A night at the hospital

I pulled pretty much an all-nighter Friday night and before you start thinking, right on, it is sadly due to a grim situation. It was 12:30 by the time I got into bed and I just could not fall asleep. After what seemed like 5 minutes of bliss, my mom woke me up at 2 a.m. asking if I could go to the hospital with her. My grandfather has been sick the last few days and on this particular night, he contracted uncontrollable hiccups and was vomiting. My mom is a doctor and for the last week she's been afraid that my grandfather has cancer. He's lost a considerable amount of weight and it's been nearly impossible to get him to eat anything at all. His late night call only reaffirmed my mom's worst fears.

I drove to pick up my grandfather and then we all went to the emergency room. An emergency room at 2:30 in the morning is such an odd place to be. The whole city is pretty much shut down and dark at this point of the night, but once we arrived to the ER, it was strangely alive, for a lack of a better term. There was a bunch of loud, drunk, young people (it is a Friday night, after all) waiting for their drunk/roofied friends and significant others. There were night guards milling around and joking, and others making coffee, talking, and eating at the cafe area near by. It felt like any other place but a hospital. I was brought back to reality, however, when we witnessed one of the more somber sites of the evening. A woman walked into the ER sobbing because she was just informed her son had been in a car accident and in critical condition.

My mom and I waited quietly and my grandfather continued his ominous hiccuping. He had the hiccups on/off for the last 36 hours and it was because of this sign that my mom felt there was something seriously wrong with his gastrointestinal tract. An hour went by and they finally admitted him. We soon found out there was only one doctor working the shift, responsible for all the patients who came in, and I knew I was in for a very long night. The nurse conducted a urinalysis and blood work, and my grandfather's results came back normal. We waited until 4:30 a.m. for him to get a CT scan of his abdomen and it was 7:00 a.m. before the one working doctor read and reported his results to us. One tumor the "size of a pool ball" grew next to his duodenum of the small intestines and obstructed his digestive tract. My mom sure knows her ish.

Not that this post is all bad news though, because things have been looking up since then. My grandfather had a biopsy done yesterday and I am happy to report that the doctors found the tumor to be benign. They are going to try some pills to see if they can reduce the size of the growth and if that doesn't work, he'll be having surgery to remove it asap. Thankfully my grandpa has been doing pretty well in the hospital overall, but his only problem currently is that he is super hungry. He hasn't been allowed to eat for three days now.

And my thoughts I'll be taking away from this experience?

Only that I can't imagine having to deal with this stuff on a daily basis. Yet here I am, prepared to go to med school in a month for 4 long years and for what? Strangely, to try to get to this very point, dealing with all the same situations, but trying to do it from the other side.