Dancing with Death, Susan Engel [novels to read in english txt] 📗

I thought I was going to die. And for once, I didn’t want to.
You see, I have placed myself in plenty of death-provoking circumstances before, not really caring whether I lived or died. Those many times when I coyly seduced death, taunting and teasing it in a rather catty way – giving it my most smoldering “come hither” look as I peered down my outstretched arm, palm up, slowly curling my finger toward me. “Come on … that’s it … just a little further …” As if I were a dancer in some sort of twisted burlesque show. “Touch me, Death … I dare you! Betcha’ can’t …” as I raised an inviting eyebrow. Then I would suddenly plop to the floor like a rag doll. “And I don’t really care if you do,” I’d sneer, rationalizing the self-centered delusion that I deserved it anyway – death, that is.
But not this time. This time I cared. This time, for once, I was clean and sober. It had been nearly a year since my last provocative, drug-induced dance with Death. This time, however, it wasn’t about me.
The pain began one Saturday night in January. It was “movie night” with my husband. We had planned on going to a local theater to see the latest indie film – nothing much, really. I couldn’t tell you what the name of the movie was today.
I was taking a shower in preparation of our evening out when the cramping began in my lower abdomen. It felt like menstrual cramps (sorry, guys), but the pain didn’t really wax and wane like it did with cramps. It began as a slow, constant, gripping, slightly-piercing pain. It wasn’t extremely painful then, but it definitely got my attention. “Shall we dance?” asked Death.
I quickly looked down. “Whew! No blood,” I sighed. That had to be good, right? Every time that I’d had those kind of cramps before, there had been blood. Blood was bad. So, no blood must be okay – right? Yet a twinge of panic hovered that I couldn’t dismiss. And there was the pain. It wouldn’t stop.
I abruptly ended my shower before I had a chance to wash my hair. I knew that I had to lay down – now. Yes, I thought, the right thing to do with abdominal pain is lay down. I quickly toweled myself off and lie down on my bed. The pain persisted, and it was ever-so-slowly getting worse.
While I was lying on the bed, I accepted the fact that the pain wasn’t abating, and so I called out to my husband, “Hon! Can you come here for a minute, please?”
He rounded our open bedroom door and upon seeing me lying on the bed, wrapped in a towel and curled into a semi-fetal position, his eyebrows raised and he said, “What’s going on?”
“I have cramps – bad cramps. They feel more just lower abdominal than just uterine,” I said as I motioned over my stomach slowly with one hand. We were both nurses and we dropped medical jargon around freely.
Behind his glasses, his eyes narrowed in concern.
“No bleeding, though,” I said and managed a smile.
“Hmm …,” he muttered. “Something you ate, maybe?”
I shrugged, “Maybe.” I winced and shifted my position – slowly – but couldn’t quite find the right spot that would ease the discomfort. We had eaten pizza earlier that evening. Perhaps, I thought, it was just some bad gas …? But the pain wouldn’t go away and it began to worry me. I said, “I don’t think I’ll be able to make it to the movie tonight, hon – I’m sorry. You can go without me if you want. I’ll be okay.” I mean, I am a nurse, right? I should be fine. Lord knows, I’d experienced plenty of torturous stomachaches in the past when I was hungover and somehow got through it.
My husband chose to stay home with me. He went to the corner video store and rented, “The Mask of Zorro.” We hadn’t seen it in the theater the year before, but we both wanted to watch it. As it turned out, the pain chained me to the bed so I didn’t watch it that night. Well, I should say that the pain and the slight nausea that had begun kept me in bed. I could hear the movie playing in the living room, where the TV was located. A feeling of tightness began to accompany the pain and nausea in my belly.
Somewhere along the line, I had managed to carefully pull on a sweatshirt and sweatpants by myself, but even that was exhausting – it must have taken me about 5 minutes (or more – I can’t quite remember now) to do it. Moving each limb into its appropriate sleeve or pant leg was laborious due to the pain, and I had to rest between movements. The pain was spreading upwards from my lower mid-abdominal area. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I began to hold my breath when I moved, so as to guard against any further unintentional abdominal movement and its subsequent pain. Suddenly, I was overtaken with the urge to have a bowel movement.
As I slowly made my way out of bed and crawled along the walls of the bedroom to the nearby bathroom, I clutched onto the doorframes for support. It was beginning to be difficult to stand fully straight up. I tiptoed my way into the bathroom, I looked down for traces of blood on the grainy wood floor underneath me. Whew! I didn’t see any blood. I sighed. No blood. That was good.
Without going into detail, suffice it to say that I was overtaken with a case of diarrhea. But still – no blood. It had to be something I ate, I vowed to myself. It couldn’t be another miscarriage. No, no, NO! There was no blood! Sure, lots of unrelenting, painful cramping – but no blood. Yes, I thought, that was it! Something that I had eaten gave me an acute case of gastrointestinal distress.
I apologize in advance here, for I’m going to get a bit graphic. Well, sort of graphic. But it’s part of the story so … I’m sorry. I suddenly realized that I could not properly use the toilet paper. I had taken a nice bunch of toilet tissue, but upon reaching around, behind me, pain seized me mid-motion. It was a searing, hot, “you-are-not-moving-that-way again” pain across my abdomen.
I took a slow breath and tried again. ZAP! Nope. I couldn’t do it. A few tears formed in my eyes. This was unbelievable. The pain had exhausted and restricted me to the point where I couldn’t clean myself. I took another slow breath.
“Hon? Could you come in the bathroom, please?” I said as loud as I could, but not shouting – it hurt to shout.
My husband immediately appeared and saw my … uhh … predicament.
I cast my pride aside and asked, “I’m so sorry … I can’t … I have diarrhea, but the pain is so bad I can’t … wipe myself. Would you … help me?” I slowly turned to the side, bent over, and braced myself against the wall.
My husband looked at me incredulously at first and said, “You can’t? Really?!” But he quickly saw my distress and took the wadded tissue from my hand and cleaned me up. I would have been terribly humiliated had I not been in so much pain that I absolutely could not do it myself. I’m usually a pretty stubbornly independent woman. And at times, we nurses almost feverishly delight in denying help when they are ill or incapacitated.
The rest of the evening was a blur. Just pain and more pain, punctuated by bouts of nausea and diarrhea. I paged my Ob/Gyn doctor at Kaiser – twice. No response. Eventually night fell, the movie ended, and my husband came to bed.
I will never forget that night. I didn’t sleep at all. I tried but couldn’t find some reprieve from that damn implacable pain! Lying on my side ultimately seemed to be my best position. Then Death showed his dance card.
As I moved certain ways, a flash of scalding electricity ripped up my back, to the shoulder opposite of the limb I was moving. Ipsilateral, referred shoulder pain? No! It couldn’t be. No way. It was just really bad gas. Really, really bad gas. Probably food poisoning.
A little gnat-like voice buzzed in my ear, “This is bad, Susan. You know it. Radiating shoulder pain is bad. It means ...” I shut my eyes tight and tried to shoo away that voice with some intermittent soft moaning. No! I was not going to lose another baby! No! You see here? Still no blood!
Sunday morning finally rolled around. Time to get ready for church! I knew immediately that I wasn’t going to make it and told my husband so. He hesitantly went to church without me, as I tried to downplay my pain the best I could. Hell, I had done better acting as if I was okay when I was embroiled in my addiction! Why, I could’ve won an Oscar or two for the acting and manipulating that I did when I desperately wanted everyone to believe that I was just “fine” as I slowly drifted further into that hellish abyss of chemical dependency. Alcoholics and addicts know how to choreograph those particular kind of theatrics. And here I was once again, putting on an act for the wrong reason.
Death was leading me, unwillingly, to the dance floor while as I tried to delude myself that I wasn’t that sick. While my husband attended church, I somehow – God knows how – made it to the kitchen and living room. I knew that I needed to rehydrate and refuel after the diarrhea, yet I had little thirst and no appetite.