– in which Dorn and Kathleen have a themed mini-vacation.
his is an update of my adventures with my mystery illness (last mentioned here). Despite the confidence my doctor voiced at the time, the video-capsule endoscopy didn’t help. The capsule-cam simply didn’t see the cause of my bleeding as it tumbled through my GI tract. Maybe it was looking in the wrong direction at a critical moment. It did spot some damaged-looking areas, though, so the next step was to send an endoscope down the throat to inspect those areas, and if the bleeding cause was there, fix it.
The endoscope, I was told, would be equipped with two balloons at the business end, for gripping the intestines from the inside, and scrunching them up onto the endoscopy pole in the same way one might scrunch up the draperies all onto one end of the curtain rod. This technique lets one explore about half way down my GI tract. (For the other half, they do the same thing, but start at the other main access point.)
The endoscopy was to take place at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Kathleen needed to be with me, but she also needed to be near Archie. So we got a dog-friendly hotel room in Eager Park for a couple of nights, and made a mini-vacation of the event. It was fun walking around the city before and after the procedure, for us and for Archie.
There was a little grassy area right next to the hotel for Archie to frolic in that was outfitted with short trails lined with shrubs and a park bench or two. It seemed to be designed to resemble a city mini-park, but it was also equipped with discreetly hidden access pipes and raised gravel beds that very much resembled the tertiary septic system and field in my back yard (or would resemble it, if I were a better landscaper). Still, Archie didn’t care what the square’s real purpose was, and if Archie was happy with it, so was I.
The Eager Park neighborhood seemed pretty safe to walk through even at night, though an internet search didn’t include it on the list of the safest neighborhoods in Baltimore. (It also wasn’t on the list of coolest neighborhoods in Baltimore, but we liked it anyway.)
I really don’t remember much of the endoscopy itself, as I was under the influence of sedation drugs.
My first memory after the procedure was Kathleen telling me that they still couldn’t find the source of the bleeding, and they might have to look again from the other direction. Either the source of the bleeding was further down than the scope went, or it was completely healed (the bleed had taken place six months ago) leaving no trace.
She didn’t seem particularly bothered by the news that I would likely have to come back. That’s not really like Kathleen, but she later explained why—the performing doctor looked and sounded, in her words, like a Bollywood movie star. I don’t remember it, but I can imagine him giving Kathleen the results of the endoscopy with a rakish smile and a twinkle in his eye. (All I can remember about him was that he wore glasses. Either the sedatives messed with my memory, or he just didn’t make as strong an impression on me.)
The hotel was close enough that we could walk back after the endoscopy. (Or rather Kathleen could walk back. She tells me that the best I could do was amble aimlessly, while she kept pulling me from in front of cars and urging me in the correct general direction.)
After my drugs mostly wore off, we had a night on the town with our niece Haven, an up-and-coming young cusper (on the
We tried to cajole Haven into telling us the hot spots in town that all the young people go to, but she insisted that her idea of a wild night was making soup at home, or if she was in a really crazy mood, baking cookies. I think she was just trying to keep our elderly frames from having conniptions upon hearing her shocking lifestyle. We had great fun with her anyway, even without frequenting any mosh pits or flash mobs or speakeasies, or whatever the young people frequent these days.
And that’s the story of our little endo-cation in Baltimore. Nothing really spectacular happened, but when the central theme of a vacation is getting a hospital procedure done, that’s just where you want to end up.
Dabangg!,
Dorn
12/14/2019