go is immediate and I have less than 5 minutes to deal with it. As long as I am at home (or anywhere with a close bathroom) I am fine, but otherwise I'd be taking a chance. So I am limited in the timing of when I can go for a ride by the last time I went to the bathroom.
Anyway, while I am able to ride my usual distances (24 or 34 miles depending on the route I take) my pace is way, way off. And I have no energy at all during the later portions of a ride. On average I seem to be getting some endurance back, but each day is its own adventure, some better than others.
Second, according to detailed invoice, I was given 18 doses of oxycodone and 14 doses of hydromorphone during my stay. If I did have any kind of withdrawal, it was probably masked by my general state of being run-down and having sleep issues derived from the general discomfort and need to go in the middle of the night from all the extra liquids I was drinking thanks to the amounts of laxative I was still required to ingest post-discharge. You want to know something funny? One of the common side effects of both oxycodone and hydromorphone is constipation.
Third, here is the full financial impact in case my description of the physical repercussions is not enough to discourage you from eating sunflower seed shells:
Total bills 17th-27th: $72,542
cost to us after insurance: $9,996
My out-of-pocket maximum on our current plan is $10,150 which we obviously hit at some point (pretty sure the unaccounted for $154 is from prescriptions and other stuff that hit before the main bill).
On the bright side, insurance did cover $62,546 of the total damage. Since our out-of-pocket max got hit, I can go ahead with some optional things I've been able to just put off for a while later this year at no cost.
So here's the thing... I'm not here to beg for money to cover my out of pocket expenses. While that was definitely a sizable unexpected expense, it's not something that's going to mess up our retirement. My wife is an excellent planner and we're going to be able to deal with it. To be honest, it's not going to affect our immediate retirement plans at all.
What I will say is that if you got anything out of this story at all, be it an overload of cringe, a shiver of vicarious pain, entertainment at my self-inflicted misfortune or hopefully found the same dark humor in the retelling that I finally found while writing it and think that was worth something to you, then I am by all means open to prostituting my pain, suffering and indignity in the name of recouping some of the cost that accompanied this adventure.
Feel free to send me something if this entertained you. This whole thing is about "did you like my story and the way I told it?", not the money.
You have no idea how many puns I consciously avoided while writing this because I thought there were too many already. I left many in anyway. It's nice to put this whole ordeal in the rear-view mirror. :P
TL;DR : Spent 9 days (most in extreme agony) in the hospital because my dumb ass eats sunflower seeds by crunching up the seed in the shell whole and sometimes spitting out the resulting mess and sometimes swallowing it.
