Papa and pain

Like most men my husband is a big baby. When he is sick with a cold or flu he wants to be waited on hand and foot. He needs a cold cloth for his forehead, he needs his Halls and a blankie and on and on... he's a wuss. But that man can take a tremendous amount of pain.

The first time I saw this was in 1983, just after I got out of nursing school. He got very sick, nausea, vomiting, fever and chills. Then the pain started, nowhere specific, it was all over his body. I had to fight with him for days to get him to the doctor. His argument?? He had no job, I had just graduated and had no job so we had no health insurance. He said it would be better for him to die than to rack up huge medical bills and then die anyway and leave me and the kids behind with the bills. What an idiot!

This was in February. He was a horrid grey/green color and while waiting for the doctor he was ripping his clothes off, pouring with sweat but even after examination he refused to go to the hospital. He did however agree to having blood work done. Later that night, about 11:40 pm, the doctor called and said it was imperative that Papa go to ER. By this time the pain had localized to his lower right abdomen and he was in agony. We didn't live far from the hospital and were there in a few minutes. By 12:15 am they had him in surgery and removed a gangrenous appendix. It burst as they were removing it. His recovery was my first real nursing experience because I got to take care of him at home. He was discharged after three days with a huge gaping wound that was left open so it could drain.

Then there was the car accident in 1988 when his ankle was broken as the floor board was pushed up into the car. That was painful but really minor relatively speaking.

The next biggie was in 2007. As mentioned previously Papa has always been prone to a sickie stomach... heart burn, nausea, gas, that sort of thing. On
St Patrick's Day we attended a surprise birthday party our son had for his wife Sara and later that night, after eating all the party food, Papa felt really crappy. He took the usuals but it just didn't go away... for weeks! He had heart burn all the time and it started getting worse and worse. Then he started having pain in his back, right below his right shoulder blade, it sometimes radiated through to the front. Papa was a semi truck driver and he drove like that for weeks and again, he refused to go to the doctor.

Then one Tuesday night he was on his way to Iowa and got as far as Lansing (two hours from our home) but the pain became so intense that he had to turn around and come home. I wanted to take him to ER but he insisted on waiting to see our family doctor. He thought it was his gall bladder and he did not think it was a real emergency, no matter what I said. I called first thing in the morning but it was the week before Easter and she was on vacation. The office said to go to ER or he could come in and see the doctor covering for our doctor. He would do neither. So the rest of that week, five days, I had to watch that stubborn man grapple with pain. He took every available pain med he could find... vicodin, a stray Tylenol #3 left over from a dental procedure, aspirin by the handful till there was nothing left even in the lint covered bottom of my purse. The pain would come and go but when it was on him it was terrible to see.

Even now I can not believe that he would not just get in the damn van and let me take him to the hospital. Why? Why was he like that? Did he think he couldn't die? Well, maybe, but one reason, the really stupid reason, is because he didn't want to wait. Truck driver have to wait a lot. They wait in heavy traffic, they wait for their trailers to be loaded or emptied and sometimes shippers and receivers let them wait for a very long time and with no good reason... sometimes just because they can. Papa did not want to wait in ER. He was afraid he would have to sit there and sit there and WAIT!

When I finally got him in to see the doc on Monday she agreed that he could be having gall bladder attacks as his symptoms were classic for that. She was going to order the procedure we actually recently followed. Her office was setting up an ultrasound appointment and she mentioned that Papa would also have to have an EKG pre-op. I asked if the EKG could be done in her office to speed things along and she agreed. By this time Papa is grey and he is in pain and he is drenched in sweat and he is nauseated. They give him an injection for the nausea and then another for pain. Two minutes after the EKG she came rushing into the office and said papa was having a heart attack. She called the hospital and told them to expect us. I drove him rather than wait for an ambulance. It took only a few minutes to get him into the cath lab where they put in a stent. He had a 100% blockage but he was so lucky that there was no permanent damage to his heart. That entire month what he had been experiencing was angina, not heart burn or gall bladder attacks. He never did have any of the usual symptoms of a heart attack like mid-sternal chest pain or jaw pain or left arm pain... all his symptoms were on the right and in his back.

So you can see that Papa is no stranger to pain, common sense perhaps, but not to pain. But how does that physical pain compare to the mental pain of imagining all that could be ahead?