2025...
This was a year wasn't it?
Well Ive been meaning to write this out for months now and the end of this horrid year is a good time to do it.
On August 19th, my brother talked me into going to a local urgent care facility. I've been sick off and on for like half the year, and with the benefit of hindsight it was no doubt all related. You guys have heard me mention how I hadn't been feeling well and the details of which make sense now.
So, Let's tell this story. It's long so if you've gotta pee, do it.
Every few months or in some cases weeks, I would get violently ill out of nowhere. Vomiting, chills, dizziness whole shebang. Then I would recover, sometimes within a day or two. Id bounce back, feel fine and write it off as a fluke and be back on my "cant stop, wont stop" train.
Hey everyone, don't do that.
As the year went on the space between "why did I puke up my entire dinner?" and, "Beep boop woop let's draw some fun crap for the people wee." got smaller and smaller. Eventually It got so bad that I could barely sit down to work or really function. (One day near the end I sat on the end of my bed, head down, for nearly 7 hours.)
I don't remember when I first told my brother I had been sick, but his first response was, and always is, "Do you need to go to the hospital?!?!" The answer was, "yes, I'm actually falling apart internally", but said no because I'm a stubborn git and presumed I'd bounce back like I always did.
Time passed and my ability to bounce back started to stop bouncing. There was a time that I couldn't even drink water without my guts punching me in the gut.
Soooo my brothers near daily messages about "do you need to go to the hospital?!?", started to sound kinda prudent. "Ok brother who is terrified of large birds, we can go to Urgent Care and get poked, I'm sure it's no big deal." The bird thing isn't relevant but I make sure to tell everyone about it because it's hilarious.
Again don't listen to me I am STUPID as fuck sometimes.
We go to the nearest Urgent care location only to find out it had closed some months back. D'oh. Oh well there is another one a couple miles down the road we'll go there. Oh? you don't take my medical insurance? Well I'm here now how much would it cost me if-
Oh, you say I look jaundiced and should probably go to the emergency room? Well ok, one of the local hospitals was literally in sight of the UC location so my brother ferried me over there.
Man, the Emergency department.
Now, I get it. You go into Emergency and aren't bleeding or choking or missing a limb, you gotta wait. But OOOOoOoOoH man. It was around 3:30pm when brother dropped me off. They checked me in, gave me a cool remote blood pressure cuff and I sat next to an older lady and her adult daughter who had suffered a compound fracture of her arm falling from a ladder.
They had been in the ED, with the daughters arm bound up in gauze for over TWENTY HOURS by then.
Uh oh.
Had a whole selection of folks over in my corner of the waiting room. There was a lady regaling everyone with stories from the days of yore and her totally disinterested husband. A guy in a wheelchair with a broken foot and his wife who were LOVING the story-lady's stories. A short man with a tall voice who was WAY too eager to share his political opinions (this guy might be trouble later...) a standard medical conspiracy guy (MORE trouble) and the two ladies I planted myself next to.
Time rolls by.
I'm feeling pretty vaguely crappy so I'm keeping to myself and noodling around on my phone. A few people come and go, or get called back to the exam rooms only to return to the chairs later.
Waiting room had a couple of vending machines to keep starvation at bay, but they were mostly empty, and the things they did have in them was suuuper old. So Arm lady and her mom volunteered to go to a nearby burger place to get people food. I couldn't eat anything though, but our little corner of waiting room was the best corner. At least for a while.
Time passes still.
Wheelchair guy lost consciousness and Arm lady called the nurses over. They took him back to the exam rooms, his wife followed and they never returned.
Small man got into a shouting match with an, unpleasant lady on the other side of the waiting room and boy did this get out of hand fast. It was pretty clear that this guy was harmless but tried way too hard to appear otherwise. THAT SAID, once security walks over, you stop. You shut up and disengage with whatever the trouble is. Everyone knew how this interaction would go and it went that way exactly. Mean lady laughs as Smoll guy gets dragged away by 5 security guards. Story lady even spoke up for him, but it's useless, he's gone and can never return.
ANYWAY, I'm sure it wont be much longer.
It's the dead of night now and conspiracy guy is uselessly flirting with a random woman by telling her that... the hospital is racist and those doors are where they take the black people to kill them.
Oh Lord...
Story lady and her husband get released and go home. Be free lady, be free.
A woman having a depressive episode is put out in the waiting room in a wheelchair. She's slowly wheeling around crying and telling us all how she knows we think she's ugly and hate her and want her to die and to stop looking at her also can she have a lighter? (NO!)
I try to sleep sitting in chair but I'm a night-owl so I get to be awake most of the night. Also, phone battery is about to die.
Oh hey look, the sun is back! Oh look phone is dead! Arm lady and mother FINALLY get to go home.
Conspiracy guy loses his shit at the nurses who he thought were trying to kill him by making him wait all night and got kicked out by security.
And finally, at around 11:30 in the morning I get called into the exam rooms.
AND THAT'S THE PLEASANT PART OF THIS STORY!!
Paaaarrrt Two:
The Hospital Proper.
The exam rooms were nice. "Are" nice since I'm still in them all the damn time as of writing this.
After a bit a doctor comes in and asks me some questions that I do NOT remember. I tell him what my damage is and he sends me to get scanned by CAT.
My first day in the hospital proper is nearly completely gone from my mind at this point. I know where I wound up, but a lot of the prelude is lost to me now. I will tell you what I can from these, the earliest of days.
A surgeon, who's name I don't recall tells me that I may have something called, "Mirizzi Syndrome", wherein a large gall stone is blocking my bile duct. He says that normally the stone or stones are only about a quarter inch in diameter and that they are going to do endoscopic surgery to remove stone if at all possible. I remember joking with him that I wanted to see a picture of stone and he said they really aren't that impressive and it didn't take much to cause a blockage.
Ha, Ha ha ha... I got my picture.
Ok so my stones were the size of quarters and I found out later that I had six of them or so. The stones had COMPLETELY destroyed my gall badder and done serious damage to my common bile duct. My sickness was caused by my liver dumping bile on my intestines and into my stomach which caused all of my symptoms. Due to the crazy amount of surgery they had to do, they couldn't fix it endoscopic-ly and had to slice me open like a fucking cantaloupe. I have a 10 inch scar from my side to the middle of my body.
I came out of surgery, the second surgery mind you, the first was endoscopy to my stomach to put in stents to stop leaking on that end, FUCKED UP. I had been completely opened up, had two JP drains on my right side (they looked like grenades) sucking fluid out of my spaces. And a bile drain poked right into the center of my body just below my sternum.
The true fun part of waking up in the ICU is that you are aware of nothing. Anesthesia completely ruins your everything and nothing the doctors tell you will stick. I spent at least a week in the ICU, dealing with the weird effects of severe pain and being completely physically destroyed.
When pain from being cut in half flashes in your mind it completely snatches your attention away from everything else and makes you literally see neon patterns when you close your eyes. Melatonin does NOT help me sleep it just makes the weird, gray haze that I saw when I closed my eyes have like, faces in it? Oh and my right size was swollen like a basketball.
OH YEAH, turns out having your abdomen sliced into means you cant use it. You know for things like moving under your own power. Being more or less immobile means you rely 100% on nurses to take care of you, and I do not know how they do it. Huge huuuuge thanks to all the medical professionals who helped my busted ass.
But that's just the ICU, after a while I was moved to my own room and there I would remain while the doctors worked and planned and came by in the morning to tell me new plans.
See I was still really damaged internally. My surgeon likened it to a tree that had a limb ripped off, my bile duct was still damaged and leaking, so they put in a drain, a massive tube and SACK to drain bile outside my body while I healed. Their original plan was to let me heal and regain strength for MONTHS, then call in the transplant team to construct me a little gall bladder from a box of scraps. Those plans changed over time thankfully (I think, I'll swing back around to this later).
Hospital life sucks. Well ok it's ok AND it sucks. You cant sleep, the food is bad, not that I could really eat much of anything. I was taking a million separate bits of medication and was confined to my bed 90% of the time. Hospital rooms are always cold, stool softeners are horrible, AND it turned out I had an allergy to one of the antibiotics they gave me and it caused me to break out into a nasty, wet rash that made them think I had shingles SO THEY PUT ME IN QUARANTINE!
... ANywAY, I forgot how to walk.
Yeah turns out that getting your midsection ruined causes you to lose a ton of weight and possibly forget how to be a human.
During hospital stay the physical therapy folks would try to get me up and around, and the first few days I was able to, with assistance, get out of bed and stagger to THE CHAIR where they would leave me for lunch. As my stay got longer my ability to stand under my own power got worse and worse. By the end I could neither walk nor stand, but I was on my way to a different facility by then.
Chapter THReEe: Rehab
Rehab hospital was awesome. I was a useless glob of a person, but rehab was awesome. The people were awesome, the gym was awesome and the nurses and therapists were awesome. They even had a dog, who was always too busy to see me, but he was also awesome.
While at rehab I started learning to person again. A skill I had COMPLETELY lost. I got a walker, but even with it I could only stand for minutes at a time. They had a fake kitchen and a fake car and some stairs, which are real by definition but only went to more stairs. Every day one of the Rehabologists would put me through the paces of using limbs to accomplish simple feats. I was lucky I still had most of my strength. I mentioned more than once how my legs and arms WORKED but it was like there was nothing in the middle holding me together. As such I was a terror on the exercise machines lol.
Made great progress at rehab. Met a lot of people with some crazy stories and was actually sad to go.
BECAUSE I HAD TO GO BACK TO THE HOSPITAL!
It was the stupid bile drain's fault. During all this I still had three drains in my body. Two jp drains that were there to draw out fluid in case of infection in the VOID where my gall bladder used to be, and that DAMN BILE DRAIN. You see all that bile, and it was a lot of it, nasty nasty stuff. Was causing me to be super dehydrated and hurting my kidney function. Doctors were constantly putting me on a ton of saline, but the drain would just wind up full faster. They sent me back to the hospital at the literal last minute (I was on my way out the door to go HOME when they reception desk stopped us) to monitor me for a few more days.
Ugh, but OK its time, Its finally time after I was In the hospital, then rehab, which is the cool hospital, then the hospital from August 19th to OCTOBER FIRST, to go.
Episode IV: Home
THE FUCK YOU MEAN THE ELEVATORS ARE DOWN I CANT CLIMB STAIRS!!!
spent night at brothers place.
EPISODE FOUR REALLY : Home
I had sent my family to my place to make it walker friendly, I was released but far from well. Family went a little crazy in some places and not crazy enough in others. That's how it goes. Thankful for the help though.
Ive been here, healing for a while now. Slowly trying to get back into my old routine. The drains though, the drains. The two JP drains fell out. leaving two naked holes deep into my body. Nurse told me to keep it covered and go see doctor asap. I did. Surgeon said, "meh, it's fine, want some bandaids?"
OK.
BUT THE BILE DRAIN. That thing, THIS thing. After rehab during my second hospital stay they clamped off the drain. SO I still had the tubing and BAG but it was clamped and not draining. I responded well to this, so it remained clamped. It was the end of September now and I kept trying get in contact with IR, Interventional Radiology, to get this (YES THIS) drain removed because nearly a month had gone by and it wasn't doing anything except being a cord and a bag I had to take care of.
Well I got an appointment, and I was under anesthesia when I first got this stupid thing but when IR works on it they just do a local anesthesia and drug you with ketamine. Which turns out, I am incredibly resistant to.
You know when a doctor asks you about your pain level 1-10? Want to know what a 10 is? Oh wait no you don't.
I, with no hesitation, count this first attempt to get this drain removed the single worst experience of my life.
Turns out, one of the stents they put in had "migrated" so they had to pull it out, then since I was still leaking internally, they couldn't remove the drain.
I had accomplished nothing but getting really hurt and charging my insurance tens of thousands of dollars. I go home and I'm feeling TERRIBLE, the worst I had felt in months. At that time I didn't even know about the stent that had to be taken out, or why I was SO sore from everything. Cause the doctor DIDN'T TELL ME. Sometimes man...
Then that night I snagged the tubing and accidentally pulled the whole catheter out of my chest... BACK TO THE HOSPITAL I GO.
Ambulance came and got me, and I didn't have to wait 20 hours in emergency. Having a hole in your chest oozing yellow goo will do that I guess.
Back to IR to get a new drain put in! I told the nurses and doctors and everyone about the horrible experience I had just had THAT MORNING with this damn tube and made sure they knew how much this would suck.
New tube and drain inserted, it sucked. They kept me overnight for observation and thus were more liberal with the medication so It wasn't as bad as before. But I had to spend another night in the hospital and ugh.
The next morning I was watching a Predator movie marathon on hospital cable when the doctor from IR came in with an idea. Since I wasn't using the drain, why did I have all this tubing and a bag? She disconnected the unused hardware from the catheter and told me to flush it out twice a day with saline. The catheter would serve as a bypass for the leaky side of my bile duct, while she and the other doctors discussed how to fix the leak for good.
A month later, last month, they attempted a new technique to seal off the leak. It was more tube work so it still hurt horribly, but they gave me extra ketamine so it wasn't AS bad? When that wore off tho, woof.
And now Friday the 2nd of January 2026, I go back in for a drain check because I STILL have this catheter hanging out of my chest like a USB dongle. I still have to flush it twice a day with saline and I hope, HOPE this thing can be removed and I can move on from this whole mess.
Im tired.
THanks to Alternate rat for keeping this place going while I was away, and thanks to all of you who stuck around even though Ive been useless and pitiful for most of the year. Im going to make up for all the holiday specials I missed, and get back to Dragon warrior posting soon... Unless I die tomorrow.