It’s almost spooky season, and you know what that means?
Time to talk about SCARY things like colonoscopies!
Honestly, I don’t have too many scary medical stories. Thankfully, I have been blessed with good health and a strong body for most of my life.
Still, even healthy people have to go to the doctor and have nerve-wracking, terrifying medical procedures once in a while.
I’ve always been pretty fascinated by science and medicine even when it’s happening to me.
Anytime I have a medical experience, even if I’m nervous or anxious, there’s always a part of me feeling a small thrill and thinking “man, this is going to make great content for the blog!”
I’m not afraid of needles and I’m a regular blood donor, so I’m not just talking about minor things like getting shots. I am talking about super weird or unusually invasive things.
If you’re not creeped out by medical details, then read on. If you are even slightly squeamish, you might want to sit this one out. Are you ready? Let’s get gory!
1. My c-section. I’ve never shared Z’s birth story here on the blog, and that’s something I need to do, pronto. In the meantime, just know that 13 years ago, we planned for natural childbirth and even seriously considered a home birth.
We labored at home for 30 (!!) hours with the help of our doula/midwife for the latter half. Alas, at the last possible minute, our beloved Z took a left turn at Albuquerque and ended up being a breech birth (just like E and I were – so perhaps we should have expected it?!) When our labor failed to progress, I heard the news had been dreading: you’ll need to come in for a c-section today.
Although my c-section experience was by no means awful – I’ve heard far worse c-horror stories – it certainly wasn’t the gentle, natural birth we had studied, planned and hoped for. Being strapped to a table, sliced open from stem to stern and having a giant-headed baby yanked out of my body was very creepy and hardly ideal.
Recovery from a c-section is also fairly rough, especially since you have to simultaneously figure out breastfeeding and newborn care while you’re healing from major abdominal surgery. Perhaps the craziest thing about my last-minute, surprise c-section is the fact that the backup OB/GYN who did it (whom I met that day) was later brought up on charges of inappropriate relations with a patient and lost his medical license for a time. Holy creepsville!
2. My dental implant surgery. Back in 2019, I had to lose a long-time problem tooth and go through the lengthy process of having a dental implant put in its place. I never blogged about my dental implant experience and maybe I should, as it probably deserves its own post.
Bottom line, although it all went smoothly, it was a nerve-wracking process for me personally. I’ve never liked the dentist and this was a multi-step, multi-month experience that involved tons of visits to dentists, endodontists and even an oral surgeon. I also had to be without my tooth for several months! Yep, your basic dental nightmare all around.
It all ended up fine and I healed well from all the multiple dental surgeries. And now I have a dental implant which is basically like a bionic tooth, so that’s pretty cool. Possibly the scariest part of the whole ordeal was when they had to pack my jaw with actual cadaver bone to build it up and make it strong enough to receive the implant.
I still wonder who the cadaver was that kindly supplied their bones so that I can have nice teeth. During the healing process, every once in a while I would spit out a grain-like bone fragment. I like to creep my family out by saying that sometimes I can still taste dead people.
3. My heart catheterization. As you might have read here recently, I had a crazy heart attack experience while on vacation in Kauai and ended up in hospital on a different island all alone having a heart catheterization.
This was scary for me because it can be a risky procedure, but it ended up going great. It was also creepy because I was awake for the whole thing and while I didn’t feel any pain, it felt soooooooo strange.
Try to imagine, if you will, being strapped to an operating table in a cath lab wide awake while a cardiac surgeon feeds a thin wire into your wrist, up your arm, across your chest and down into your literal, beating heart. Heart catheterization sounds like something out of a horror movie but it actually happens every day in a hospital near you.
The cath patient feels the entire procedure and it’s beyond creepy. They feed the wire in pretty slowly, but then once they figure out you’re healthy and fine, they yank that thing out again in one swift movement like starting a lawnmower or chainsaw. I don’t know how I didn’t jump out of my skin at that moment.
If I were going to put a fourth medical experience on this list, it would likely be my crazy unstoppable nosebleed that I had last year. The list of ways that doctors can stop a nosebleed range from horrid to ghastly, so I highly recommend you keep your nasal passages in top shape.
I suppose some people might put arthroscopic knee surgery on this list, but since I slept through that operation and had a pretty easy recovery, I’m leaving it off.
Others might include a routine colonoscopy screening on their list of scary medical procedures, but I wouldn’t. Mine was easy-breezy and well worth doing. Ditty for donating platelets.
So what’s on your list of creepy or scary medical procedures? I’d love to hear your spooky medical tales in the comments below or over on Instagram or Facebook. It’s all in the name of, errr, patient education.
