Pete Dodd Dot Com (.us)

Whenever I play Super Street Fighter 4 with my internet mates someone eventually gets crushed in a match and blames the matchup and the joke is “I’m going to write a strongly worded letter to Seth Killian about ____ (insert egregious offense that was just unleashed on you here).”  Seth Killian is a community rep for Capcom, the company that makes SSFIV, and the joke may have an older meaning that I don’t know, but to me it’s always been about feeling helpless and your only bit of recourse is to be one of those old ladies that writes letters to her favorite cereal about how the last time she bought it that it tasted like shit and how when the company gets said letter they will look at it and laugh but maybe send that old bitty a free box to shut her up.

Well I guess for a long time now this blog has been my collection of letters to Seth Killian, but usually about random bullshit going on in my life.  After last night, however, it’s about something that is actually real…  and the feeling of helplessness I felt while there has forced me into the role of penning an angry letter (well, angry essay is more like it).  I’m not sure if it’s actually going to be sent or not, or to who, or whatever.  Maybe it will just exist here, though I’m guessing more than a few people will google the exact phrase of the title of this piece and maybe stumble upon this and we can commiserate over how terrible this hospital is, though i doubt they will send us a free box of cereal.

The back story is fairly simple.  Arnee (my wife, pronounced Ar-Nay)was having sharp, sudden pain in what she assumed was her left Ovary.  About 12 years ago or so she had cists on them so she knows the area pretty well.  After a couple of days of the pain increasing in frequency (once every 8 hours to once every 10 minutes) I finally convinced her to go to the doctor (a complete role-reversal for us).  We went to see our new doc a few blocks away…  he pushed in and did other doctor stuff but admitted that he wasn’t a OBGYN but that the pain worried him.  He thought an ultrasound would be needed but couldn’t get Arnee in till tomorrow.  We thought about it and decided to go to the ER because the increasing frequency of the pain had us worried enough that spending another night at home not knowing what it was could have been a nightmare.  He suggested we go to Lutheran Medical Center and he called a doctor friend there to try to expedite the whole process.

We got there and the first waiting room was pretty packed but we only sat there for 45 minutes or so before being admitted and put in the triage area.  Once in there that number of people was staggering.  We sat down and waited.  And waited.  And waited.  And waited.  Several hours later a doctor (I think her scrubs said RPA –  I’m not up on hospital lingo, but people refered to her as a doctor so I assume she was) saw Arnee for maybe 3 minutes.  She pushed on her stomach a few times and decided she needed an ultrasound.

So then we waited and waited and waited and waited and then we got sent up to the Ultrasound area.  When we got there Arnee asked if she could have some water, as she was told earlier not to have any, and the nurse said yes.  Arnee went in for the ultrasound and the tech scolded her and the nurse for drinking water.  Nice that they are all on the same page.

So then that finished and we went back to triage and waited and waited and waited and waited.  At one point all visitors were kicked out for “shift change.”  During that i was in the outside waiting room.  I overheard one woman say that her mother was admitted 20 hours earlier via ambulance and still didn’t have a room.  Other people started relaying their current horror stories.

So i finally got to go back in and Arnee was nearly in tears and having a panic attack.  I understand that they need to clear the ER out of visitors from time to time, but it’s certainly not good for the patients, especially someone like Arnee (or me, if it was me) who is likely to freak out and potentially go into shock.  But that’s what this hospital does.  There was not one time during our 10 and a half hours there that I felt like the hospital gave a shit about the human beings inside of it.  We were all just an annoyance to the staff.  It was busy, which sucks, but to them it’s like they were accountants and we were math equations in a giant pile that they were pissed off they had to solve.  Work would be so much easier if these fucking people would just stop being sick!

And as an aside, for those that don’t know me, I am a caregiver myself.  I work in a much more controlled environment (a group home) than an ER, but there are basic rules that I know need to be followed.  If you are frustrated you don’t show it.   When you are frustrated you must realize that it’s not the people who are taking care of fault.  They still deserve your best level of care.  In fact, when things are hectic, that’s when you need to up your game, so to speak, because the people you are tasked with caring for are at far greater risk for something going wrong.

I’m not going to pretend i know what it’s like to work in an ER, because to be honest this was my first time ever being in one other than the outside waiting rooms.  I have avoided them like the plague.  I do have a feeling, backed up from many conversations with family and friends, that this situation at Lutheran Medical Center is pretty much how all ERs in cities work.  I’m sure ones in the suburbs and richer, less populated areas probably operate with a bit higher standards.  But im guessing that Lutheran Medical Center is not alone in being terrible.  And I’m guessing that working in a busy ER is thankless, tiring, frustrating work and that probably does not pay enough for stress level endured.  As much as I had anger at each individual person that couldn’t care less about my wife, I had even more anger for the entire system being so utterly fucked up that this level of care is not only tolerated, it’s the goddamn norm.

Anyway, so a few hours after the Ultrasound the doctor (RPA?) came back and told Arnee she didn’t see anything and wanted to get a Catscan.  Thirty minutes after that a nurse came over to prep her for it (prepping for in involves drinking a liquid 1.5 hours in advance).  At this point the catscan was scheduled for 2am.  We got there at 6pm.  It’s been eight hours if you don’t want to do the math.  And just to recap, so far in this 8 hours Arnee has seen the doctor for 4 minutes total and gotten one Catscan.  She also was attended to by a nurse (hooking up an IV, etc) for another 5 minutes.   So 9 minutes of care and 1 test in 480 minutes.  That means that 99.99% of the time we’ve been here she was not tended to.  Literally!  I DID THE MATH!

And hell, im not even asking for much more time spent, just more check ins.  Going 3 hours without hearing anything is frustrating but even worse, it causes a great amount of anxiety.  Arnee had cancer when she was a teenager.  She went through chemo and eventually beat it.  She also had a child that passed several hours after birth.  This is a woman who has experienced great medical trauma in her life.  When she has shooting pains in her ovaries it’s going to cause a GREAT amount of concern.  Is it cancer?  Is in Ectopic Pregnancy?  Is this going to make her infertile?  Is something rupturing and her life is in danger?  Is this one of those “that thing almost killed me but they found it in time?” type of things?

I’ll be fucked if the staff there was going to tell us anything.  Simply put, they don’t care.  Oh, another anxious couple with lower stomach pain, it’s probably gas, send them home.

So, yeah, the 2am Catscan turned into the 2:30 Catscan without them ever updating us about it.  But at 2:30 they sent us over, which the person there promptly sent us back because Arnee was not dressed properly for it which “they should have known” according to the tech.   We eventually get back and the Catscan is done.  The tech says the doctor will have the results in 30 minutes.  It’s 3:10 at this point.

We sit there for about an hour and 30 minutes, asking around the one hour mark if the doctor has gotten the catscan results yet.  The answer we get is “NO” and get shot looks like we are giant fucking assholes for even asking the question.  At 4:40am the doctor comes over and says “There is a little bit of inflammation in your lower intestine, we are going to give you a script for cipro and something for the pain.”   And then she walked away.

Cipro?  I know from the 2001 Anthrax scare that Cipro is an antibiotic.   Ok, so it’s an infection?  How did she get it?  Where is it?  Is it bad?  Is there anything we could have done to prevent it or prevent it in the future?  What would have happened if it went untreated?

Yeah, we didn’t get to ask any of those questions.  And furthermore, we don’t really trust the diagnosis in the first place.   Arnee has had incredible pain for days, including a bout with wicked diarrhea the night before that she thinks was from something bad she ate.  Could that be the cause of the inflammation?  Probably.  Is it the cause of the shooting pain in her ovary?  Not likely.

But even if it is the right diagnosis, it’s just a simple infection, a little bit of an explanation as to why it exists would have been helpful.  At this point I had zero faith in anything this hospital was doing.  We were seated by the nurses station for the last couple hours of the night and all they did was bitch.  They bitched about the computer systems, they bitched about how busy it was earlier (it had emptied out quite a bit by this point), they bitched about having nothing to do, they bitched about whatever nurse wasn’t there, one nurse proclaimed she is no longer writing notes on patient’s records.  Add that to how little care we got, how they sent us to a catscan with arnee wearing clothes with metal in them, to how the whole goddamn operation was run… and what i came away with was that I didn’t trust a goddamn word out of their mouths.  They no longer get the benefit of the doubt from me.  And the second you don’t trust your doctors is the second they become fucking worthless.

I think the doctor looked at the catscan, saw a little inflammation which is obviously there — I mean I COULD HAVE TOLD YOU BEFORE WE EVEN GOT THERE THAT THEY WOULD FIND INFLAMMATION!  SHE’S IN FUCKING PAIN OF COURSE THERE IS! — and she decided to just wash her hands of the whole thing by writing a script for Cipro and sending us on our way.  So 10.5 hours later we still don’t know shit and we got a script that we could have gotten from a walk-in clinic in fucking Ethiopia.  And i can pretty much guarantee to you that the bill is north of $1000, probably by quite a bit.

This shit needs to change and it needs to change now.  I don’t care if it’s “Obamacare” or what… but it needs to fucking change.  Our healthcare is a goddamn joke.  The republicans seem to think the whole system will be fixed by putting caps on how much you can sue doctors.  I’m all for them putting caps on that, but let’s be fucking serious –  that’s not the reason why our healthcare sucks.  I don’t know if Obamacare fixes it either, i would guess it probably doesn’t, but atleast it’s a fucking attempt.  I’m sure its problem is that it doesn’t go far enough.

The solution for Arnee and I is that we don’t go to shitty hospital ERs ever again unless we are unconscious.  We have health insurance, a car, are white, etc etc.  We can drive to some nice place in Long Island and get better care, and that’s what we will do from now on.  But even though that works for us, that doesn’t fix the system.  And it certainly doesn’t fix Lutheran Medical Center, which in ten and a half hours did not do a single thing right.

I didn’t really plan it this way, but about 30 minutes ago I remembered that Sub Pop recently remastered and rereleased Sunny Day Real Estate’s first two albums.   So being the no morals having pirate that I am, I hopped on zee intranetz and downloaded those shits.   I then loaded them onto my iphone and decided to write a blog post about my adventures in trading addictions.

The past week I have been staying in Connecticut, with my parents.   It’s been enjoyable.  Well, as enjoyable as staying with your parents while quitting smoking can possibly be.   I’m staying in my old room, which is now a guest room and doesn’t really feel like my old room in any way.  It’s much nicer than how I ever had it.   Antique furniture, a nice oriental rug, a high shelf with various nick-nacs that look to be anywhere from 20 to 100 years old.   It’s not my room anymore, and that’s fine.   Unlike a lot of people I’ve run into, I have absolutely no yearning to go back in time.   I hate the teenage version of Pete Dodd.   I was a douchebag.   I was also confused, upset, retarded.   I think I would have felt quite uncomfortable this last week if this room was shrine to my most terrible years.

But the fact that I am currently sitting in my old room listening to Sunny Day Real Estate was almost lost on me.   It wasn’t until I started writing the first sentence in this post that I realized that only a few things are different between right now and 1994.  First off, the remastered Sunny Day album sounds much better, secondly I’m typing this on a 19″ widescreen beast of a laptop instead of scribbling this into a notebook and lastly I’m alot nicer of a person.   But the fact does remain, I am sitting in my old bedroom listening to Sunny Day…  and that kinda cracks me up.

So anyone that follows me on any of the various internet social networking hubs already knows the basic jist of what this last week has been about.   Quitting smoking.    And it’s going well.   I smoked my last cigarette sunday night/monday morning  and it’s now friday, a bit before lunch, and I feel pretty good.   The constant want is gone, it’s been replaced with the occasional want, which I must say is kinda a bitch because it sorta sneaks up on ya.   Like yesterday I was sitting out near my parent’s pool reading Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris and I finished a chapter and I was like “I should smoke a cigarette before I read the next.”   No.   NO!   So yeah, i’m now trying to unlearn all of the habits.   This is where the real work comes in, I guess.   Not that the first few days of going cold turkey are easy, but they are predictable.  You constantly want to smoke and you constantly hate everything.   Where I’m at now is much more subtle and tricky.  But it also means that the majority of my day I am not feeling want or anger, and that’s pretty nice.

Along side quitting smoking, I haven’t been drinking.   I’m on day 8 of that.   But that isn’t nearly as big of a deal, because I didn’t drink as much as I smoked and drinking has never been a physical thing for me.   Even when I was a fairly hardcore alcoholic years ago, I quit cold turkey and didn’t even get the shakes let alone going into the DTs.    Drinking is a very mental thing for me.   It is my medication of choice when it comes to my anxiety and depression.  So, if Im not feeling anxious or depressed, it’s easy to walk away from.   Not so much with cigarettes, I enjoy them mad/sad/psyched/tired/teabagging/doing the robot.   But I guess it is worth noting I haven’t drank in over a week.   It will be a few more weeks before I do again.

All of this was brought on by my recent med change.    I had to stop drinking to let them do their thing, and then when I quit drinking I figured it was a good time to quit smoking.    Being in CT helped, because I hate smoking at my parents house because I feel like I have to hide it and at 32 years old it’s kinda demeaning to hide a behavior.   I took that as proof positive that I wasn’t proud of the behavior.

In place of smoking and drinking I have moved onto caffeine and spending money I shouldn’t on videogames.   I’ll cut back on the videogame purchases with the help of a gamefly subscription (think Netflix, for videogames).   I’m happy with the caffeine though.   I like being alert without feeling panic.   It’s a very new and exciting feeling.   Kinda like being 16 again, minus the bad hair and anger.

As intrepid readers probably noticed in my last post I haven’t been doing that great lately.  It’s weird because my life is good.  Really good.  I mean I need to be doing more with it, but there isn’t anything wrong with it per se.   I have an awesome fiance, I live in the coolest city in the world, I can sorta afford my bills.  Stuff is fine.

But my anxiety has been through the roof lately and the usual things to make it go away haven’t been working.   It used to be that I really only felt anxious for long periods of time if I was hungover.   But I would go 3-4 days straight without drinking and still wake up like I had that typical full body hangover anxiety.

So I setup a date with my psychiatrist yesterday to talk about it and figure out what to do next.   It was a really amazing session.  It always is with her, she talks to me like I’m a med student, instead of dumbing everything down or not explaining to me at all why she is making the changes she is making.  There are big life changes that I need to make, and I’ll get to that in a minute, but I find the medication aspect pretty interesting because it’s maybe a little heavy handed but it has very tangible goals.

One of the major issues she sees with how I live my life is that I stay up all night.   Anyone who has known me for decades have known i’ve done this since I was a kid…  I can remember staying up late in my GI Joe bedtent with this little pink radio (that was handed down from my sister) and listening to KC 101 as late as I possibly could.   Anyway, this needs to change, so that’s a component of this med change.

I have been on 40mg of Prozac and two .5 mg pills of klonopin a day for a while now.   Yesterday we added Seroquel into the mix.   Seroquel is by far the most powerful drug I’ve ever been prescribed.  It is in the anti-psychotic family of drugs.   It’s typically used to sedate the most manic of manic depressives.   Now, I’m not particularly manic, so why give it to me?   Well basically, it does two things…  it acts as an amplifier for the prozac I am already on, and it knocks my fucking ass out.   So the plan is that i take it at a reasonable hour to go to sleep (I’m still sorta pushing it, I just can’t imagine going to bed before midnight or 1am…) and then that’s that.  I go to bed.   Also, mixing alcohol with this drug just isn’t possible.   I’ve known all along that if I didn’t feel anxious that I wouldn’t want to drink nearly as much, but I’m certainly not sad that it also gives me another reason to not drink…  I just can’t.   So that’s that.   I mean, if I am going out for the night and want to drink socially, I can, I just can’t take the drug that night.   Which is cool.  But no more sitting home and drinking just because I’m bored.   Which is also cool.  I know Arnee is pretty thrilled with this aspect of it.

So I took it last night for the first time and didn’t feel much of anything for about an hour…  and then it hit me fairly hard.  I was pretty loopy.  I was really hungry so I walked to my parent’s kitchen (I’m in town early this week for a training at work) and totally clipped a doorjam.  Whoops.  I then slept like a fucking log for about 11 hours.  I could have slept longer, but I forced myself to get up.   I immediately had a diet coke…  I don’t drink caffeine often but I knew I needed it.   For the last few hours I’ve been sorta bumming around my parents house, mostly sitting on my laptop and playing Farkle.  But man, I feel fucking calm.   I mean, I am seriously zombiefied right now, and this is not how I would like to live my life forever, but after a month+ of pretty intense anxiety it’s fucking nice to feel this calm without being drunk.

So the plan for me is as follows.   I am going to take this drug for close to two months and then switch over to abilify.  Abilify is pretty much the same thing minus the zombifying aspect…  the hope is that by that point I will be used to going to bed earlier and won’t need it…  and after a couple months of feeling this mellow that Ill be ready to deal with my anxiety again.

My doctor and I talked fairly indepth about the general concept of what it is to be a person with an anxious brain.   She was trying to get through to me, and I think she did, that being anxious isn’t a bad thing.   I just don’t take advantage of what my brain is good at.   People with brains like mine need to be stimulated.  We need jobs where we are constantly problem solving.   We need relaxing activities that still keep our brains moving.   I have, for years, been afraid of stimulation.   I’ve figured that since Im anxious that I want to stay away from stimulating activities as much as possible.   I figured that my mellow job (well, most of the time) was good for my brain, it let it relax.   But the problem is that my brain doesn’t want to relax.  I haven’t been feeding my brain with what it needs to feel fulfilled.  So i am going to make a concerted effort to challenge myself more often.  My current life of easy job + long stretch of time off where I don’t do much + going to bed at 4am is about as wrong of a lifestyle for someone with my brain type as is possible, according to my doctor.  And I believe her, because most things in the past that have made me anxious have always become triumphs once i do them, and not just because I’m beating my anxiety, but because I’m using my brain how it wants to be used.

So…  going to bed earlier, far less drinking, gonna try to exercise more, gonna try to “feed” my brain more…  gonna try to find a new job that challenges me.   It’s a pretty long list of shit I need to do…  and they aren’t all going to happen this week, or this month.  But i’m on step one, which is mellow the fuck out and sleep more.  Hopefully I will have the follow through to keep it going to the next steps when the time comes.   But for now I am completely in fucking Zombietowne because of this drug.  Which is kinda cool.  I like not freaking out.   It’s a good start.