Month: November 2017

So here’s the deal guys – NG tubes do bring relief, but they are also very unpleasant. In the last installment, you saw that despite my best efforts to start digesting again after surgery, nothing worked. I’d held it in for days, but in the end, I threw up liters of bile everywhere. That sealed the deal and meant I’d need an NG tube.

At first, it wasn’t bad at all. Doctors took a lubed up tube and fed it down my nose, past my throat, and into my stomach. Yes, it felt weird going in, but once it was in and started vacuuming up bile, I started to feel a lot better. As I mentioned before, willing yourself to hold in vomit for days is also very unpleasant, so the vacuuming was a relief. And really, the tube just felt like post-nasal drip. Annoying, but manageable.

After a while though, it started to drive me crazy. I felt the constant need to swallow, but swallowing didn’t help. Then my nose and throat started to get irritated and raw. Doctors gave me chloraseptic spray to help, but it wasn’t very effective. On top of that, I had already been feeling uncomfortable tugs from the catheter when I’d move around or try to sleep, but now I was feeling them through my nose and throat too. In short, I was pretty miserable overall and I still hadn’t even been able to look at the ostomy yet.

As a heads up, the next few entries will cover my life in this state. The Crohn’s Saga is mostly to educate, but it’s also here to help me cope with memories of events I couldn’t emotionally manage at the time. The few days I spent with an IV, a catheter, and an NG tube were very difficult. I had mostly kept my chin up throughout that past year of being sick, but these were the days when I finally started to crack. These were the days when I finally started to despair.

Yes, I really did tell my nurse that having Conan the CNP on the recovery floor to put people out of their misery would be a good idea. She disagreed.

For those who don’t know by the way, CNP stands for certified nurse practitioner. If you’ve been reading along, you’ll know that this occurred a few days after I’d had surgery for my Crohn’s Disease. The recovery had not been going well. My body was simply not waking back up, so I’d needed to have a catheter reinserted to prevent bladder infection and an ng tube to keep me from constantly vomiting bile. I’d already been sick from the Crohn’s for over a year at this point, so these recent developments were unfortunately just the icing on the cake. I’d been physically broken, but now I was finally starting to waver mentally and emotionally.

So yeah, that state combined with a lack of sleep and the lack of filter from painkillers had me wishing that someone would just put me out of my misery. Or at least just knock me out for a while. It’s difficult to convey what it’s like to be in a mental state like that, so I’m going to kick it up a notch and risk alienating some of my readers by bringing up philosophy.

If you’ve never read Emmanuel Levinas, you should give him a try. He has a wonderful mind, a big heart, and a knack for explaining ideas that are difficult to articulate. Like all existentialists, he spends a lot of time exploring the self and what that concept even means. One of my favorite observations of his is that there is a similarity suffering and insomnia. In both, you become aware that it is impossible for you to ever escape from yourself.

We spend most of our day engaged in activities, so we’re most often both thinking and doing. However, when you can’t sleep, you are only thinking and not doing. You can’t will yourself to sleep and the more you try, the further into your mind you get. You become aware that you can’t just turn your mind off. You can’t get away from thinking. In short, when you experience insomnia, you experience yourself entirely as a mind and you realize that you can’t divorce yourself from your perspective. Levinas described it as feeling enchained to yourself.

That enchainment is the same with suffering. In suffering, you realize that can’t escape being you. Even if you fall asleep, you will still be you with all of your pain when you wake back up. It’s a frustrating experience. You’re unable to do anything to help yourself. There is no pause button, off switch, or fast forward. You’ll never be able to escape yourself. You can’t create your own relief. Instead, you just have to endure.

So yeah, I didn’t really want to die, but the thought of being knocked out at least until I was further healed was very appealing.

Merriam-Webster defines mercy as “the compassionate treatment of those in distress”. When you’re in the hospital laid out in pain with tubes in nearly every orifice, mercy makes all the difference. In that situation, your morale hangs by a thread, so kindness and compassion can make or break you. For my recovery, I was lucky to have a highly competent and compassionate staff looking after me.

I first met the Ostomy Nurse the morning of my surgery. She taught me all about ostomies, and she measured and marked where mine would go. During my recovery, she taught me how to empty and change my bag. In short, she was my guide for my new life. She was the Virgil to my Dante.

The Ostomy Nurse was polite and knowledgeable, but the mercy she showed me depicted above is what I remember most. I’ve had a lot of nurses over the years. Some have had good hearts, but weren’t the most competent. Others were skilled, but they were checked out and just going through the motions. The best are skilled, engaged, compassionate, and able to read their patients. The Ostomy Nurse fell into this latter category.

Sometimes I think I’m just being whiny about all of this. People have been through much worse. But then I remember that this surgery came after a year of a nasty flare and 25 years of life with this stupid disease. Like most chronic illnesses, Crohn’s Disease wears you down. It’s always in the back of my mind, like a thug waiting in the shadows. I’d dreaded having an ostomy for years. Now I had one. On top of that, I was having a bad recovery. The physical pain I was feeling at the time was nothing compared to the penetrating hopelessness.

That’s how I was feeling when the Ostomy Nurse came into my room to train me on how to take care of my new body. I didn’t want to learn about my ostomy. I hadn’t even really been able to look at it at that point. I was dealing with too much and I couldn’t cope with the reality of it all. Luckily, after one glance, she knew where I was and she knew that I couldn’t have handled it. That’s mercy. That’s the compassionate treatment of a person in distress.

I will always be grateful for her and the rest of the staff at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. They are exceptional. They treated me with compassionate care every step of the way and that made all the difference.