Hello. Today is my regular installment of the Sunday Gene Pool, in which I ask for questions but, as always, generously give back with entertainment. Today’s entertainment is the true story of what happened to me yesterday. But first, a one-question Gene Pool Gene Poll.
So: I am scheduled for surgery Monday morning to excise a truly disgusting event that has occurred on my face. (My face itself is already a truly disgusting event, but this is a further insult to it, the way a maggot infestation further destroys the look of a morel mushroom.)
Anyway, it is fairly serious surgery — as I wrote last week it could wind up damaging a nerve and leaving me with a perpetual snotty sneer, which wouldn’t be that big a change, actually, but is still technically alarming. So before the surgery I had to submit to a physical exam and blood test to make sure I could withstand a three-hour procedure, which was not a given inasmuch as I am 71, have lived a life of shocking debauchery, and am in generally ghastly health with a prostate the size of a beanbag chair.
I took the physical on Thursday, and on Saturday I received a panicked phone call from a physician’s assistant at my doctor’s office. She said I was, basically, dying. My blood test came back with wildly elevated levels of potassium, which can mean many bad things — I confirmed this with Dr. Google — the worst of which is that your heart might explode. The physician’s assistant said I had to go to an emergency room, immediately.
I am not making any of this up.
So I went to an urgent-care clinic and got my blood re-tested and it turns out my potassium levels are fine. The initial test was wrong. So never mind. Sorry! Your heart is not exploding, it turns out! You’re good to go. Have a nice rest of the day!
This did remind me of something that happened 50 years ago to my father. One of his eyes lost focus, and he went to a neurologist who told my mother and me (out of his earshot) that he probably had a malignant tumor behind his eye that would grow and quickly disconnect his brain from the rest of his body, leaving him fully conscious but basically a giant protoplasmic mass, unable to do anything, including talk or move or breathe without assistance until he died in existential agony. It turned out, he was just having a bad reaction to a new diabetes drug. He lived another 30 years. This is just one more reason I love modern medicine.
Anyway, I will be having my surgery. I will be left with kind of a big scar on my face, which I am sort of looking forward to because it will connect me to Pacino and Tony Montana and my lil’ fren, I will feel more manly.
Today’s question: Have you had an amusing medical event in your life? Tell us, please. Send your stuff to here:
When I was pregnant husbands were allowed to join their spouse at some of the pregnancy checkups. There’s my husband sitting in a chair basically at my feet. The doctor comes in and tells me to get my feet in the stirrups. As the doctor walks back to examine me I ask my husband “ how’s the view down there?” I still smile remembering the time I managed to embarrass both my husband and my doctor at the same time. And yes it was a male doctor.
Funny now, not-funny then— I was taken into the ER with a head injury and broken bones after a bicycle wreck. I had a helmet on but it was old and although it saved my life it did not save my marbles, at least temporarily. We live in a small town and so word got back to me eventually….
The doctor’s notes politely say things like “word salad” and “patient will not hold still for CT scan.” But Reader, I was bat shit.
I counted relentlessly out loud, then would get stuck on a number and shout obscenities, words that I do not regularly use in public. I repeatedly attempted to climb off my gurney despite my neck collar and broken bones (collarbone, shoulder blade, four ribs). I screamed for help when help was right there, and flailed at people who were indeed helping me.
They gave me meds to calm me down and finally had to go to the stuff that shuts meth addicts down, just to get me to quit further injuring myself.
For me, this is now just ten hours of nothingness.. I felt drunk for a month and am still not quite myself, but am glad to be alive. And I laugh to think this otherwise nice middle class white lady had all that waiting inside her for the right moment.
I bought a new helmet, of course. Please wear yours.