chapter 1: part 6

Continued from part 5

The next day we'd both had enough. Hal had patiently endured days of probing and testing and we now insisted on a medical conference.

We met that afternoon with Dana, Dr. K's medical resident. We pointed out that Hal had been without food for a long time and some sort of decision had to be made. We had read up on Crohn's disease and if this is what we were dealing with, we would learn to live with it. We had to have some answers and we needed to know what the doctors planned to do before Hal lost more weight.

On a practical level, he had clients getting impatient with his inability to finish his assignments.

Dana reported our feelings back to the doctor and he came in to say he had arranged to have a laparotomy performed in two days time. This is a look-see sort of operation, or an exploratory procedure. Since the tests weren't giving a clear picture of the problem, they would resort to this surgical procedure to tell them what the culprit was.

"Oh by the way, " he added, "Did anyone mention the possibility that we might have to do a colostomy?"

My god. There was a time when news like this would have sent us into shock, but if this procedure would put an end to the nightmare, they were welcome to go to it. We'd rather they didn't but life was much more precious now.

In the two days remaining the doctor, frustrated by the lack of significant answers, ordered three more tests prior to the scheduled surgery.

First, Hal was to drink some barium, and the course of its journey would be followed by X- Rays every three hours. The barium couldn't get very far, which seemed to surprise everyone but us, and he soon felt the return of violent pain. Despite his agony, we knew that in three hours a porter would come to fetch him, take him with his intravenous pole in a wheelchair downstairs to Radiology. Then, after the test there was another wait for a porter to be called to return him to his room. The delays were frustrating and I finally persuaded the nurses to let me take him down and back myself, managing the chair and pole with the help of anyone in the elevator. By the second trip down he was groaning so loudly with pain he got top priority and went to the head of the line, just to get him out of there before he agitated the other waiting patients.

After that miserable experience we learned that the test results were inconclusive and that filled me with resentment, but I didn't know then how to cope with a specialist's orders.

Next on the schedule was a C.A.T. scan, which was fine with us, because there wouldn't be any pain involved. When that got underway the technician angrily announced the procedure was useless because of all the barium sitting there with nowhere to go, blocking a view of the site.

There was one final test to try before the scheduled surgery, a Colonoscopy. This is similar to the Endoscopy except that the flexible illuminated tube is threaded from south to north through the rectum and colon. Hal had insisted on a large dose of Valium and was groggy but smiling after the examination.

I sat with him all afternoon but there was no sign of the doctor and I assumed he had taken tissue samples and hadn't heard back from the lab.

Continued in part 7