laryngocele

Mom woke me up at 5:00 am and I got dressed and we were on our way.  Drove about twenty minutes, then stopped for some breakfast, drove a couple hours more, stopped for gas and food, then drove more hours still until we arrived at my sister's house.

We peed and rested and then headed to the hospital.

I was unnerved the entire time because the city was too busy and crowded for me.  I felt like I was going to have a panic attack.  All these medical students whizzing around, staring so hard at their cell phones they aren't paying attention to the traffic and jaunting out into the street just as easy as you please.

We found a parking garage where we were met by a very bitter parking attendant who told us the one we drove into was full and then proceeded to give us directions to another one.  When she was done barking at us, my sister Shannon who was driving, looked back and said, "Did y'all get any of that?"

We managed to find out way to the hospital, where I peed, signed in, filled out a bunch of paperwork, then waited.

I was called into a small room with shiny sharp instruments and bed pans and waited.  The doctor's assistant came in, a tall lanky man in a yellow and navy striped bow tie, thick black rimmed glasses, and medical headgear.  He inspected my throat, looked in my ears and up my nose and asked a bunch of questions about the lump.  He saw that we had the CT scans from my previous doctor visit and took them.

"I'm going to hand these over to the doctor and we are gonna look at them.  Hang tight."  More waiting.

He came back in minutes later with an instrument with a long, skinny black appendage.  He squirted a numbing agent up my nose and said the doctor wanted to look up my nose and into my throat.  I sniffed it all up and he left.  More waiting.

The assistant came back in with the doctor, finally, and he sat down.  He was a tall man with a long neck and shaggy salt and pepper hair to match his goatee.  He wore scrubs and a serious look on his face.  In fact, he never smiled at me once during the consultation.  He was pretty clinical and cold.

He took the device with the black appendage and snaked it into each nostril and told the assistant with the bow tie that things looked clear.  He then told me that it was definitely a cyst, but one that stemmed from my vocal cords.  A laryngocele.  Another brand new diagnosis.  Was my goiter really that abnormal that no one else could have came to this conclusion?

The strangest part was he said my cyst is normally found in glassblowers and people who play musical instruments like trumpets.

He sent me to complete some pre-op stuff, which consisted of moving from floor to floor, waiting around, being placed in a room and asked the same questions (what's your birthday?  would you accept blood in case of an emergency?  ever had a stroke?  drink/smoke/crack/marijuana?, etc.) and then told to go back to the waiting room and then put in another room with another nurse asking the same questions again.  And more peeing. 

I was a bit worried because the nurse practitioner was left-handed and had trouble working the mouse on the computer.  I watched him struggle as he tried to highlight and delete information on the screen.  He'd highlight one portion and the other portion that was highlighted wouldn't be anymore.  He'd project a "blam" under his breath and try again.  I wanted to ask him if he needed any help.  I was pretty sure he accidentally put down that I had Hep C.

I was then sent to another floor to get some blood drawn.  More waiting.  And then a short older lady called me back to a high chair-looking contraption, swabbed my arm and poked me.

And then I was finally done.  But not before I peed one last time.

Getting out of the hospital wasn't nearly as bad as trying to enter.  But by that time I was tired.  We got to the hospital by 11 and didn't leave until 4:30.  I was tired of the bumpy roads and a brand new diagnosis of the lump and I was put off by the doctor's dull demeanor.  At that point, I just wanted the lump out.  I was tired of worrying about whether it would get bigger or if people were secretly staring at it when I wasn't looking.  I was tired of it hurting and enlarging and tired of trying to shave my way around it and getting razor burn, which really just drew more attention to it.

I just wanted to be done with it.

We went to a restaurant and I felt like I deserved to indulge a little.  After being poked and prodded and made to fill out a questionnaire concerning my "swallowing abilities," I just wanted something delicious to mask the mental exhaustion.  Ordered some potato skins and chicken tenders and once I saw them in front of me, I regretted the decision.  Portions were too big and they were all too greasy.  After having abstained from the greasy stuff for about two months now, I was pretty sure that stuff was going to slide right on out of me, probably while I was on the road.

I surprised myself by only eating a small portion of my meal.  I was proud at my willpower but I also had to admit to myself that some of it stemmed from the fear of having to crap in a cracked commode in some shady gas station off I-65.

I boxed up the rest.

We made it home around 10:30pm and I crashed.  Work the next day.   

The surgery is scheduled on the 30th so hopefully that will truly be the last of the lump!