October, 1997
Just because I'm still here doesn't mean that I've had an easy time along the way. For one thing, I've had to have several surgeries and 'procedures' that have made me very wary and nervous around doctors and in hospitals, and they nearly lost me a few times.
I didn't have the benefit of counseling and play-therapy that critically ill children of today have, and I feel like I was treated as incompetent of understanding anything at the time, though from age 9 on I pretty much knew what was going on and what they were talking about. There's one incident in particular that really unnerved me and broke any trust I still had in doctors at the time, and that was a heart catheterization when I was about 9.
They told me that they were going to go in through a vein in my leg to look around inside my heart on a TV monitor. I thought of it as another operation, and I remembered from my first spinal fusion when I was 5 that I was asleep during the the operation, and really didn't remember any of it, so it wasn't so bad except for the feeling yucky afterward.
What they neglected to tell me was that I was going to be awake for this procedure... big mistake. I panicked when they came at me with the huge hypodermic syringe filled with whatever numbing agent they used on my leg where they were going to make the incision, and they had to restrain me until it took effect. Really, I don't remember much more about it, except that I got very, very thirsty, and I had to beg for the nurse to get me a cup of water so I could have a drink.
They did put me out when they were done with the cath, to sew up the incision and repair a hernia I had, so that's probably why I don't remember much more. Maybe it wouldn't have been so traumatic for me if not for what the doctors had to say after they'd seen the holes in my heart: They thought I should have a heart-lung transplant...
Admittedly, I was only 9 at the time, but I used to read the magazines in my mom's chiropractor's office when she would go in for treatment, and I had read articles about the man who'd been given the Jarvik-7 artificial heart. I knew what having a heart transplant involved, and the combination made for some really really terrible nightmares.
I'm still supposed to go for regular checkups for my heart, but I tend to stretch the time between visits a bit, even though I finally have a female cardiologist who is not so intimidating and for once doesn't treat me like an idiot child. Her colleagues do (or at least the one I have met so far), but at least she doesn't.
Side note... I don't like doctors, and since this is my place to truly be me, I'm not going to tone it down at all, so if you're a doctor, pardon my attitude.
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