teddwebb

Shit happens every day, but it can always be wiped away…

Archive for the category “Medical Update”

Watch Out For Your Cornhole

You Might Feel a Pinch

When Sheri and I lived in Tennessee, we were very poor and I had very, very cheap Medical Insurance. I had been shitting blood and black stool for weeks and having bad abdominal pain. The doctor at the local clinic where I went gave me medication but it did not help any at all. A “procedure” was going to be required, however, the first test was to be a Prostrate Exam. I was nervous. The room was grey, dimly lit. There was a wrinkled, well used tube of generic lubricant on a stainless steel tray alongside a pair of latex gloves. I will never forget the cold chill of that sterile environment. The doctor came in swiftly and quickly donned the gloves. He instructed me to remove my pants and underwear, to turn around, bend over, and to grasp the table, that I would feel some pressure, but assured me that if I relaxed the process would be much easier and go more smoothly. I will never forget the sight of the nonchalant way he squeezed a giant glob of lubricant onto his finger as I turned around, and that lubricant smell is forever burned into my brain. A pinch! A PINCH! SLIGHT PRESSURE! HOLY SHIT I’ve just been raped! A pinch, my ass! Literally! LOL!!!

…and then it was over. He quickly removed the gloves and disposed of them, told me everything seemed fine, and in a cold, professional way, pointed me towards a stack of paper towels and told me to clean up and come get him when I was done. I was shaking, felt ashamed and dirty, violated, standing there in that cold, dimly lit room with a butt crack filled with medical-grade lubricant after having been anally violated. How foolishly little did I know what was to come!

After having wiped away my shame as best as I could, I went to his office where I had a very hard time looking the man who just had his entire arm, up to the elbow I believe, maybe even all the way up to his armpit, way up in my ass, and I had to sit there and look him in the eye and carry on a conversation. Anyway, he dropped the bomb and had determined that the only recourse was to give me a colonoscopy. We had a problem though. My insurance was not enough to cover a colonoscopy and Sheri and I did not have enough money to pay for one. This doctor was very concerned about the length of time I had been bleeding internally in my intestines so he offered to perform the procedure on me for $700. There was a catch though. I would not have any anesthesia at all for the procedure and would have to endure the pain of a colonoscopy completely conscious. The price for the twilight anesthesia was $600 and Sheri and I just didn’t have the money.

When the time came for the colonoscopy, I was terrified. I mean, in this day and age, they have to actually run a 12 foot, ONE INCH THICK hose up through your asshole and into your intestines! Why not just the tiny, itsy-bitsy, teeny-weenie fiber optic cable alone? Why? WHY? Well, 3 “nurses” held me down while the doctor ran this, what seemed to be a never-ending gigantic black hose up my butt! I’m not saying that I like it in the butt or anything, but once the hose is up your butt, it’s really not that bad to be honest. The part that really HURTS during a colonoscopy is when they blow air into your intestinal cavity so that they can get a better view with the little camera on the end of the hose. OH…MY…GOD… You want to talk about the meaning of pain! Waterboarding ain’t got nothing on pumping air into your guts! OH! There was another part that hurt too, and that’s when they were really mashing hard on my intestines while they were trying to work the hose around.

I struggled, but they kept telling me to relax. But it HURT Damn it! But I also knew that if I didn’t find my inner core and endure it, that all I was doing was making it take longer, making it more difficult for the doctors to maneuver the elephant sized hose they’d jammed up into my intestines, and elongating, prolonging my torture. In that moment of dazed agony, your mind does not always think clearly or logically, and I can recall several instances where this one big “nurse” had to really struggle hard to hold me down, to “remind me” to calm down, that it would all be over soon.

After what seemed an hour of torture, which was probably a 10 minute procedure in all reality, everything was completed and this time someone else wiped my ass for me! I think that is the only time that I can recall, as an adult, having another human being wipe my ass for me. I remember at first being embarrassed when the procedure started, laying there all naked with my cock and balls and ass all exposed in front of a room full of strangers, but by the time the ass-wiping came, I was just grateful that I could lay there and relax while someone else wiped my ass for me. The doctor had wonderful news. He did not find any polyps or anything else out of the ordinary wrong up inside my guts. He warned me that there would be a great deal of farting to come, as is to be expected after a colonoscopy due to all the air that is left behind when they pull that fifty foot long pipe out of your cornhole. And fart I did! I did some of the best farting that I have ever done in my entire life. I am talking about 60 seconds of continuous farting here people!!! I was the world record champion of farting…for about 2 hours, then all my “steam” was gone 😦

About two years later, I went through the exact same spell of shitting blood for weeks on end and having black stool and having a lot of constipation intermixed, all with constant abdominal pain. So I sucked it up and went to my new doctor. Long story short, guess where I ended up? Yep, standing in a room with my pants around my ankles and with some old guys finger up my ass!!! And again a colonoscopy was called for as the only recourse to solve this mystery. Now in those two years: computers have like quintupled in processing power, we have had all sorts of medical advancements, we’ve broken the human genome project, and we now have some medications for AIDS even, but you’re telling me that with all those advancements, you are still going to run that same fucking 12 foot long, 1 inch thick pipe up my ass!?!?!???

Yes, yes we are still going to run, what looked to me like an even LARGER pipe up your ass Mr. Webb. The morning came and I showed up promptly for my anal raping. I had a better job now and I had better insurance, lived in a better location and was seeing a better doctor, but I was still scared just as shitless nonetheless! The room was dark and I was placed on a bed and given a blanket and hooked up to an IV. I was curious as to what was going on and the nurse said that she was giving me a “twilight drug.” What’s a “twilight drug?”

After a few minutes hooked up to the “twilight drug,” I fell into state of almost complete loss of consciousness, a sort of dream-state, with just a small grasp on the threads of reality. I remember being vaguely awake, talking about, “what is a twilight drug” one minute, and the next thing I remember was “waking up” and asking if they were ready to start the procedure yet. Fortunately, the gods of the twilight drug smiled on me and the nurse told me that the procedure was already over and that once I was fully awake, I could leave…but that I should be aware that a great deal of farting was to be expected. And fart I did, long earth-shattering farts that lasted an eternity and made me feel like the Farting Champion of the World!!!

Again, as before, the doctor said that he could not find any polyps or anything else that seemed out of the ordinary, or appeared wrong with my intestines. And again, just as before, shortly after the colonoscopy, all the bleeding stools and abdominal pain went away again. And again, just like after my FIRST colonoscopy, it seemed that the solution to my problem, that the medical solution that actually fixed the problem of the bleeding stool, was to simply perform a colonoscopy on me. Yes, that makes no sense, but now we are two for two. Tedd has agonizing painful abdominal cramps with lots of anal bleeding and black, bloody stool, then he gets a colonoscopy and the colonoscopy itself is what solves the problem. Now that makes sense to no one, but the facts remain the same.

Well, time passes and I have more bouts of these bleeding painful intestinal problems, but they go away after a short while. Most of them, that is, went away after a short while, but then, after another couple of years, the time came where I had weeks of black stool, bad abdominal cramps all the time, and literally shitting toilette bowls filled with bright red blood. I had to just suck it up, bite the bullet and go back to the damn doctor to see what is wrong with my intestines. You would think I would have gotten used to it by now, but I do not think that you can ever get accustomed to standing naked, bent over a table, with a strange man’s hand up your ass, well unless you’re a catholic altar boy maybe. LOL!!! Anyway, it was another trip back to twilight drug land for me, and another 12 foot long, one inch thick black pipe jammed up my ass, wiggling around inside my intestines, trying to find if anything was wrong. And again, nothing could be found up inside my intestines, and again, I went through a colossal bout of farting.

Over the course of almost a decade, science has made leaps and bounds in computer advancements, the bio-tech industry has literally exploded in growth, new medical instruments have been developed to perform microsurgery, and medical science has advanced to the point where we can transplant entire HANDS, grow human organs in petri dishes, and create therapies using the human genome project and stem cell research. And in this same DECADE of miraculous scientific and medical advancements, no one has seemed to have been able to figure out a less-invasive procedure and more quantifiably accurate procedure than to have some old guy jam his fist up your ass? What about making some of those medical advancements in the colonoscopy arena people? So in a hundred years, are we still going to have old dudes fingering your asshole and then ram-rodding a 50 foot garden hose up your cornhole? Really? Well, I’m 39 years old and I’ve already had THREE colonoscopies, and I speak from the voice of experience. When a doctor wants to finger your ass, be warned that the next thing he’ll want will be to stick a big black rubber hose in your bunghole instead! Ye Have Been Warned…

 

Please Bend Over

 

>ð|~@-@~|ð<

Paracentral Disc Protrusion – Say What?

I just had an MRI of my Thoracic Spine on the 18th. That’s the middle part of my back that has been screaming in pain ever since that butthead rear-ended me on the freeway 2 years ago. Sometimes, for example, when I pick up a jug of milk, I have a slicing pain that cuts me in two right at my Thoracic area where my back hurts, right about at the bottom of your ribcage is a good marker, and when I get that pain, I can’t breathe, from that point all the way down to my feet goes numb and I can’t feel anything and I almost fall.

I’m not gonna give you guys a lesson in reading MRI Reports, so here’s the short version. (T# are different vertebrae – Google it)

T5-T6: 4 mm disc protrusion

T6-T7: 10-11 mm disc protrusion

T7-T8: 9 mm disc protrusion

T8-T9: 3-4 mm disc protrusion

I have an appointment to go see a Neurosurgeon to discuss back surgery.

What does all this mumbo-jumbo mean? Well, it means things like the crap inside my back are pressing on my spinal cord. When shit presses on your spinal cord, it shuts off access from where whatever that nerve is connected to the brain. As an example, for me, a small 1 millimeter change in the pressure has caused me to not be able to digest food properly. If it is not fixed, my intestines will shut down and rot inside my torso and will eventually have to be removed.

 

MRI 09.14.2010

Great News!  I have more brain death than ever before!  Yeah!  And what’s even more exciting boys and girls is that I have entire chunks of my brain that are now dead lumps of stinky rotted meat inside my skull in NEW AREAS where I’ve never had lesions before.  Yippy.

My lesions have pretty much always stuck to the same half a dozen areas in my brain and they pop up and go away and pop up and go away.  For the most part, they stay gone long enough for my neurons (brain cells) to be able to mostly heal.  That way instead of 100% brain death for each lesion, I’m only getting 10% brain death, nice and slow decay, except for my central gyrus where the big boy hit with a fury (that’s why I walk with a cane now).

Whenever I get an MRI Report, I always feel this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, like I’m going to throw up.  I’m both anxious to read the Report and afraid to read the Report.  And when I read the Report and I come to sections like this, my heart skips a beat, and sinks.  No one ever Expects The Spanish Inquisition!  …No one ever Expects Brain Atrophy!

“focal FLAIR hyperintensity in the juxtacortical white matter with involvement of the U-fibers.  There is enlargement of the adjacent sulci, compatible with focal atrophy….hyperintense lesion at the level of the left pericallosal white matter adjacent to the genu of the corpus callosum…”

Yummy!  Brains…brains…cold, dead, non-functioning, rotten, but stuck, trapped inside my skull brains… I need a “nano-zombie” to go in there and clean up all that yucky mess!  LOL!!!

When I got my first “black hole” (that’s what we call those little black spots on your MRI ‘atrophy’ that should be nice, happy, smart, living brain matter, but instead is just black, dead brain cells), it hit me really hard.  I broke down, sobbing uncontrollably.  It’s not every day that you look at an image of your brain and you see a spot that should be alive and thinking, but instead it’s dead and once brain cells, neurons die, they NEVER grow back.  I’ve had a few more smaller black holes here and there, but not as big as my first one.  However on this MRI, there are half a dozen or so.  I didn’t even finish looking through all the films on the CD.  I just stopped half way through.  I didn’t want to see any more.  There’s no point.

That’s funny because Dr. Clarke said the same thing when I asked her about getting an MRI more often.  She said there’s no point.  What good is it going to do?  So we don’t catch your brain when it’s in a highly active period.  So what?  If we did, there’s nothing that we could do because the ONLY treatment that you can do when you have a flair up of lesions is steroid infusions and guess who’s allergic to steroids?  Yep, me.  Isn’t that a bitch?  The only treatment available that “may” help slow down the lesions, is a treatment that I’m allergic to and made me go half blind when they infused me with them in the beginning before we all knew that I was allergic to steroids!  LOL!!!

Anyway, there’s the latest news on the MRI.  A couple new lesions and half a dozen or so new chunks of brain death.  I’m a little bit more senile today than I was yesterday.  I’m 38 and I have dementia and am getting as senile as an old man Sad smile

 

>ð|~@-@~|ð<

Reality Check…

I went to the neurologist today.

Reality Check…

She said that I was maxed-out on Hydroxyzine and that medical science had no other drug stronger or more effective for treating MS Pruritis, which is phantom itching. The entire left side of my head and neck itch constantly. It’s maddening. When it first started, it was all I could do to keep from taking a knife and carving my scalp off to make the itching stop. No matter how much I scratched, it had absolutely no effect. You see, it’s the damaged nerve cells in my brain that’s “telling” my brain that the entire area is itching, but there’s really nothing irritating the skin that’s causing the itching. So no creams, or salves, or ointments, or scratching is ever going to make it itch any less or go away.

Then Glory Be to God, my Neurologist found that a drug they give to drunks for the DT’s in rehab going through detox, or to nervous patients right before surgery to calm them down, actually has this weird effect on the neurons in MS People that slows down those “bad itching neurons” from firing so much, so you itch less and it becomes more bearable to live your life, still constantly itching, but not itching to the point of madness. You learn to stop scratching like a junkie and control yourself. You learn to stop thinking about that constant itch and to try to ignore it. However, my itching is creeping up again. Now it’s constantly on my mind, constantly itching, constantly having to control myself to keep myself from scratching and scratching and scratching until my skin is raw and bleeding…I must control myself. But the itching won’t stop or go away.

And today my Neurologist tells me that I am at the maximum safe dosage already, that there are no other more powerful drugs, that Medical Science hasn’t figured out how to fix it yet…that my itching is going to get worse and that there is nothing anyone can do to make it stop or to help me and that I must just endure the maddening itching forever. Science just discovered a couple weeks ago what kind of MS I have, let alone how to treat specific symptoms of it, so I’m screwed.

Reality Check…

Ever since I got MS, I’ve felt like my left arm is being drawn and quartered. Has anyone ever had bursitis with bone spurs with torn ligaments with decayed cartilage with a pulled trapezius muscle with a dislocated shoulder blade? Well if so, then multiply that pain by tenfold and that’s what being drawn and quartered feels like. I literally feel as though my left arm is being twisted and torn away from my body and all the muscles connected to my arm are all tight and in pain just like they would be if it were being torn away, and the pain radiates down my entire arm. Mostly it’s my triceps and biceps and forearms that hurt. Every now and then the pain makes it all the way down into my hands and it takes my breath away.

Reality Check…

When your hand has been chopped in half, you stop and pay attention! In fact, you stop breathing. You stop moving. You stop thinking. I think your heart even stops beating for a second or two because the pain is so excruciating. I never knew that you had so many “sensory” nerves in your hands until this. I always knew that you had a lot of sensitivity in your fingers, but I guess it never occurred to me that all those nerves in your fingers have to get there somehow…and they get there via your hands and there are a lot of nerves, places for your tricky brain to cause pain, in your hand. There’s nothing quite like being in the middle of a conversation and then having your hand chopped in half, and then having that half pulled apart, and then dipped into hot lava, and it lasts for 20 seconds to several minutes. It’s all I can do to keep from crying. It hurts so bad that I can’t even talk to tell Sheri what’s going on and why I’ve stopped talking. And when the pain stops and I can move and breath and speak again, sometimes all I can do is break down sobbing and crying helplessly.

Reality Check…

An Angel from Heaven in disguise as a Doctor in an Emergency Room gave me one of the only medications that has kept me from walking out into the ocean and ending my pain quickly. That’s called, Neurontin. It’s not a normal, “junkie-style” pain medication. You’ll never see this stuff on the streets. Neurontin is a Nerve Pain medication. It’s not an opiate like morphine or oxycodone. It works inside your brain to help make those damaged neurons/brain cells “feel less pain, or think they are in less pain” so that you “feel” less pain. Since there’s actually nothing physically wrong with you, pain medications have no effect on you whatsoever. I have an extremely high tolerance for pain. I have an 8mm bulging disk in my spine, and it’s just one of many bulging disks and I’ve been on Fentanyl and high-dose MS-Contin and neither one did anything for my neuralgia (that’s nerve pain, my MS Pain).

Reality Check…

Have you ever seen a hot cattle prod? Have you ever seen a 1,000 pound bull jump and holler when it’s stuck with a hot cattle prod? I have had a hot cattle prod pressed up against my left collar bone for 6 years now. I think all the flesh burned off years ago and the bone has been burnt to ashes and it’s just burning for fun now. LOL!!! Seriously though, this one just freaks me out so much that I don’t even know what to say about it or exactly how to describe it. It’s a freaky, painfully freaky feeling. It feels like my collar bone is on fire, like it’s being pushed into my body and is about to snap at any moment, and like someone is pulling on it trying to pull it out of my body, all at the same time. I told you it was a freaky! It feels like it’s pushing on my throat too and sometimes I have problems swallowing.

I can’t eat or drink because my throat muscles won’t function properly. It’s like that pressure my collar bone is pushing at the base of my throat has disabled my brains entire ability to swallow, or like I have simply “forgotten” how to swallow. Swallowing is labored and difficult, and sometimes I simply just am unable to swallow anything, even my own saliva.

Reality Check…

The pain I feel has been kept to manageable levels. Sometimes it hurts so bad that I cry or that it takes my breath away, or that I have to lay down or sit down, or that I can’t move, but most of the time, it’s just a constant pain that I feel, always. However, the Most Blessed and Holy Neurontin has been my Savoir throughout these past 6 years and has kept the pain at bay for 85% of the time. And 15% of the time in screaming agony is something I can totally handle, no problem given my options on the table!!

However, for the past few months, the pain has been growing, getting worse. Instead of being in agony 15% of the time, I’m in agony 45% of the time now. I had hoped that my neurologist would simply “wave her magical wand of Medical Science” and write me a prescription for something different, some new medication that I’ve not heard of, or change around my dosage, increase it or something, do something to help make the pain stop. But instead, she said that I was already at the maximum dosage levels that were safe for human consumption and that there were no other drugs available. Medical Science has not yet developed any new medications. In the past SIX YEARS Medical Science has not made a single tangible step forward. Oh yes, there has been progress in research studies in Canada and Great Britain, and in a study at UCLA but that doesn’t mean that there is a new “wonder drug” on the market, or A Cure. It just means that they’ve discovered some new quirky piece of information that helps them solve one more piece of the convoluted puzzle of Multiple Sclerosis.

Reality Check…

It’s going to take some “digesting” for me to come to terms with “you’re already maxed out on all the pain medications we have and there isn’t any other medical science in existence that can help you…so you’re just going to be in pain forever”…and it’s getting worse and more painful…and I’m not going to get more or a stronger dosage or some other medication that’s going to take the sharp, stabbing, screeching edge off the pain and just make it a bearable scream that you can tolerate after a while.

Reality Check…


>ð|~@-@~|ð<

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