Ernest Goes to Camp (1987)

I have never really been into camping. Hell I've probably slept in a tent less than three or four times in my entire life. I don't like mosquitoes, rocks poking you through a sleeping bag, or even the sound of a tent rustling in the wind. And let's not even address the hygiene problems. I am a man who likes his showers.

So when the invitation to Bob & Stephanie's wedding came in the mail it took some adjusting. Why you ask? Well because only Bob & Stephanie would choose to hold their nuptials at Big Bend National Park.

Big Bend is unique (it's website cheerily informed me) because it's the largest protected area of Chihuahuan Desert topography and ecology in the United States. Translation: A huge pile of dirt with a few mountains thrown about for looks. Apparently it's also one of the most remote and least-visited national parks in the lower 48 United States. Their website does not inspire confidence.

Sounds like the perfect place to start looking for Jimmy Hoffa. Or, you know, get married.

Well never let it be said that I am not a true friend. If my crazy eco-friends want to get married with the bears and mountain lions high atop Mt. Middleofnowhere than you can count me in.

I arranged for a rental car and made some phone calls to see about carpooling with friends for the nine hour drive that lay ahead of us. I was able to get friends Dan & Rachael to join me and away we went on the day before the big day. The car loaded with tents, food, and sleeping bags galore. We left early in the morning so there would be plenty of time to get there, set up camp, and spend the night with old friends and the local wildlife before the big day. Visions of roasting hotdogs around a campfire filled my head as we headed out west.

We arrived early (by our estimation) and had a pretty pleasant drive. By pleasant I mean of course fast. I will not confirm the breakneck speeds I got the rental car up to. Let's just say that I was more likely to go to jail than get a ticket if I happened to get pulled over. I set up my tent in record time with the help of Dan and then eagerly mocked those who were attempting to set up their own. I was not even deterred in my sarcasm by the fact that Dan had to show me how to assemble my tent only minutes before. That had been a whole ten minutes ago and was now long forgotten.

We sat for dinner and I had a few chips. The night seemed off to a great start. Mountain lions be damned.

This is of course where our story takes a turn. This is when the pain begins.

Sharp pain suddenly hit me while watching people eat dinner and seemed to take residence in my abdomen. Not stomach pain (as I was pretty familiar with that at this point post-surgery) but a pain lower than there that seemed happy to hang around for a while.

I should tell you at this point that this was not the first time I had felt pain like this. You see I had been to the ER only a weekend before with the exact same problem. There were blood tests and cat scans and x-rays (oh my) and after I had been told by the ER doctor that I was dehydrated. After pumping me full of three bags of IV fluid I was sent home feeling fine. Sitting at the park bench that night with my friends I was pretty sure that it was happening again.

But how could this be? I know I was drinking a ton of water. At that point already I had consumed 50 ounces and it wasn't even the end of the day.

So I sat quietly in pain for thirty minutes drinking a bottle of water and hoping it would subside. This plan seemed not to be working and the pain was actually getting worse. So I went and looking for one of the park rangers. Turns out that park rangers are also licensed EMTs. Ranger Dave took my vitals sitting on the steps of a ranger station at nine o'clock at night and I was told that I had a choice. I could stick it out and see if I started feeling better or be taken to the nearest hospital. It just so happened to be that the nearest hospital was 110 miles away in sleepy little Alpine, TX.

Boy, both those options sound fantastic.

I decided to stick it out and crashed in a lodge room with a friend. I slept maybe two hours the whole night. I drank water and writhed around in the dark all night trying to find any position that would hurt just a little less.

At four in the morning I decided to wait for daylight before calling back Ranger Dave to see if I could get some IV fluid at the park. I was somehow still convinced that my body was just dehydrated and the fluid would fix the problem. So here comes Ranger Dave again with his bag of tricks. After checking my vitals again he tells me that he's not comfortable attaching me to IV bags because he doesn't think that I am dehydrated. My options now limited I decide get myself dressed and drive the 110 miles to the nearest hospital.

I will only say one thing about that trip. You would be surprised the speeds you will go when you don't care about getting a pulled over by a cop. I mean you would really be quite surprised.

When I arrived at the hospital in Alpine I was introduced to one of modern medicine's most ingenious creations. This wonder of science is called The Pain Scale and it works like this. According to this chart you have pain ranging on a scale that goes all the way from one to ten. In this case (as in most) ten on the scale is the most pain imaginable and one the least. I know this sounds a bit complicated. But don't worry, the giant brain that came up with this wondrous chart knows how difficult his invention can be. You see; to help clarify this tricky scale every hospital known to man has a diagram with smiley faces to match the corresponding number on the chart. I told you the guy who came up with this was brilliant.

It's like they want you to look at this chart and figure out (while in your haze of pain) what your face would look like if it were in stick figure form. In all honesty I am convinced that it's some sort of additional sociological test they put you through since you're already there.

I picked number 4 on this magical pain chart when I got to the hospital. Not to high to make them think I was some sort of wussy and not so low that I really shouldn't even be there. I mean really, who goes to the ER when they are feeling a 1 on the pain scale?

"Yeah doc, I think this splinter is pretty serious. Pain chart? Oh I don't knowmaybe a one."

So the first thing we did were some x-rays and some blood work.

A not so little sidebar about the world of drawing blood:

I am now positive that the people who draw your blood at hospitals are always the last person you yourself would choose to do that particular job. And I'm including the janitorial staff as well as the gift shop girls here.

They are always new techs whose mission is to probe every inch of your arm for any sign of a veinand then go everywhere but that location to try and draw your blood. I swear to you that if it weren't for the fact that it's my arm they're doing needlework on that I'd seriously feel bad for them.

They always come across like a pothead trying to play a complicated Jimmie Page riff on guitar, "Wait, wait, oh sorry. Hold on, ... wait I got it ... nope, damn ... wait a sec ... there it ... ah, nope ... hang on a sec ... wait."

And on and on until you are confident you can connect the dots to form an accurate picture of The Battle of Gettysburg on your arm. It's only at that point that they look up at you and speak with a small and ashamed voice, "I'm gonna have to get someone else to come and give this a try."

Then of course a very sweet old lady comes in (who has probably been a nurse longer than Junior Senator Rick Santorum has been unpopular in San Francisco Bathhouses) and not only gets it on the first shot, but manages to do it with almost no pain at all.

My question is this: why on earth is this woman not hired full time to draw blood and paid in stacks of tax free hundreds every day to preserve the sanity of the patient?

But I digress.

So what were the results of the x-rays and blood work? You guessed it ... normal. The ER doctor said he thought that I might have an inflamed lower intestine and that it would be causing the pain. He slips me some pain medication and recommends they keep me overnight to see if things got worse or better. That officially meant that I would be missing my good friend's wedding. Kind of bummed about it, but at least I am no longer in such painand that night I do get to catch the last weeks Soprano's rerun. Ok, so I may be looking a little too hard for a silver lining here.

I call a friend at Big Bend camping with the wedding party and arrange to pick up my travel mates in a town outside the park so we can get headed home the next morning.

I am discharged at 7am with just a little tenderness in my abdomen and drive myself the 2 hours or so it takes to get to Fort Stockton. I find a gas station in town and wait for my friends to arrive at the meeting point. I'm still not feeling all that great, the little pain chart smiley face looks mainly confused at a solid two.

Dan & Rachael get dropped off and tell me the wedding went off without a hitch. I ask Dan if he can drive, a sure sign that I am not feeling well, and we make our way out of town to confront the 7 remaining hours it will take to get back home to Austin.

About forty minutes into our journey I am hit by a wave of nausea and I know what comes next, "Dan ... pull over now."

I jump out of the car before we come to a complete stop and heave up bile. What the hell? Normally if I throw-up it's because something I've eaten has been rejected by my stomach. The moment I get it out of my body I always feel better. But not this time. This time the same series of events happens about 4 or 5 more times before we finally stop at a state rest area. I get out, get sick, and the pain continues in my abdomenand slowly starts getting worse.

After the rest stop I am in the back seat of the car. My hope is that I will be able to lie down and pass out. But try as I might no position is comfortable and still 40 miles south of Fredericksburg (another 2 and a half hours away from Austin) I am writhing in pain. The smiley face pain chart face is laughing at me now and two perfectly twisted little devil horns have popped out from the top of his head to form an eleven.

While in the back of the car I am consumed with these thoughts. One, I have never been in this much pain in my life. Through broken knee, ankle, toe, crushed and jammed fingers, and even after my last surgery ... it has never hurt this badly. Two, I am dying to ask where we are (or more to the point when we will be home) but am terrified that the answer is not something I want to know. And finally I am laughing at myself. At some point between hurling bile into a plastic bag and the constantly moving from one painful position to another, all the while keeping as silent as I am able I realized how ridiculous I must have seemed to my friends in the car. Like a drunken mime on ecstasy or an enraged monkey with his mouth taped shut. I can only imagine how uncomfortable the trip must have been for them.

The second we get into Fredericksburg it hits me how far we still are from Austin. I am no longer able to keep quiet and start cursing under my breath and letting out unintelligible sounds of pain. I tell them to get me to an ER. We stop at a firehouse for directions and within minutes Dan pulls up to the entrance of the ER and I am moving as fast as I can for the door.

Now let me preface this with two pieces of information. I like most hospital staff. I am very rarely treated badly at a hospital and grew up in and around them most of my life. I understand how they work and try my best to work within those parameters. And I also know that the moment I stepped into that ER I stopped all pretense of trying to be cool about the pain. I was officially the world's poster boy for bad patient.

My mantra was a simple one - "pain medication; you must give me pain medication."

The nurse begins with, "What would you rate your Pa-"

"10!" I say without letting her finish. "I am a 10. Didn't you just hear my mantra?"

This goes on for what seems like days as she gets my vitals and I rehash my medical history. I can only speak in short hyperventilating bursts of information, "Camping - gastric bypass - abdominal pain - dehydrated - drank lots - need pain medication - you whore!"

All right. That last one was just in my head. But I think she knew what I meant. I could not sit, lie, or stand still. I was seriously hoping that the pain would knock me out or I would hyperventilate myself into unconsciousness.

At one point (after being put behind a curtain in the main ER) the nurse comes over to me and tells me that I need to, "calm down and be quiet." I have never had the desire to slap a woman, but I would have loved to shake the shit out her at that moment.

The doc finally orders a cat scan and, of course, blood work.

The next two hours are a blur. No pain medication, a battery of tests, and Dan sitting silently in the corner waiting to see what's going on while I try not to fall out of my little bed. Cut to two hours of pain later when he the doctor comes back in and drops the bomb.

It turns out that a stricture has grown from the scar tissue from my previous surgery and is pressing against my intestine. That's right ladies and gents. A full four months post operation I had my first real complication. I was unable to move anything past that point in my intestine and that was what was causing the abdominal pain. A huge risk was that the intestine could rupture and cause me to go septic.

How was this to be fixed? Surgery.

They would have to go in and remove the scar tissue to unblock the intestine and hope that the blood supply had not been cut off.

My big question, "Can I have some pain medication now please?

It was weird feeling as all of a sudden the nurses were treating me like I had a real problem and was not just some nut whining about a tummy ache.

So I sent Dan & Rachael home and they took me by ambulance to St. David's Hospital in Austin. I can't tell you when I left. I can't even tell you how long it took to get there.

What I can tell you about that ambulance ride in my little stretcher is that they are very bumpy. I can tell you that the driver of the ambulance had the same name as me and I would snap back to consciousness every time the female EMT would say his name.

I can also tell you that there may not be a heater in the back of an ambulance. For what felt like 15 minutes I had a debate in my head about asking for a blanket or asking for the heater to be turned up. I was freezing and couldn't decide which I wanted to ask for. After, again, what seemed like fifteen minutes I opened my mouth to ask for a blanket, in my mind the more likely thing to get and was cut off by the EMT hollering out in his red neck drawl, "We're hear buddy, let's get you inside."

Those must have been some really good pain meds my friends.

So this is when I met Dr. Faulkenberry who is a surgeon with the Southwest Bariatric Surgeons in Austin, TX. Dr. Faulkenberry was on call that night and was there to greet me at almost the moment I was wheeled into the hospital. He clarified what was wrong with me and told me he would be operating. I can't stress enough how high on pain medication I was. I don't think I have ever been more agreeable and nonchalant about such a serious issue.

"You may have to slice me wide open instead of operating laproscopicly? There's a chance I could lose pieces of my intestine? And like all surgeries there is the risk of death? That all sounds great doc ... have yourself a ball."

But there was a moment of seriousness right before I went under. It was as they were wheeling me into the operating room.

This was the second time in less than six months that I was to have been operated on. The last time I had spent an entire night writing out a last will and typing out my goodbyes to all the people in my life.

I had been given months to prepare for that first surgery. This was different. I had not had any cell phone coverage in days to call and tell anyone and the few people who knew what was going on with me had no idea who they could have called for me. There was no time given to call family and let them know. No time to call the little red-headed girl I loved to tell her that I had fallen for her long ago. No time to make sure someone would care for my pets. Just no time to do anything but realize all of this as I'm crawling from the stretcher to the operating table at 2am on an early Monday morning.

I closed my eyes and thought about what I would miss more than anything else in the world if these were my last moments in this life

Something I don't think I'll share thank-you very much.

I swear to you it's probably an Oscar winning movie (or at least a Lifetime Movie of the Week moment) if that's where it all ended, but damn it if I didn't ruin it all by waking up.

And in my drug hazed post-surgery first moments who did I call? With no cell phone in sight I dialed the only local number I had managed to store in my head.

"Hey bro, I'm in the hospital and just had surgery. I won't be in to work today. Call mom and tell her I'm fine."

I then passed out until much, much later.

The operation was a success. No complications. Dr. Faulkenberry was a genius and kept the whole thing laproscopic. There were just three more tiny scars to show for my bad weekend.

I called everyone I could. My mother was mad I didn't call her. My father told me he always knew I was full of shit. I called Bob & Stephanie to be "officially the last person they know to congratulate them on their wedding." I reached friends and family who had been both frantic and unaware. But it was all down hill from there.

I was released from the hospital on Thursday. I stayed an extra day to be treated for a bacteria infection and to make sure my temperature was normal before I went home.

I am alive and well, and I am past my first (and hopefully only) complication.

So what did I learn that week? What life lessons did my ordeal of pain and suffering teach me? How am I a wiser man now than I was before? Well I now know that if you're on IV fluids for six days straight you can lose fifteen pounds. I learned that it's possible to travel one hundred and ten miles in less than an hour and a half by car. I learned that no matter what drugs you are on, how little your cell phone works, or how life threatening the issue, you always call your mother before going to a hospital. And I learned that love, indeed, works in mysterious ways.

Oh, and if you're friends invite you to go camping for the first time in two decades ... listen to your gut and say no. Trust me on this.