With a jolt of pain and a spasm from somewhere in back, I realized that what had been mildly concerning the night before had left me nearly paralyzed now.
I managed to shuffle to the bathroom. I spent the hour and a half that followed on the floor, in various positions of a pathetic inability to ambulate.
"Beached whale" came to mind more than once, usually when I was on my back, unable to roll to one side or another.
The plan the night before had been to call Mom, and she would drive me to the hospital.
Back on my bedroom floor, unable to sit, kneel, stand or do anything that involved my hips and back aligning, I realized that I wouldn't be able to walk to the car, much less get into or out of it.
I also realized that I had locked the door, meaning anyone who came over wouldn't be able to get in.
(I didn't think of calling my landlords — who live upstairs — and screaming was not an option. Period.)
I grabbed a pair of long pyjama pants and a sweatshirt, put my phone on top of them and pushed them ahead of me, crawling an agonizing trail down one hallway, then turning toward the door, adding my flip-flops and purse to the pile and accumulating some stellar blisters on the tops of my toes.
We're not meant to crawl.
At the door — the door that had been UNLOCKED all night — I weighed the few options I had. And I called 911.
The truly humiliating thing is that I live — literally — down the hill from the hospital. But I called for an ambulance. Because I had to.
The shame of being carried out of my apartment on a stretcher was lost on me, curled in a fetal position on my side and glad that someone could finally do something.
I'm a fan of Fentanyl. I am NOT a fan of morphine. Morphine was lead, weighing my body down, but not reducing the pain. It hurt entering my body — all four times they pushed it through my IV. It made my heartbeat drop super-low & my oxygen fall to alarmingly low levels.
Thank God Shannamay was there to wake me up & keep me talking.
"Don't worry — I wouldn't let it go to zero," she said.
Thanks.
I'm also apparently a disappointing drugged patient.
"I don't have any good stories to tell," Shannamay said.
Phew.
Short story: We still don't know what caused this.
I'm on a walker, two kinds of pain killers, a muscle relaxer and lots of ice. Best guess is that I REALLY pissed off a bundle of nerves in my lower back. I didn't fall or get hit. I simply sat down at work after lunch, and three hours later, I couldn't stand up straight.
And I'm very humbled. You can't be anything but humbled when you're crawling on the floor after lying on it. Humility is a constant companion then.
We won't go into the bathroom-or-catheter discussion.
