Ignore the Woman Behind the Curtain

This one I’m writing just for me – I’m not going to be publicizing it because (let’s face it) this is not a fun read, but sometimes I have to write my fears down to get them out of my head.  You’ve been warned.

Nightmares have been creeping in. I think it’s the anniversary – almost three years now, and for three years I was able to ignore it.  I survived, hell, I thrived.  Why dwell on unpleasantness?  But late at night, when my brain is trying to shut off, memories come back and mess with me. 

It all started as I was leaving the office.  I could feel something going wrong the minute I stood up from my desk.  By the time we got home, there was a huge puddle of blood on the car seat.  I tried to get into the house and get cleaned up, but it just got worse and worse (I think it was Daniel who called it a scene out of Carrie), and I knew that we needed to go to the emergency room right then.  And that’s where the nightmares start…

First off, there’s the sheer humiliation… although for me, that’s almost the least of it.  After dealing with the sheer inconvenience and shame of Hank’s pressing down on my bladder for the past three years, a bloody mess is nothing anymore, really.  But laying there for close to 24 hours, unable to get clean because anytime the blood was wiped away, a new batch would just plop out 5 minutes later, soiling me and the sheets and gloves and mats and everything in that wretched emergency cubical – ok, yeah, the humiliation is still there.

Then there’s the fear… blood, after all.  So much blood – plate-sized clots of it falling out of me every time I sat up or shifted position or breathed too heavily.  Enough blood that they eventually had to pump three pints into me, and they didn’t seem to have any clue as to how to stop it, or even be trying all that hard to stop it.  It felt like I was just left there, bleeding away, having the sheets changed occasionally.  Somehow, I doubt that a gun-shot victim would be left bleeding away on the table like that.  But then again, that’s just it – when you’re a patient, you don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes.

Then finally, Dr. Scott coming in and telling me that they were going to do an emergency D&C, almost exactly 24 hours after I had started to bleed out.  Figuring it was fibroids and the worst was over – once they let me out of the hospital in a couple of days… and then getting the Saturday phone call that meant everything was going to change.