ins and outs

Glossing daintily over what was a kinda crappy weekend, I was dropped abruptly into a less than pleasing Monday morning. Guzzling from a giant cup of mystery smoothie in a hospital gown, reading a Smithsonian magazine from 1990. I filled queasily with barium and dread. Every ten minutes, laying on the metal table, holding my breath, face down as the hours passed. Waiting for the doctor who didn't understand the connection between my history and the need for the test today. Getting under another xray camera with a probe about the size of a soup bowl that lowered itself onto my stomach under the command of the doctor. Pressing me here and there, calculating. While the real time xray showed on a monitor by me head... my dazzling intestines waving like leaves of giant kelp with every breath and twitch, distracting me from the soup bowl paining me where it finally dropped.

The pain you have, the doctor says, is in your terminal ileum. The end of the small intestine. It is where Crohn's disease likes to live. The xrays we have taken today show nothing unusual there though. So it may be early stage Crohn's or a mild case. In any event, you should have a CAT scan.


swallow © Laura Kicey. All Rights Reserved.

After some blood work and insurance wrestling, I went home feeling neither good nor bad. Wondering how many more times I would do this same dance before I had an answer. Considering that my other problem, the one that will possibly require surgery in a couple weeks might be a permanent fixture in my life, or at best, a recurring one. So I went home and made some shrimp gyoza for lunch to break my fast and stir my hunger that had been killed by the barely strawberry beverage prep I drank earlier that morning. Then I took my xrays out of their envelope and looked at myself that way. More than naked and a complete mystery.


enteral realm © Laura Kicey. All Rights Reserved.

Then to send me off to sleep, I built myself a brand new wall to hide behind.



recognize © Laura Kicey. All Rights Reserved.