I told a little white lie.  I said I would come back today and get right to the Q&A session.  But, during the course of my little intimate date with my gastroenterologist (who didn’t even offer me a cigarette afterward), I encountered another shining example of how the irony of life can stand up and bite you on the butt (pardon the pun) when you least expect it.

Yesterday morning my husband drove with me to the surgical center for my appointment.   They were remarkably efficient, and the wait in the lobby was short – which anyone who is familiar with the Arkansas medical system will realize is definitely not the norm.  I am feeling pretty happy that this will be done and over with in fairly short order, because:

1.  I hadn’t had anything to eat for 36 hours and I was STARVING.

2.  I hadn’t had anything to drink for almost 12 hours and my tongue was starting to feel like beef jerky.

3.  Any procedure that involves gastroenterologists and anaesthesia in one sentence is something to get over with as quickly as possible.

The first thing that happens as I follow the nurse through the door is that he hands me that oh-too-familiar little cup, and points to the bathroom, and tells me he needs a sample.

Riiiiggghhht.

I have just spent the last 24 hours flushing every drop of moisture in my body out through my intestines.  I haven’t had a drop to drink since 10 pm the night before.  I had a better chance of sneezing gold dust out my nose.  But I obediently took the little cup and did my very best to think of Niagara Falls before I came out and told the guy that it was futile.

No problem, he’s just going to hook me up to this little old IV of saline, and the faucets will be running in no time.

30 minutes and a half a bag of saline later – no luck. 

30 more minutes and another half a bag of saline – still nothing.  Nada.  Not a drop.

So I tell the nurse that I really don’t think this is going to be forthcoming anytime soon.  Must have been more dehydrated than he thought.  And, out of curiosity, since this is up my line of work, what does he need the sample FOR, anyway.

For a pregnancy test.  Hospital policy.

Huh.  Well.  I assure him that if he had told me that sooner, I would have saved him a lot of trouble.  Not only does timing and counting on my fingers tell me that this is statistically unlikely, but I have the word of a reproductive endocrinologist and a multi-thousand dollar fertility bill (or, as I have taken to calling it, the futility bill) that should tell him he is in the clear on that little point of liability.

Sorry, he says.  Got to be sure.  And hangs another bag of saline.

For those of you who either know me personally, or read this blog, you know that my son is nothing short of a medical miracle.  I spent thousands of dollars (my own, and the insurance company’s) against the advice of my fertility doctor to meet my son.  We spent thousands of more dollars in the vain hope of producing a sibling, only to have a second fertility doctor pronounce “complete ovarian failure” over me.  It was a pronouncement grave enough to warrant the sign of the cross over my poor, defunct, reproductive system. 

The sublime irony of my situation was not lost on me.  Here I was, after months and years of praying for two pink lines on a pregnancy test, and my life was being held up because I could not produce a negative one.  It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so heartbreakingly cruel.  Every emotion I had managed to bury over the last few months pushed up behind my eyes and burned there, threatening to break into tears that would not stop.

Another hour, another bag of saline, and one more round of me trying to reason with a medical organization stuck in a do-loop, and still nothing.  Finally, somebody had the brilliant idea of taking blood and ordering a blood test instead of a urine test.  Which would have been even more brilliant if my one nice, big, accessible vein hadn’t been taken up with the IV they had been so diligently using to pump me full of fluid.  After palpating for a while and mumbling things that sounded like “tearing through the vein,” my anxiety level, already primed by repeated trips to the bathroom in a backless gown and the impending gastroenterological invasion, was pretty near the snapping point. 

I do not do “vulnerable” well.  In fact, I am pretty much a complete bitch about it.

Luckily for the nurse, he stumbled on the expedient (and rather obvious, in my opinion), solution of actually pulling the sample out of the hole they had already punched in my arm (wow, an IV goes TWO WAYS, who’d have thought?).  Because his cute little gay butt was cruising for a serious kicking by a middle-aged underdressed, perimenopausal woman that he had subjected to Chinese water torture for the last two and a half hours, during which I watched every other patient in the holding area leave and return, and had plenty of time to reflect on my non-reproductive status. 

I think he must have sensed that, because they sent a far more sympathetic, middle-aged female nurse back to let me know that the test was indeed negative, and they would take me next.  The little gay nurse with the cup never returned.

The rest of the experience was comparatively uneventful.  And that’s saying a lot, considering that it involved bodily invasion of a fairly high magnitude.

A piece of advice for you medical professionals out there?  A little common decency goes a long way.