How an unexpected hospital stay gave me hope
Unexpectedly last Monday my plan for cataract surgery was abruptly postponed. They did a “finger stick” in my primary care doctor’s office and found my red blood cell count was way too low. They promptly put me in a wheelchair - I had walked in - and wheeled me to the Emergency Room at Downey PIH Hospital. And so the adventure began.
I had just been hospitalized for three days the week before, for weakness and shortness of breath. They gave me two units of blood, did an endoscopy to look for the unexplained bleeding, found a gastric ulcer and cauterized it. I went home, felt fine, was up and about, but I did get exhausted just walking around my apartment, a sign I now recognize as not having enough red blood cells to carry oxygen around my body. I thought I was fixed up, but here I was, back again.
A survival technique, the first of many for me: to keep myself anchored to reality, this time I kept notes of everyone’s name as they came into my room. It seemed to help if I wrote down the numbers of my blood pressure readings, so I got out pen and paper each time. Last time I had wanted to tell about the wonderful care I had gotten at Downey PIH. Now I was back again and had the chance.
Fortunately my daughter Carrie, an emergency room nurse, was with me this second time, and she accompanied me from room to room in the ER for the next five hours, of very efficient treatment: blood draws, x-rays and echocardiogram, and the start of two more blood transfusions. Son Jeff showed up with my hair brush. He knew what I wanted.
Once in my hospital room, the night started out long, but when I asked the nurse’s name, Natalie and Juliet and Nancy and Myles, and where she or he came from, the time passed so much better. Each home country was always beautiful, but they were all glad to be living here…Kenya or Cameroon or Viet Nam. They all had time to smile and made me comfortable while doing their jobs.
Let me say right now that nurses are the heart and soul of the hospital system. With their 12-hour shifts, they are the ones who touch the patient with their care. And these women and men were awesome.
After the two transfusions on Monday, Tuesday morning was to begin with another endoscopy. On my previous stay a week ago, my GI (gastro-intestinal) internist had done this procedure where I, while unconscious, swallowed a fiber-optic camera so they could check out the lining of my stomach and a little beyond. Incredible, this miniaturization.
While waiting for the GI doctor to arrive that first time I was admitted, I talked with the technician and the nurse. He was from Artesia and she from Montebello. He liked to coach high school basketball, and said he hoped to catch at-risk kids and help them by lessons of sport. “Lessons for life,” he said.
So I told him how I was going to be a judge for the best baseball book written in 2020, and that I wrote for the Downey Patriot. They thought that was cool. One of the other nurses piped up and said, “Be sure to say I was here.” And he was.
I said that I had moved here 50 years ago, and that Downey was still a good place to live, because we still had such good schools, our own fire and police departments, our own Family YMCA, and a Symphony Orchestra. “SYMPHONY?” they said. They didn’t know about our 60-year-old professional regional orchestra, our wonderful conductor Sharon Lavery and our three yearly concerts in the Downey Theatre.
The tech-coach had played the clarinet in high school because his mother wouldn’t let him play the drums, and “Every kid wants to play drums, right?”Since then he played in his high school marching band, and gone on from clarinet to oboe to saxophone and trumpet and, yes, even drums.
“I can listen to music and tell which percussion instrument is playing as it fades away” he said.
“I think music is the greatest of the arts,” he added, “and when I hear something beautiful I have tears - of joy.”
So I asked if I could give him two tickets to come as my guest to our April 11 Downey Symphony concert, and he was thrilled at the chance. Two tickets for the nurse, too. The basketball coach put his name and the nurse’s too in my bag with a paperclip. By now my purse was my desk.
“I can hear your doctor washing up his hands now,” the tech said, and I had to say with a laugh, he had really acute hearing if he could tell one doctor from any other washing up. All this talking, with oxygen tubes in my nose.That was then, and now on this Tuesday a week later they took me down for another endoscopy so my GI doctor could see if the previous cauterization was enough. The same anesthetist greeted me again.
The next part is a merciful blur. They got me back to my room by 11:30 am and only a liquid lunch - consommé and jello – because there were more procedures to come. The MRI.
Off I went again. For the Magnetic Resonating Imagery test, they pushed me into a small chamber with a narrow low ceiling. To keep up my spirits, I thought about those poor boys who were trapped in the cave in Thailand, and how they were there for weeks, with much poorer air and in the dark and nearly submerged. How could I complain – I had a strong vaulted space above me, and good clean air.
Since I am a SCUBA diver, I could appreciate what it took to rescue them. That was a miracle. I thought about deep diving and wreck diving where you go down 100 feet. Your fingernails turn purple and most of your dive time is spent in a carefully controlled ascent so you don’t get the bends.
I prefer to swim in the first atmosphere, the first 33 feet, where it’s warm and you don’t have to worry about decompression. All the colorful fish and corals are there. It’s better than snorkeling because you are free swimming and feel weightless, and you can lie quietly on the sandy bottom, like in Tahiti or Bonaire, and the fishes will come out and play around you. The Silent World, it’s called. Thinking about my diving days, the time passed.
Next test, the Midnight Flyer. All day I had had helpful attendants with unusual names: Liberty, and Giselle, Aurora and Haiti; and now it was 11 pm and yet another procedure. The orderly who took me down to the Nuclear Medicine Department was Ulysses.
“What a terrific name,” I said. “How did you get it?”
“My parents liked Greek stories,” Ulysses said.
“He’s my favorite hero,” I said. “He was the smart one. He thought up the idea of the Greek Horse.”
It was nearly midnight now and the hospital corridors were empty as we sped through them, because the technician had to come all the way from Diamond Bar. Nuclear Medicine, or “Peace Health” is a fall-out from WWII, the cyclotron and the making of the atom bomb. Marie Curie coined the word “radioactivity,” but this medical specialty didn’t even exist when I was a girl.
They transferred me onto an impossibly narrow and stone-cold special platform, and I called out to Ulysses, “Tell your parents, this is the Bed of Procrustes.” Procrustes was an evil innkeeper who liked to stretch the traveler’s body on a rack if he was too short for the bed, and chop off his feet if he was too tall.
The tech was a large buffed person, who dominated the machine and the room. After managing to extract blood when I thought I didn’t have any more, he mixed it with a radioactive isotope and re-injected it into my body, so they could trace its course in circulation and see if it lighted up with an eccentric pattern where the suspected new GI bleeding was occurring.
While the mixing was going on I told him it was cold in the room, but I had known colder, growing up in Boston and Syracuse and Pittsburgh, with snow and ice and winter blizzards. He agreed, and said he had lived seven years in Russia.
I had owned and operated Stonewood Travel in the Stonewood Mall for 35 years, so I told him I had visited Russia.
“In 1974,” I said, “I went to USSR” (he nodded – no “Russia” existed then). “I saw Moscow and Leningrad, and the beautiful city of Kiev, on the banks of the Dnieper River in the Ukraine, and then I visited Yalta, on the Black Sea, with the lovely Swallow’s Nest Castle. Roosevelt stayed there during the Yalta conference.”
“I love Yalta,” he said. “It’s nice in the spring,”
He has lived in Diamond Bar for 20 years, “because it is more peaceful than Downey, but I was born in Jerusalem,” he said, and I said that was a beautiful city. He smiled with pride. He had an Arabic name, but I decided not to go into the Palestinian question at that moment. We agreed that politics in the Middle East was a dismal subject.
There was a sort of sling they strapped me into and my arms were immobilized and a big press came down over my torso. Then I was inside the body of the huge gamma camera itself. It took up most of the whole room, and it could image gamma radiation from the isotopes from above and below.
When I heard it might take two to three hours lying like this to get the results, I thought, even the MRI’s barrel chamber was better than this Bed of Procrustes.
“I am trusting myself entirely to you,” I said, as he was about to bring down the camera head.
“You don’t have much choice,” he replied, a little cynically I thought.
“Yes, I do,” I said. “I have the choice to trust myself to you –happily - and I do.”
The test mercifully took only an hour and a half, and I never was so glad to get back to the warm and comparatively fluffy sheets in the bed in my room. “I’ll never complain about this stiff gurney again,” I said. And at that moment I meant it.
Earlier that Tuesday night watching TV, I had gotten the Super Tuesday primary results, and news of the spread of the coronavirus, though the television had only a limited number of channels, and the closed captions weren’t very good.
I had to remind everyone that I am hard of hearing and they should speak right at me. They were good about remembering that, and would take down their masks so I could hear more distinctly. Little things make such a big difference,
Wednesday was spent resting and getting ready for Thursday’s next big procedure. By now I realized how determined they were about taking blood and my vital signs. They were cheerful and skilled at their jobs, and responsive to my small personal needs.
Each procedure started with the new personnel checking my name and number on my wrist band and asking me my name and birthdate, to be sure I was the right person. One asked what year it was, and it was so tempting to say 1066 or 1775. There were always permissions to sign and I was tethered to the bed by IV’s. If I had tried to get up and stand, a silent sensor in the bed would sound an alarm in the nurse’s station.
After negative results for the procedure on Thursday morning, by that afternoon they could see I had stabilized blood levels, and my case could be managed on an out-patient basis, and that I wanted very much to go home.
Earlier I had been discussing the evils of colonialism with my staff physician from one of the most important African nations. He was born here but is proud of his parents’ heritage. On the way to America they lived in Oxford long enough for him to develop a charming accent.
“To be in politics in my country is death,” he said. “Everywhere there is corruption and civil war. It is too bad, that there are men who just have to have power and dominate other people.” We agreed on the deplorable truth that such men make the world a dangerous place.
But when this doctor and my other GI physician happened to come in together and were standing side by side, summing up my case as I was leaving, I remembered this conversation.
“There are these war-mongering and power hungry people,” I said. “But there are other kinds of men too.” And from my hospital bed I pointed to the two of them.
“Men like you, who are kind, and offer service, who make the world a better place. I have hope.”