The Biopsy and Other Stuff

I had the muscle biopsy; it was an open biopsy with full anesthesia and was of my right deltoid muscle (bicep).

I'm a little dismayed that the desk attendant misinformed me. She said the biopsy would be on my thigh; therefore, when the nurse who came to insert the needle for my IV asked me where I was going to be cut, that's what I told her. She, thinking the hand we used didn't matter, tried to insert the needle into my right hand. I suppose it's a good thing she wasn't able to find a usable vein.

The nurses before the procedure were great, but those I dealt with afterward were rude, rude, rude. I came to awareness with one yelling at me because she was trying to change my gown and I hadn't been moving the way she wanted me to. After I asked for pain medication and had to wait half an hour for it, a second nurse lectured me about waiting "until a 5 became a 9 [on a 1 - 10 pain rating scale]" to ask for pain medicine. Um, I became conscious at an 8 and asked for pain medication then. Stuff it.

Instead of using the words or the tone I wanted to, however, I simply said, "I woke up in an 8." She then snarkily "reminded" me that I'd had a choice of whether to receive intravenous pain medication and stay in the recovery room an extra half hour, or to accept Tylenol 3 so that I could be moved into a room to see my husband. She was wrong, but this time I didn't even try to set her straight. The choice the original nurse (the one who yelled at me to move) had given me was between IV medication and Percoset. I've had Percoset. It works much better than Tylenol 3, and I'm not sure that I would have chosen Tylenol 3 had that been the alternative to the IV with which I was presented. Regardless, either medication should have been administered a good half hour before, at the time it was offered; instead, both nurses promised medication and left me sitting for several minutes while attending to other business.

I know medical professionals are busy, but that kind of behavior is inexcusable. Instead of saying, "I'm really busy right now; I'll get to it as soon as I can, but it might take a few minutes," the preferred alternative is to make a patient coming out of surgery wait and, unprovoked, accuse that patient of making bad choices? I hadn't nagged and hadn't criticized. I think the second nurse just felt the need to blame someone else for the time it took her to get the medicine to me, and when her first way of placing blame didn't work out, she moved on to a second to save face. Ridiculous.

It took several days for me to get a full range of arm motion back. I have a follow-up appointment tomorrow (the two week mark), but that's just to see how the incision is healing and to remove the stitches. I won't have the test results for another couple of weeks.

A few days before the biopsy, I got a terrible, noncontagious rash on my legs. Itchy red bumps. Oral steroids seem to have cleared it up.

I recently stumbled across information about a disorder called neuromyotonia, or Isaac's Syndrome. It consists of muscle fasciculations, muscle cramping, and extreme muscle tightness, and it's in the same family of disorders (peripheral nerve hyperexcitability disorders) as benign fasciculation syndrome and cramp fasciculation syndrome. It seems a tell-tale diagnostic sign is an abnormal EMG. I wanted to discuss this with my neurologist before the surgery (since muscle biopsies are sometimes useless for diagnosing Isaacs), but her receptionist told me she wanted me to make an appointment after I got the results of the muscle biopsy. I was kind of hoping to avoid being cut into if it wasn't necessary, but maybe she just wanted to explore all possibilities. Odd, though, since she previously seemed to want to order the biopsy only after exhausting all other possibilities.


Oh, the TENS machine really isn't all that. It feels good in the spots to which the electrodes attach, but any chain-reaction muscle tightening that happened before still happens now. For example, when I use my arm, my jaw still becomes painfully tight. Also, even though I may not feel pain in the muscles to which the electrodes are attached while the electrodes are attached, the muscles themselves still become sore from overuse. When the machine comes off, I'm in a lot of pain.