all trussed up and nowhere to go

Yesterday I went to the hospital and had a lumbar epidural. The night before, I had had a very scary dream about the procedure, where I was on a table that kept going higher and higher up towards the ceiling. (Trust me, it was scary.) The table that I was eventually put on for the epidural was not unlike the table in my dream, so I panicked a bit when I first went in the room.

During the epidural itself I was face-down on this table with my shirt pulled up and my pants and undies pulled down below my butt. This would have been sort of humiliating and fear-inducing, to be offered up on a table like that, but it was so humorous to me to be so hapless that I couldn’t find any actual fear or shame. If I turned my head to the left I saw needles and little bottles of medicine, and if I turned my head to the right I saw manuals and supply cabinets, so I kept my head to the right. I apparently did “outstanding”, according to the very nice doctor. It was not very painful, and not even very weird, and I got to stay and look at my fluoroscopy and ask questions of the very nice (and patient) doctor.

BF was there almost the whole time, supportive and sweet. He helped me out to the parking garage – my leg was partially numb and my knee very unpredictable – and got me Noodles & Company for lunch after it was all over. I told my mom that my knee felt nothing like an articulated joint, that it felt like a straw with a bend in it, and she thought this was a fantastic description. I felt fine after, aside from the slowly-dissipating anxiety I had that something would go wrong (working at a medical malpractice firm is not very helpful when you have to rely on doctors for things like this), and I feel more or less normal today. I took it really easy afterward, anyhow, trying to reduce the chances of some weird after-effect and also happy for an excuse to baby myself.

This morning, I have a lot of soreness at the injection spot, especially when I twist or bend the wrong way. I am hoping this will go away as the hole in my back heals.

At work, apparently a hissy fit was thrown in my absence about a few things that are in my purview and non-negotiable, and I don’t really know what to do about that. Since it seems to be a cyclical process – hissy fits are thrown, things are cleaned up, and then they go back to the way they were because it doesn’t make sense to change them – I am not terribly worried, but I can’t get over the knee-jerk red-eared reaction that it reflects on my job performance somehow. (Logically, it doesn’t.)

Nevertheless, I don’t think it’s going to be a fun couple of weeks.