The Little Shop of Horrors

It is funny how you gain perspective quickly when you start to compare other people's circumstance with your own and then you quit wanting to be such a crybaby. So I think my life is misery that I have no sleep, no respect, my skin is peeling off and I think I am allergic to surgical scrub or the hospital because I have developed a bad rash all over my body, am constipated for being chronically dehydrated because I am either stuck in the OR and can't drink, or I am out running around like a mad chicken and don't drink? This is what I thought as millions of children lay hungry and people are dying for no reason?

That is until I met up with someone I will call Fettucini because I relate everything to food.

Ms Fettucini had the unfortunate circumstance of meeting up with OB/GYN, the Birthing-cum-Vagina doctors, who said she needed to have her whole female plumping permanently removed from her system, which will make her incapable of having any children so she wouldn't contribute to the amassing amounts of hungry children in the world. Three weeks later, she developed an infection which led to abscesses that formed on her insides, in her abdomen. Abscesses are like giant zits and like giant zits, they have to be popped or they won't go away. She gets admitted into the hospital, because giant zits in the abdomen are awful painful, and comes see the surgeons.

The surgeons say, as is a typical response you would expect from a surgeon,:
"That's why people who have only 3 years of training in the OR are not qualified to operate on people."
Surgeons suffer 5 years, plus some, of agony while Vag Docs get to do it for only 3 years before they are allowed to hang a shingle on their window and open their Little Shop of Horrors.
They decide to manage it conservatively and sent her to the Interventional Radiologists.
IR people wanna be surgeons but, unlike surgeons, they also want to play golf, own a million dollar mansion, go on extended vacations in Tuscany, drive their nice high-end series BMWs and Benzes, work 9-5, and never take call. They think they are more superb than the surgeons because they get to study about physics and atoms and use big xray machines to help them place drains and lines and stuff like that into people.

IR gets called in to help drain Ms Fettucini's abscess. They think there may be a pocket in her lower back they can get to with their big xray and they stick a drain into her abdomen from behind. Three days later, Ms Fettucini is still in pain and she is spiking a little fever and her drain is draining something looking like poop. We take her back to the Xray men who take a picture of her abdomen and find now that the abscess cavitiy has bored a hole through the small intestines and she is draining pus into her gut.

The surgeons want to try to treat this but not cut into her uneccessarily (can you beat that, a righteous surgeon?!). Two days later they take another picture of her abdomen and now, there are tiny abscesses everywhere in her abdomen.

So back to the OR she goes, nice little tattooed Fettucini whose greatest concerns were: 1) we don't screw up her tattoo she has around her belly button, and 2) no one sees her without her dentures. She is thirty-three, with no spleen and front teeth because her boyfriend had the shit beaten out of her, she has no uterus and ovary because she had such bad HPV infection her OB/GYNs had to remove them and she has HIV, which someone gave to her when she was 22.

So we open this woman and the first thing the surgeons said was this:
"What the fuck is this?" as he surveys the angry abdomen with intestines bunched up in a knot, pus pockets littered everywhere.
It is always comforting to know that even the surgeons can't tell the difference between pulverized flesh and minced meat.
"Is this the colon? What hole is this?"
Fettucini is a jig-saw we are trying to put together. The right side of her colon was stuck to her abdominal wall where it was presumed that when the Vag Docs went in to take out her uterus and ovaries, they had "bagged" the colon with a stitch as they were closing her up.
After what seems like hours, we flush out every abscess we find, clean her out, and then we went fishing for the drain the Xray men put into her that was draining something looking like poop.

When we finally find it, we find it hiding in her small intestines and it was draining out what was looking like poop, instead of pus, because it was poop that was draining out of the drain. We had to take the drain out and fix the hole that the drain had made so poop doesn't drain into her abdomen.

And as we were closing, we find an ovary with an angry fallopian tube that had to come out. (Wait, wasn't it supposed to be out already?)

So now, Fettucini is spleenless, uterus-ovary-less, with holes in her intestines, has HIV, is toothless and she is 33. However, we made sure her tattoo around her belly-button looked as symmetrical as the day she acquired it.

What is my little rash compared to that?

By the way Polk and associates in Waterbury.....stay away from them.