After going to the local GI doc (who is wonderful and his staff is wonderful as well), I was told that they don’t do balloon dilation during a colonoscopy. The physician’s assistant called GI Associates to see if they offered this, but was given the run-around by a drunk-with-power receptionist. It is such people who have inspired me to say that the peons pull the strings (every receptionist is a gatekeeper). Anyway, I scheduled a regular ass colonoscopy, asked for the hard stuff (the 1+ gallon of Go Litely plus magnesium citrate) because that Gatorade + Miralax method was not going to cut it (and it isn’t recommended for someone with kidney disease). The clinic had a cancellation and I could have opted for an earlier time, except I had my ride all arranged for later in the day. I think this set some nurses (who wanted to finish their shifts early) against me. I thanked the nurse for offering me the earlier time, but I needed to be considerate to the person driving me.
Things went well with the procedure, but after they woke me up, I guess they expected me to go back to sleep. When I am woke up, I’m up. Nothing knocks me out very much because I am used to being heavily medicated to deal with spasticity from MS. They said they were calling my mom (my driver), and even though they got the number from her when she took me in, they asked me for her number. They told me the doctor would come talk to me when my mom got there. They were waiting on her, but never told her to come in, and in fact had originally told her to wait outside in the loading area and that I would be wheeled out.
“Can I go to the bathroom?” I asked. “Just fart,” the nurse instructed, but I told her I had to pee. They pumped a full bag of sugar water into me before the procedure and I have numerous bladder issues. I started to explain this… “We don’t want you getting up so soon… can you use a bedpan.” I replied “No.” I have never been able to use a bed pan. It causes me a lot of pain. I said I could hold it for a little while. The thing is, when I hold my urine, I get really nauseous. It had been over half an hour, and I was frantically looking for the nurse button which was nowhere in sight. This is something I will be filing a complaint about.
Then a nurse swooshed by to say “your mom still isn’t here,” to which I responded, “did anyone tell her to come in?” A nurse asked and found out that someone had told her to just bring the car around. I told the nurse I would need help getting dressed because I have balance issues under the best circumstances. It was obvious this nurse didn’t want to help me. Everyone else had gone home for the day and she was chomping at the bit to get out of there. In fact, so much so that she handed me off to the front desk clerk so she wouldn’t have to wheel me out. I was a little bit crabby. I had cramps and wasn’t feeling well from being forced to hold in my urine. I mean, it was good that she admitted someone had fucked up on communicating to my mom, but the fact that I didn’t have a nurse call button anywhere within reach is a big fucking deal. It had been tied to my gurney before the procedure, but was nowhere to be found after I was wheeled back after the procedure.
The guy I was handed off to, referred to as Lon, was telling me the hospital was very busy and he would need to go to the ER after dropping me off. That is all he needed to say, and actually more than he needed to say, but then he goes on to complain about how short staffed the hospital is because “as Trump says, people don’t want to work.” I replied, “That isn’t true; there are worker shortages because the largest generation, the Baby Boomers, have mostly retired.” He then told me he would be retiring this year. I was already getting in the car, but I would like to have informed him that if Trump got elected again that he could kiss his retirement goodbye. I get where staffing shortages are frustrating, but a big part of why there are shortages amongst healthcare workers is because so many were harassed by Trump supporters during the pandemic, and having gotten fed up with that bullshit decided to leave the profession. It is a problem uniquely created by MAGA.
The hot take by the man wheeling my fat ass out to my mom’s vehicle (she had been waiting in the patient loading area for quite some time at that point) had reminded me of the recent hot take from Ben Shapiro on how retirement doesn’t make sense unless someone is sick. This has become a MAGA talking point as Trump has recently talked about putting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on the chopping block. Most Americans don’t have plushy bullshit jobs that involve airing petty grievances on hate speech radio. Unlike Shapiro, a lot of Americans have physically and mentally demanding jobs. My dad worked in a hot smelly paper mill and was forced to retire two years early when the asset management company that owned said mill, and also received government bonds so that they wouldn’t need to lay off workers, decided to shut down operations because of the pandemic. My dad needed to retire, but he was denied his full retirement benefit because of the cheaters who are always the biggest recipients of government welfare dollars: asset management firms. My dad has earned every leisurely hour he spends on a golf course. He deserves every cent he has coming to him. So do I.
I essentially retired at age 40 because my health problems got so bad that even part-time work done from home became impossible. Truth be told, I should have been on SSDI since 2006, the year I took short-term disability from my place of work. I should’ve been diagnosed with MS back then, but I wasn’t diagnosed until early in 2019, nearly two years after I quit my last job to apply for SSDI one final time. I had applied in 2007, appealed in 2009, and was denied. I received no back pay, because I would have needed to apply again before 2012, and I had given up on applying for SSDI until I was literally on my death bed. I had asked a disability law firm to help me apply. They did. I found out there are a lot of forms that Social Security wants you to fill out that they never give you. I kept a detailed symptom journal. I listed diagnoses, some that I believed to be false, but there were medical records showing these. I always believed I had MS, but I was not diagnosed at that time, so I had to list undifferentiated connective tissue disease among the other ailments I actually had because that was the diagnosis I was given by rheumatologists who could not admit they were wrong and just refer me to a neurologist.
Most of the other conditions I listed are neurological: trigeminal neuralgia, chronic migraine, hemiplegic migraine. Then there are the bladder and bowel problems, reflected as chronic UTI, interstitial cystitis, and IBS, but probably actually pelvic floor dyssynergia resulting from MS. Even my chronic kidney disease is related to the misdiagnoses. When other medications failed, prednisone would make me function well enough where I could work, so I would stay on it way longer than anyone should. I would sometimes be taking prednisone for six month stretches. As can be expected, I developed Type II diabetes. I quickly got my sugars under control while on metformin, and should have stopped the medication sooner than I did, but I believed it was helping with the cysts on my remaining ovary. That and it made it so much easier to take weight off. I think metformin likely caused my chronic kidney disease. Untreated UTIs are another culprit, but the metformin nearly killed me. I was suffering from lactic acidosis and my kidneys were failing. My GFR was at 25%; it is at 70% now. Talk about a comeback story.
Anyway, I think you can discern just how triggering it is for me to hear someone who is planning on retiring spewing MAGA bullshit that is tantamount to generational warfare. I am reading the book The Adjunct Underclass, and a lot of what the book reflects upon is how undervalued education is. This is a also a big part of why there are worker shortages in the field of medicine, and so many other fields. It is a little thing called the skills gap, and it will widen further if Trump gets in office again.
I have always supported student loan forgiveness, but I get why some people don’t. I wish that American leaders would look to Canada for a solution that I think more people would get on board with: free tuition for anyone entering a field where there is a shortage of workers. Let’s get rid of the necessity for loans entirely when it comes to these areas. Sure, there is debt forgiveness for people entering public service, but there is some unnecessary hoop jumping and a lot of people who qualify don’t even realize that they can get their loans forgiven. I was kind of an expert on student loan forgiveness; I developed curriculum for the UWEX financial wellness coach train the trainer courses aimed at college students. I did this while earning some student loan forgiveness for myself in my service as an AmeriCorps VISTA.
I have worked as adjunct faculty. I have experienced the dark side of higher education in this country, but still I value education and know how necessary it is for us to move forward. There were members of the nursing staff I encountered today who were frankly out of their depth. There was quiet quitting, sure, but there was also just a lack of basic protocol being followed. How many were passed by adjunct instructors pressured to inflate grades? I think there were two or three for whom this likely is true. I empathize with the amount of stress these workers are under, but when someone is coming out of anesthesia, there better be a call button within reach!
There was nothing abnormal found, so now it is up to the GI doc to refer me to GI Associates for manometric testing and the world’s most invasive physical therapy (and no, it cannot be done in the comfort of one’s home). When you have an asshole that does not open on it’s own, you have one big pain in the ass. The outpatient procedure staff didn’t need to add to my pain, but they did.
I'm sorry you had such an awful experience. I think the worker shortage has made it so the people left are overworked and getting burnt out, which makes the worker shortage even worse. I hope things go better the next time you have to go in for something.