Hospital adventure #5, 2013

Hey folks –

I was compelled to post that earlier essay I wrote because I was, at the time, in the hospital. Again. C figured that it was the 5^th time I was at Abbott this year. This was one of my longest stays – exactly one week. I went in Sunday afternoon November 10^th and got out Sunday afternoon the 17^th. A clear week. This was also a stay where I got quite a bit sicker before I started to feel better. Plus, there were a few surprises along the way.

What further complicated being away from school was that my high school lost two students the weekend before I went in – car crash and suicide. It was hard to be away during that time, though I would guess it was even harder to be there.

I mean here to relate what the week was like – what happened and what it was like to experience it. I generally experience narratives like a road trip – chronological, cause effect, linear. You can follow it on a map. Hospital stays feel more like an extended drunken adventure. A chaotic, confused journey. Hospitals are places out of time. True, I generally slept from about 1230 AM to about 6, when it is nighttime. But it is not sleep anymore than lying in bed all day is being awake. Time is punctuated every 3 or 4 hours by having my vitals checked (blood pressure cuff on my arm, thermometer in my mouth, blood oxygen level meter on my finger), having blood drawn, and the error alarms on my IV machine. After a few days of this there is no time.

Tell it right now, nice and easy. Take your time.

There was an instance when I was counting minutes during this stay. I had a pneumonia that was not responding to antibiotics and they wanted to figure out what bug was in my lungs making me sick. C and I are trying to figure out on what day this happened, this procedure where they sedated me and put a scope in my lungs to take some samples. Bronchoscopy. Wednesday.

So because I was to be somewhat put under, I couldn’t eat or drink leading up to this procedure, which was at 11AM. For whatever reason, the ‘nothing by mouth’ started the night before at midnight, when I was extremely thirsty. There have been a few moments of this in my hospital life, where I was not allowed to have anything to drink and was thirsty beyond imagination. My tongue, mouth, throat were dry. I couldn’t swallow. This went on for two hours. I couldn’t stay still. All I could think about was how good cold water would feel in my mouth. An ice cube. Have you been thirsty like this? Every breath made it worse, breathing in a desert. I rinsed my mouth in the sink a few times, which helped for a moment or two. Eventually I gave in and drank the best three glasses of water in my life. It was 2AM – nine hours before this procedure, and it was totally fine.

That was Wednesday – the bronchoscopy. Wednesday afternoon (or possibly Thursday) they did a CT scan on my lungs to see what there was to see. Around this same time, I noticed that my right arm had swelled up around the elbow, just fluid, but I had a fun wobbly arm for the afternoon. They did an ultrasound on my arm and shoulder to look for clots and found one – superior vena cava I think. The ultrasound rooms are nice – dark, warm – the gel used for the scanner is warm. It’s quiet aside from the sounds of the veins they are ‘seeing’ on the ultrasound, which are pulsing and womb-like – wom wom wom wom. There are pretty reds and blues on the screen. On me, I was missing a vein – right side near my collarbone. Same vein where the tech pulled the dialysis catheter in the last entry. Writing this is beginning to feel interminable. It was a week of things like this. I was on oxygen for two days. My creatinine went up to 3.8  (from 2.4) then back down to 2.1. They found a tumor (during the CT scan of my lung) in one of my native kidneys and will remove the kidney sometime this spring. I watched The Avengers, Captain America, Thor, Skyfall, Austin Power and three seasons of The Office (thank you Netflix), but there were two days when I didn’t watch or do anything. At one point when someone asked me why my kidneys failed originally I told them I masturbated too much. That was a highlight.

It is so hard to capture all of this. This reads nothing like all of it. Would pictures help? I guess I could say that at times it felt interminable, like being thirsty, and some days drifted past me without my knowing. Just a different way to be a person I guess. I had to adjust my notion of who I am a few times - being on oxygen was new and scary to me, I didn't friends of family to see me with the tubes on my face, and taking home the blood clot and future surgery were big new things. I am now a person who has 'been on oxygen' and 'has a blood clot', along with everything else. 

Back home now, for a few weeks, the specific memories of my stay are already beginning to slide together. My body is recovering slowly from the pneumonia and whatever went with it, but I am improving by the day. I have passed the point where I don’t remember what not feeling sick was like. I passed it today, but I passed it. That was a great feeling. Thanks for reading!