I’m never the sick one.

Over the last 27 years I’ve been the mother who takes sick children to the doctor, injured children to the Emergency Room, and one child to the orthopedic surgeon. I’ve sat in waiting rooms while my daughter and my husband were in surgery. There was the memorable few weeks when I had to change silvadene dressings on the leg my son burned when a campfire log lit his jeans on fire. I’ve dealt with Spica casts, traction, and head injuries.

But I didn’t have the time or the inclination to be unwell. What I had was three children to support on my own so taking a day off wasn’t an option. I have had hospital stays, to be sure. But they were of the unmedicated natural childbirth variety and after the first one, I looked forward to the peace, if not the postpartum depression, of the next two.

It became a way of life, believing that I had no Achilles’ heel nor Kryptonite. And then the pain came.

Every six months or so for the past four years, I would be stricken with abdominal pain so crippling that for the next six hours I would be unable to think coherently, writhing in a cold sweat. My abdomen seemed as though it would burst from the pressure. The muscles in my diaphragm would clench and ache without a moment of respite.

But I am never the sick one. Thus I refused offers to take me for medical attention. Did I mention that I didn’t want anyone to touch me during one of these episodes? The mere idea of emergency room hands was inconceivable.

In May we had dinner with a classmate of mine from high school. A festive occasion, we met at my favorite Mexican restaurant and ate and laughed and talked and ordered sopapillas and coffee and OMIGOD THE PAIN AND THE SHIVERING AND THE SWEATING. I made my excuses and got home in one piece and then began to try enduring the next several hours.

A web search the next morning lead me to the Mayo Clinic’s website and a self-diagnosis of biliary colic. After this was confirmed by an ultrasound, wherein if you look carefully, you can see the stones lined up like pretty little dancers in a chorus line, I consulted with a surgeon. She suggested that we should do blood tests to rule out H. pylori that would indicate a stomach ulcer and admonished me that if this was to happen before I saw her again, I was to get to the nearest emergency room so that blood tests could establish whether these “attacks” were liver-related.

One day later, I allowed myself to be driven to the ER.

There are reasons that I don’t want to be in an emergency room when I don’t feel well and every single one of them reared its ugly head. The intake questioning at the triage desk amounted to not much more than a shakedown for insurance information. My explanation that I had seen a surgeon just the day before didn’t make sense to them. Why would I consult a doctor at a hospital that was part of Harvard University Medical School? It was especially nice to have my vital signs taken practically in the waiting room that featured whining children. But the nadir of this experience was being left standing in a hallway outside a bathroom crying out in pain.

The nurse tried to calm me by telling me that they were short handed and didn’t have a bed for me. I politely responded that that was not my problem and continued to writhe in pain that I described as worse than childbirth. The phlebotomist stuck a big dull needle in my left arm and shouted to me that she needed to take samples of blood. Are gall bladder attacks known to cause temporary deafness? My research since that night hasn’t come up with anything to back up that hypothesis.

Eventually I was put into a room in the ER one curtain away from a woman having an anxiety attack. I was asked again why I had consulted a surgeon in Cambridge to talk about cholesystectomy. There was a soothing fluorescent light fixture directly over my bed that was cranked up to its maximum light output setting. I drew my knees up to my chest to try and manage the pain but it wasn’t happening. The IV line in my left hand kept me from moving any more than that. The air conditioning then snapped on and, dressed in the stylishly breezy hospital-issued johnny, I began to shiver even more.

Now that I was shuddering with cold, screaming in pain, blinded by the light and exhausted because by now it was close to the midnight hour, I sent my husband to find a nurse to turn down the lights and get a blanket. It had been almost two hours since I was admitted and there had been not so much as a Tylenol given to me for the pain. Figuring that this visit was necessary to gather information about what my body was doing during one of these gall bladder episodes, I steeled myself from pulling the plug and walking away.

After a perpetually-grinning doctor came in and asked again why I had had an appointment with a Cambridge surgeon and what her hospital was named, he “examined” me by asking where the pain was and for a description of it. He ordered a shot of morphine combined with an anti-nausea medication. It almost improved the pain. Another IV injection a while later brought the pain down enough that I asked my husband to get a nurse to take me to the bathroom.

Did I mention that there was no call button for the nurse?

The nurse who had first taken my vitals when I went in showed. She was the same person who had left me standing in agony outside the bathroom two hours before. At that point there was no alternative so I let her lead me around the mouse maze of the emergency room. She left me off at the door and told me that if I wanted to I could walk back to my bed or I could pull the emergency call cord next to the toilet and she’d come get me. When I was finished, I opened the door thinking that at least I could salvage a shred of dignity and walk back to my bed. Unfortunately I had no glasses and no map to the territory. I pulled the cord and was escorted back, past the police officers who had brought in one of that evening’s more entertaining patients.

Let’s rush ahead. A technician came and got me to be X-rayed. I stood for the first “film” and had to push my bra up so that it pooled loosely around my neck. They of course don’t want the underwire showing on the picture. I of course don’t mind standing around with a brassiere at my throat. Why would I? It’s only my dignity. It didn’t make the pain any worse. Or any better. She laughed as I struggled to re-seat the bra. It would have been easy if I was an A-cup girl with an elastic leisure bra, but the garment in question is roughly the architectural equivalent of the Zakim Bridge in Boston.

Laughter. They say it’s the best medicine. It must be at this hospital.

One last injection of pain medication got me down to feeling like a human being again. The grinning doctor came in and discharged me with instructions to see their surgeon that I told him was not going to happen because, as I explained for the sixth time, I had seen a surgeon in Cambridge just the day before and a low-fat diet to follow, even after I told him I’d been on a low-fat diet for the previous two months.

He even grinned through my husband’s assessment of how terrible the organization of the ER had been. We got a fleeting admission that it shouldn’t have happened that way and that they have to make sure that people coming in claiming that they have pain really do before they are given medication.

There’s only one sure remedy for this painful malfunction and that’s surgical removal of the gall bladder or cholecystectomy. As I explained over and over to one emergency room person after another, I had gone to my personal physician weeks earlier and she had sent me right away for an ultrasound exam that showed gall stones. Dutifully following her recommendation, I called the surgeon and made an appointment. And at her instruction, I took my most recent episode to the nearest emergency room and let them tinker with me. Because I had a follow-up appointment scheduled a few days later, I went to the hospital and got the records of my visit. They weren’t 100% correct, but the test results showed that there weren’t any other mystery medical conditions going on.

My surgeon looked me in the eye over her desk and said that her opinion was to remove the offending organ as soon as possible. And then she apologized for the haphazard treatment I had received in another hospital in another state. Once the decision was made, her assistant took over and set me up with a pre-op EKG, told me how to answer the registration and medical history questions online, and called me that afternoon with the time of my procedure.

Giddy, I went along with everything, knowing that it would be the solution to the worst pain I had ever felt.

This Monday, this Coyote will be checking in to a teaching hospital in Cambridge at noon with laparoscopic surgery scheduled for two o’clock in the afternoon. Because I’m never the sick one, I don’t know exactly what to expect, but I’m sure they’ll tell me. And I do get to stay overnight for observation so that I won’t have to take the two-hour car ride home twelve minutes after I’m out of recovery.

Wish me luck. I’ll let you know how it goes.