Life Imitates Art — NDE #6, Volume Two

PREVIOUSLY ON GITGAW

Our anhero begins chemotherapy in New York to treat his recurrent rectal cancer metastatic to the lungs, liver, kidneys, adrenal glands, and brain. (Ed: JESUS CHRIST!) After two treatments he falls victim to a rare side effect of Avastin: Perforation of the gastrointestinal tract. He’s rushed to the E.R. where we end with a cliffhanger to rival the close of Kill Bill, Volume One. Willie Survive?

Anyway. You know how whenever you go to the E.R. in real life you spend five hours waiting to see one doctor, but on the tee vee they instantly have four nurses, three surgeons, two cops and a firefighter? And they’re swarming around the bed yelling “We need oxygen!” “We need saline!” and “Who called the cops and why did they bring a fire fighter?”

Well, this was like on the tee vee.

Let’s back up a bit. I’ve said that my GI tract was ‘perforated,’ but what does that mean exactly? Well, for me it meant that I developed an extra whole in my rectum. So when my food was 99% digested, it had two choices: It could go out the usual exit, i.e. the anus, or it could just seep out this new whole and go to lands unknown. In laymen’s terms, I was shitting into my bloodstream. For half a week, probably.

Back to the E.R., where the surgeon began “ablating” the western hemisphere of planet buttock. At first it sounded straightforward: You’ve got a big bag of pus on your butt, you lance it, drain it, patch it up and go home. Problems here were (a) the feces in the blood that needed removing and (b) the abscess being too large to sew up, leaving an open wound about the size of a Blackberry. That wound would need to have its dressing changed three times a week over the next six months, but we’ll leave that for a separate fun blog post. Stay tuned.

Saving my life, the surgeon was able to remove some “frank stool” as the New York doctors termed it. That staved off my dying of any number of bacteria in the poop, including the famous e. coli. So, well done there.

Still not out of the woods yet though. Now we’re headed up to the ICU where the team acts just like they do in the movies, scurrying about with bags of blood and whatnot as they try to keep me from dying of septic shock. (My blood pressure was about 5 over 3 at this point and my pulse was 700 as my heart raced to compensate.) Long story short (Ed: You call this short?) they save my life. Thanks.

I can’t even complain about the catheter they stuck into me while I was fully awake. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it, but you know me. I can’t complain.

But wait, there’s more! The surgeon told me I’d need a colostomy bag. Again. That would require surgery the day after — surgery the doctor wasn’t sure I’d survive. Heading into the O.R. a nurse told me she’d be my guardian angel and wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me. She lived up to her word. In a more dramatic world I would have gone back to the hospital later to thank her and be told “Nobody works here by that name.” But life isn’t like the movies.