04/13/2024: Withdrawals

April 13, 2024

There are many things I did/do that I did not know I could/should do until someone else encouraged me to do. This blog is one of them. Writing these posts has given me an outlet, not just to communicate my status to friends and family, but also to sort my own thoughts and fears around what is happening and what is to come.

I type up my posts on phone, usually when on a walk. I then come home and upload pictures on my laptop - my phone fails there. Yesterday, after dropping Taara at school, I sat down at the dining table, by the window, to do just that. The laptop screen got too bright and unusually blurry at the same time. I moved to the other end of the table to escape the sun. It didn't help. I lowered the brightness on the laptop to a minimum. I squinted my way through photo upload, closed the laptop, and got up and almost immediately sank back into the chair. The sofa, the chandelier, the chairs, and the stairs- everything around me- started wobbling. I somehow managed to get myself upstairs into my bedroom and called Bhaskar who was in the middle of a meeting two floors below me. He called the on-call neurosurgeon to describe my symptoms. I took a nap while waiting for their response.

A couple of hours later, a friend stopped by for a quick visit. After he left, another friend brought some hot lunch and made me some buttermilk. Their visits, company, and the food definitely helped and I felt better enough to even take a shower. It was a whole another story after the shower, however. I started sweating profusely and it took every last ounce of my energy to make the ten feet out from closet back to bed. My phone does not work well from our home. Since Bhaskar never got a response from the morning call, I borrowed Raaga's phone to give the doctor another call. When I saw, five minutes later, that I had already missed their call back, I started sobbing uncontrollably. Poor Raaga was shocked beyond belief by my junkee+PMS hybrid reaction to a simple missed call!

Long story short, I was ER bound by 6pm. One wise decision I made this time was to stop Bhaskar from accompanying me to the ER. It was only 24hours ago that he sat through the torture of my screams from the IV pokes. In fact, I heard him requesting to be excused from the room during my angiogram procedure. Poor guy was terrified that he would have to watch me scream through groin rupture too! Needless to say, it was a lot for him to handle. I knew very well how hard it is to be the caregiver for someone dealing with pain of any kind. Raaga had a music exam the next morning and I knew she was already freaking out about it even *before* witnessing my afternoon episode. I decided it was best for the family if he stayed at home with the kids, while I navigated another round of the unfortunately familiar ER surroundings.

A friend kept me company at the ER until I got a room assigned. ER truly is an extremely miserable place to be. A high school kid with fresh bruises on his elbows. A middle aged man struggling to breath. An infant crying inconsolably. The clincher was the crazy man clearly going through withdrawals as he yelled at the hospital staff for keeping an alcohol-based hand sanitizer while he's been struggling to stay sober. He dropped such generous f-bombs and other horrible expletives in every phrase he spoke, loud enough, that the security personnel had to show up to keep him in check. While I was getting paranoid for the next monkey wrench that'd get thrown at me during this visit, I was also oddly thankful - at least I did not end up like that guy in withdrawals, and I had a friend there to talk with and laugh about it!

The rest of the night was uneventful. I requested no IV pokes of any kind. The ER staff were kind enough to honor that and let me go with a CT scan and a few more hours of waiting. They concluded that my headaches and blurry vision have nothing to do with any brain abnormalities, and that it had to be from migraines. As Bhaskar picked me up and drove me home close to midnight, I kept wondering if it was all the fentanyl used in the anesthesia the day before, and that perhaps I had been in withdrawals of my own.