Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Dreamtime Dreamscape: Stomach Ulcer

I've had upset stomach dreams before. The kind where you go to bed either hungry or full of indigestion and somehow your dreams are full of angst and searching for food. Last night's dream took indigestion to a whole other level...

I don't remember much. But what I do remember was quite, uh, fun.

I'm going to the local hospital for an outpatient procedure to get my stomach checked out because it really hurts. The doctor tells me I have an ulcer again and I need to get surgery so they can fix it. He just whips out this surgical table (in the manner of dreams) and I lie on it, all ready.

I tell the doctor he's got about 15 minutes, then I have to leave because I have to go somewhere with my hubby. He gets 15 minutes into the procedure and I just get up and leave. He tells me I have to come back, there's something really wrong, but I just brush him off and go do other things. I don't remember the other things, something about a swamp, running around... I think it was based on Infamous 2, the video game I've been playing but I'm not sure.

A few days later I'm back at the hospital for the real surgery. I'm on a bed in the middle of a bunch of other beds, laid out in an orderly fashion as I would imagine an infirmary would be set up. The doctor has a scope down my throat and I'm nearly passed out. My stomach hurts really badly. I keep wanting to puke up acid, but I can't with the camera down my throat.

Hubby comes in and says we have to go now. This is some kind of emergency I was waiting for. The doctor starts telling me he found something, but I want to just get out of there. I want to throw up the camera and just leave with hubby. I'm antsy. The doctors start doing an image of my stomach with some sort of portable CT scan.

The scan is only half complete when I just get up and leave. The doctors are yelling at me to get back on the exam table, or at least come back later for the results. I leave.

Hours later I come back. Now the infirmary room is set up with the beds as tables and all the patients are in wheelchairs, rolling between beds. They're all old, it's like a nursing home.

I find my doctor by the exam table. He says I have to stay, they found something life changing. My stomach is really on fire now, and I have been going to the bathroom a lot and my food has been coming out half digested, I know something serious is wrong with me but I don't want to face it.

The doctor finally forces me into a chair and tells me I have an ulcer that ate through my innards until it made a tunnel to this strange intestine I have right behind my actual stomach. He says half my food is going to my stomach and half is going to this new intestine. I see in my mind a picture of it. An empty stomach and this bloated intestine right behind it, and a tunnel between them where food goes, having to chose which area to go to.

The doctor is showing me diagrams and talking all this over with me. Meanwhile all the elderly folk in their wheelchairs are making a circle around us. They're very interested and start asking questions as if it's a game show.

Hubby comes in, he's worried, but he says we have to go. I'm getting restless and I don't want to hear more, especially when the doctor says there's nothing they can do, I'm just going to have to live with two stomachs. The acid is cured with a pill, but he says I'll have to watch what I eat, I only absorb half the food I did before, or maybe it was twice the food. Either way, my diet will have to change.

My stomach burns and all I can imagine is if I puke, which stomach will the food come out of? The real one or the intestine?

And then I wake up. Hungry, of course.

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