Tuesday, April 29, 2008

I ALMOST DIED

PART II

When my friends found out that I was in the emergency room, the first question they asked wasn’t “what happened?” or “are you okay?” but instead “is it like being on that show ER?” I’ve never watched the show, but I assume the answer would be yes - granted you uglied up the cast and swapped out George Clooney with a shit load of homeless people.

After taking my temperature and blood pressure, the raisin faced nurse said nothing to me, just muttered something into the phone that prompted the arrival of a large attendant with a gurney. I looked at the nurse helplessly, is this necessary? written across my face. “Go on now,” she said to me. Reluctantly, I handed Katy my coat and climbed aboard.

With the nurse at the bow and the attendant at the stern, the two steered me through an obstacle course of homeless. Gurnies filled with hobos were parked everywhere, and my two handlers were struggling to maneuver me through the tight turns. It was a maze, and I wondered how on earth they were going to get me through it. I reassured myself, thinking “they’re professionals. They do this hundreds of times a day.” This confidence was shaken, however, when they rammed my bed into one of a sleeping homeless person. His eyes bolted open and we stared at each other screaming – he because he had been abruptly awoken, and I because he wasn’t wearing pants.

The two didn’t stop for apologies. They quickly wheeled me into a small room in the corner of the ER. These rooms – cubicles really – were divided by brightly patterned curtains, offering a hint of privacy from the moaning masses. The nurse situated my gurney next to a large oxygen machine and left briefly to fetch a chair for Katy. It was a tight fit, but she managed to wedge one inside the cramped quarters.

Katy sat beside me and held my hand as the nurse drew my blood. For the next hour or so, the nurse popped in and out, first to drill an IV into my arm, then to stick oxygen tubes up my nose, and finally to give me a hospital gown to change into. It was a complete hospital makeover, transforming me from a relatively healthy looking person into Tammy Faye Baker in a relatively short amount of time.

To pass the time, Katy and I began to play our favorite game There’s no real name for it, but the rules are simple. One of us thinks of someone we knew in middle school, and the other tries to determine who by asking a series of yes or no questions (for example; did they repeatedly throw rocks at me? Were they recently handcuffed and forcibly removed from the local Sam’s Club?) Once accurately guessed, Katy and I then stroke our fragile egos by discussing how much cooler we are than our former tormentors, or if not cooler - at least thinner. This time, our game didn’t last more than five minutes. The fun, smug feeling of superiority just wasn’t the same while laid up in a hospital bed next to a woman screaming “Nurse! The urine! It’s everywhere!”

Fortunately, Katy had thought ahead and brought a magazine for us to read together. Unfortunately, she chose to bring the Valentines issue of Woman’s Day. She read it aloud to me, beginning at the mast head and reading until I begged her to stop.

“Oh look,” she said as she opened up the first page. “The members of the Woman’s Day staff have listed the sweetest ways someone has told them they loved them. Isn’t that neat? Producer Judith Elissaint writes, ‘My sister calls me and puts my 2-year-old niece on the phone to say ‘I love you, Titi.’ It’s the cutest thing in the world!’ Let’s read on, shall we?”

She paused in between Catherine Zeta-Jones’s Secret to a Great Relationship and Tips on Writing a Love Letter and took my hand. “This is kind of nice, just you and me,” she said, “We never get to just hang out anymore. We never just talk.” Then she lifted up her magazine and pointed to the next page. “Now this is fun! A recipe for DIY potpourri!”

A young woman in a white coat pulled back the curtain and poked her head in. “Mr. Miles?” she asked, “You know we’re open 24-7 right? You don’t have to wait until you’re shitting blood and falling down to come see us.” My initial reaction was who the fuck are you lady, but she quickly introduced herself as my ER doctor for the evening. She was definitely an attractive woman, although looking back, it may have been that she was only attractive in comparison to every one else in the ER. She was funny too, and her mildly sassy demeanor put me at ease. I shook her hand and introduced her to Katy, and then asked her the question I had been wondering since I had passed in the bathroom.

“Is this for serious, or is this just in my head? Because I think I might be faking.”

She paused briefly, deciding the best way to answer my question. “Well, let me say this. I don’t really know you Mr. Miles. I’ve never seen you before. I don’t know what you usually look like, but I can tell you right now…without even looking at your chart…that no, this isn’t just in your head. You see…” she said as she put her hand on my shoulder, “Most people have color in their skin. You, on the other hand, have none. At all. I mean…Have you looked at yourself lately? Have you seen how pale you look? This can’t be normal, can it?” She looked at Katy for affirmation.

“I didn’t want to say anything,” Katy confessed, “but you have been looking very pasty lately.”

The doctor grabbed my hand. “Look,” she said as she examined my palm, “You don’t even have color in the palms of your hands. I’m not even exaggerating. Look!” She rapidly moved my hand close to my face so that I could bask in my paleness.

“I just thought I needed some sun.” I told her.

“You need a lot more then sun!” she told me as she started examining my chart. “We took your blood a little bit ago and tested your blood count. Now, in a vile of blood taken from a normal, healthy person, blood cells account for about 40 to 45 percent of it. The rest is the liquid they’re suspended in. So if a normal person’s blood count is at about '40', do you know what your current blood count is at?

She paused for dramatic effect. “19. Your blood count is 19.”

The only thing I could say was “Wahhhhhhhhh?!”

“If you would have waited any longer to get this treated,” she told me, “you would have slipped into a coma,”
“Or died?” Katy asked.
“If you had waited to treat your ulcer any longer, then yes, it is possible you could have died.” She told us.

I was completely speechless. Katy leaned over and said “Aren’t you glad I made you go to the emergency room?”

“Now, looking at your symptoms, it’s likely you have an ulcer in your stomach where blood is entering your digestive system. You’ve been bleeding internally, basically digesting your own blood, which would explain the black stool. Can I ask you how long your stool has been black?”

I had to rack my brain for an answer, but it was hard. I couldn't really remember a time when I was dropping black ones. I recalled a scene of me entertaining my family with black shit anecdotes at Christmas breakfast months earlier. My mother had to stop me, saying “Stop it! I’m eating grape jelly.”

“I don’t know,” I told the nurse. “Couple weeks.”

She jotted something down and continued. “Now, when you started seeing blood in your stool, there was probably so much blood in your stomach, your system couldn’t keep up and digest it all. That would take a lot of blood, Mr. Miles. It’s no wonder you passed out. The only think I don’t understand is how a 24 year-old gets a bleeding stomach ulcer.”

She turned Dr. House on me and started drilling me with a 101 ulcer related questions.
“Do you eat a lot of spicy foods?”
“Do you drink a lot of highly acidic beverages, such as orange juice?”
“Do you eat a lot of foreign or imported fruits and vegetables?”

No to all.

“Do you take a lot of Advil?”
I stopped to think. “How much is a lot?” I asked.
We both stared each other for a moment. “…How much do you take?”

The fact of the matter is I’ve been popping Advil like it was sweet candy for years. Ever since middle school, I’ve been taking it regularly to help me sleep, in addition to whenever I have the slightest headache or muscle ache. Hangover? I take three. Drunk? I take four to prevent the hangover. Sometimes I take it for no reason, other than the fact that I have a bottle sitting in front of me and I need something to go with my water. Sometimes I take it because opening the child proof bottle makes me feel like a man. I’m at the point where the recommended dose of two doesn’t even faze me. I’m at the point where the assistants at work have to order it in bulk on a special website because the Duane Reid next door was getting suspicious.

I told the doctor that perhaps I may have taken more than the recommended amount, but she wasn’t convinced it was enough to ware a hole in my stomach. “It would take massive and massive amounts of Advil to cause a bleeding ulcer in a relatively healthy 24 year-old,” she told me. We stared at each other for an awkward moment of time - she because she was lost and thought, and I because looking at her face was a better than staring at the curtain dividers. She broke the silence, saying “I’m going to send the specialist down who’s going to ask you a ton of questions that I wouldn’t even think to ask. There has to be a better explanation.”

“So I think it’s the Advil” was the first thing the specialist said as he walked in. Katy and I looked at each other, wondering what happened to the litany of questions we were promised. Like the last doctor, the specialist was young. Unlike her, he was neither attractive nor sassy. I tried to like him, but I couldn’t. He had “douche-bag” written all over him.

“We’re going to be moving you upstairs soon,” he told me. “We’re going to be performing a very simple procedure that will help us find the ulcer, and at the same time repair it. We’re basically going to be sticking a long tube down your throat. This tube has a camera on it that will allow us to find the damaged area. It also has a zapper that can cauterize it once we find it.”

I asked how long I would be in the hospital for. I had hardly been there 4 hours, but I was already hating it. “Well, you’re very ill,” he told me. “Your blood count is extremely low. We’re going to have to wait until your blood count gets significantly higher before we let you go anywhere.”

“So do you have a time frame for that?”
“Well,” he told me, “let’s just say you should inform your boss you probably won’t be in for awhile.” And with that, I had found my silver lining.

Before the specialist left, he ordered the nurses to add another iv drip to my free arm so that I could begin the first of the four blood transfusions I would receive.

Katy and I sat there, soaking in what just happened. “I almost died” I told her.
“I know!” She said. “Awesome.”
“Totally awesome.”

A half an hour went by, when a nurse came rushing in, pulling back the curtain to the front of my cubicle. “We need to move you Mr. Miles. We have a woman coming in, and she’s going to need this area.” A couple of attendants rushed in and tried to move my gurney. With the amount of tubes running into my body, they found it difficult to get me very far. Like a nasty yoyo, I was tangled on everything, so they ended up angling me into the neighboring triage station. They tried closing the curtain as they pushed a woman on a gurney in, but my tubes connected to other machine prevented them from shutting it very far. The woman they brought in was crying loudly. It was an awful and ungodly noise, and I couldn’t help but watch, trying to figure what was going on with her. Her husband stood there beside her. “It’s going to be okay” he kept telling her, but she only screamed louder. My cute/sassy doctor was there with her, telling her that they were giving her morphine to ease the pain. She looked over at me and told me, “We brought her in here to make you feel better by comparison.”

The cubicle they had pushed me into was shared with another man. I instantly noticed that he only had one leg. He was curled up in a ball, motionless. “I almost died!” I told him. He didn’t move.

A nurse came by and told me that they would be moving me upstairs very shortly. “I don’t know how this is going to work,” I told her, “but I really have to pee.” She left and returned with an unusual looking jug – very similar to the container my mother made kool-aid in when i was a kid. “What the hell am I suppose to do with his?” I asked her.
“You pee in it, Princess.”

I’ve always avoided urinals, so pissing in a small plastic container in the middle of a busy room while lying in bed seemed pretty incomprehensible. There were no curtains in my new room, so Katy positioned her self with her back to me, standing in-between me and the rest of the room. I moved the bottle under the sheets and carefully positioned myself inside it. My bladder felt like it going to explode, so I cleared my head and tried to unleash the beast, but as hard a I pushed, I simply could not pee.

“How you doing over there?” Katy yelled back at me.
“Still working on it,” I told her.

I shut my eyes and envisioned my happy place…my bathroom at home. While picturing myself sitting on my toilet and reading a shampoo bottle, the pee finally came forth, although at an incredibly slow speed. After five minutes Katy said “Jesus! Are you done yet?”

“I’M WORKING ON IT!” I snapped back. Minutes later, when I finally finished, I thought “Now what do I do with this?” I tried giving it to Katy, but she refused. I was too embarrassed to ask the nurses to take it, so I left it there, in between my legs and under my sheets. When the nurses came to take me upstairs, I worried that it would spill, but when faced with handing them a giant jug filled to the brim with warm piss, I decided to take my chances.

Katy followed me as they pushed my gurney into the elevator, and we waved goodbye to all our homeless friends. The nurses took me to the second floor, and wheeled me into a pleasant room at the end of the hall. They hoisted me onto the bed, said goodbye, and wheeled my gurney away, along with the bottle of piss I left with them.

Laying in my new bed, nurses came in and out, bustling around me. Doing this and doing that. I had been up all night, and exhaustion finally hit me. Katy remained next to me the entire time, holding my hand.

“You can go Katy,” I said to her. “You should probably go home and get some sleep.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. “I don’t want to leave you here alone.”
“I’m sure,” I told her. “I should probably get some sleep myself.”

She got up and gave me a kiss goodbye. “You’re going to be okay” she told me. It was about this time when everything hit me. Here I was, 24 years old and in the hospital. How did I end up here? I was alone, hundreds of miles away from my family. And honestly, I was scared. I had almost died, and I had just realized that this was the first time that someone had told me I was going to be okay. But was I going to be okay? Tears started streaming down my face.

One of the nurses saw me and rushed over. “Are you okay? Are you in pain?”
I was horrified that someone had caught my crying. “No!” I told her. “I’m just…full of emotion!”
“Oh…” she replied. She was clearly taken aback. She then but her arm around me, her large breasts falling into my face, “Don’t worry. I have a son your age, and you have Mother Devi here to take care of you.”