Take Flight with Solumedrol

125 mg of solumedrol is like being a passenger on an airplane flying in the air. Time feels like it has slowed, but it hasn't. Your thoughts are racing, but when you look up toward the curtain it feels as if you are moving quickly, but you know the curtain is only moving slowly. Everything starts looking darker you feel your body reacting to the steroid. Solumedrol hits my veins. Heat steaming up on my neck, the fire brewing in my stomach. Churning and turning. Finding its way to the heat. Winding itself around the bottom of my throat, tightening until I can't breathe, and it crawls around my throat, pulling tighter and tighter. The tingles spring up wrapping with the heat like two anacondas tightening, until the pressure builds to an eruption point. The release begging you to find some relief. 

Your nurse breaks you out of your phasing out, as he asks someone for a throw up bag. The damn green bag of death. I hate showing any kind of weakness at the hospital, but sometimes the release is inevitable. What an ingrain strength or weakness. Dependent on where you are, I guess. I don’t know whether it was embarrassment or shame or the constant, ‘you are fine’, or ‘there is nothing wrong with you’ or ‘it’s in your head, so you have anxiety’ said by health professionals as they dismiss the pain that was worse. Every feeling from triggers to fears start blurring together like the trees passing by on a train. You remember that you grew tougher, have more boundaries that prevents a show of any shame or weakness and when the time comes that there is no other choice but to be vulnerable there is an exit strategy. There is no crossroads and there is no trap door. You have to push through this boundary, because today you are faced with the inevitable truth that you are at the end of your strength and at the beginning of vulnerability. Your readiness for vulnerability is being tested and a breakthrough is looming.

A breakthrough where I can fully trust a medical care team with my vulnerabilities. All the triggers tied with my shame and embarrassment starts to unravel right before my eyes. In a split second every pain, every struggle, every moment of weakness and every season of oppression is revisited like a movie clip as I bear my guts into the ugly, green bag. I try to not let it get to me, wanting to crawl back into my shell. Where it was safe, where nothing can get to me, but its too late. The echos of the room return and you hear your nurse repeating the dreadful line, you ok? But, it dawns on me that the voice is calm, non judging and in that split second, I found my voice in this moment of vulnerability.  

The nurse has stilled and after what felt like minutes has passed and he asks, ‘you ok?’, and all I could say was, ‘can we stop? I can’t take anymore?’. He says okay and says, ‘I will let you rest, and I'll be back soon to give you Tylenol. I thought to myself, shit I forgot. I had one more premed to take. Thank goodness I had the sense enough to change the Benadryl to before the solumedrol dose, because the liquids through my line would have been way too much after.