This is a test.
From across the hall, I could hear a man screaming at his nurse. The nature of his displeasure seemed to stem from the fact that the hospital only had turkey sandwiches available to eat, and dammit, he wanted something else.
Back in my room the ENT and the student nurse prepared me for the incision. The nurse laid a gown over my chest to protect my clothes from any unpleasantness that may soon come spurting (or drooling) from my mouth. She then gave me a basin to spit in, which I thought was very thoughtful of her.
The ENT began by injecting a shit ton of Novocain into the area surrounding the abscess. He wanted to be thorough, and so he ended up injecting me in at least five or six different places. Everything was going fine until my gag reflex kicked in and I coughed up right in his face. He was a pro, though, and soldiered on. He tried using one of those tubes that dentists use to suck up saliva from your mouth while they’re working, but it seemed to be broken. That was fine during the Novocain portion of the procedure, after all, at that point nothing was gathering in my mouth by saliva, and that was easy enough to spit out. But that wouldn’t do for the actual incision, when my mouth would be filling with blood and pus. For that he needing a working suction tube. He called in a nurse to take a look, who ran off to get some new parts for the device. After replacing the broken parts, the machine seemed to be working to his satisfaction. It was right around this time when Meg and her mother arrived.
I couldn’t really talk between my swollen throat and the abscess, but I could nod plenty good and the ENT was happy to fill them in on what he was about to do. Meg’s mom asked all the good motherly questions and Meg made jokes to keep my spirits up and acted appropriately disgusted at the shit that was about to go down. Then the ENT was ready to get to work and they told me they would be back in after he was finished.
He grabbed his scalpel, told me to open wide, and got to work. Throughout the procedure I gripped the spit basin in my lap as tightly as I have ever gripped anything, willing the tears back into their ducts and preventing my gag reflex from flexing. A sour taste would occasionally fill my mouth, but he was right there with the tube and sucked it away. He seemed to take a long time, making cut after cut. Shouldn’t one slice have been enough? Apparently not, as he continued working with the scalpel in my mouth.
And then he was done and he told me I could spit. A viscous blob of blood dropped from my lips into the basin. I spit out some more blood. Both the nurse and the ENT commented on how well I had done. Shortly thereafter Meg and her mom came back in. Again, the staff commented on my stoicism. I still felt like shit. Meg’s mom asked some more questions about the next few days, about what medication I would be on, about how quickly I should recover. The ENT said he would call in my prescriptions, that I should be fine in a couple of days, and that I only had to stay over night if I really wanted to. I chose to go home. Resoundingly.
We waited around in the room as the paperwork was finalized. I was still in pain, so Meg’s mom asked the nurse if I could get some more morphine. She said that was fine, and got to work securing it. The man across the hall continued to scream about anything and everything. She got back with the morphine. I didn’t feel a thing this time, no tingling, no liquid metal, no bringing the pain down to four. Then the nurse came by with my prescriptions and it was time to go. The student nurse took out my IV (not as bad as I had feared) as Meg’s mom went to get the car. The nurse asked if I was okay to walk, if the morphine was making me dizzy, and I assured her I was fine. As I stood up to leave, I turned to see the clear container attached to the suction tube used to clear out my throat during the incision process. It was filled with blood and green yellow treacle of pus. Walking out of the room we passed the screaming man’s wife standing outside his room. She looked at us apologetically then went back to staring at the floor.
Meg and I met her mom outside of the doors to the ER. They dropped me off at home then went to Walgreene’s to pick up my meds and soft foods. Saints, both of them. They returned and I took my percocet and my antibiotic and ate some apple sauce and drank some tea and ate some ice cream and drank some apple juice and stayed up late watching Lost with Will.
Finally, after two and a half hours of waiting a nurse came to lead me back to a room. Actually, I misspoke. Two nurses came to lead me back, one of them being a student nurse in training. As we walked to my room, I thought how it would be cool to see a police officer waiting outside the room, like they do in The Fugitive or Lost when the patient was dangerous. Then I wondered if that sort of thing happened in real life. Then we passed a cop, sitting on a folding chair, directly across from a room occupied by a sleeping kid probably in his early 20s. Bitchin’. We got back to my room. It was a double but the other side was empty. Score. A hospital gown lay neatly folded at the foot of the bed. “Does he need to wear the gown if he only has a throat thing?” the student nurse asked. “No,” said the real nurse. Double Score.
I laid down on the bed as they did nurse-like things around me and took my temperature. They told me a doctor would be in shortly. Before they left the student nurse brought me a blanket. I huddled up under it and tried to sleep, but instead found myself staring at the water damaged ceiling tiles. I heard blood curdling screams coming from down the hall and began to wonder exactly what sort of hospital I was in. As I lay in bed pretending to be asleep, a moaning woman was rolled in next to me on her bed. I cursed my luck.
Soon after the doctor came in, took a look at my throat, said that, yeah, I had an abscess and that he was going to bring in an Ear, Nose and Throat specialist and that in the mean time they were going to hook me up on an IV with some antibiotics and some morphine. I’d heard that morphine was a lot of fun, so I found myself somewhat excited for my first IV experience.
As I waited for the IV, a nurse came in saying that my parents had called, but the call had been dropped. She said I could call them back on my room phone. After some initial difficulty I eventually was able to place an outside call and got through to my parents. I then gave them the lowdown. They told me they had talked to Meg’s mom, and that if I wanted, she would come by to act as an adult in the room. At first I didn’t think it was necessary, but I eventually relented and hold them that it would be nice if she came by.
After saying goodbye I tried to sleep again, but shortly thereafter the nurses came back in ready to hook up my IV. The real nurse asked the student if she wanted to try putting it in, to which she responded hesitantly yes. Now, I had never had an IV, but I had heard horror stories from friends who went through hospital stints or given blood at school blood drives, and it did not sound pleasant. The real nurse guided the student through the steps. Apparently she had trouble finding a vein at first, but after tapping on my forearm in the way that nurses do, she evidently found a vein that “looked like a garden hose.”
She had a bit of trouble getting the IV in (the real nurse kept telling her to “push up) but she succeeded in the end without any undue pain on my part. This is thanks to a numbing agent they had applied to my arm earlier. They got things hooked up, and soon a steady stream of antibiotics and saline solution (is that right? it doesn’t sound right…) was flowing into my blood stream. Then the student went to hook up the morphine drip. She said she was going to have to inject it slowly. I said that was fine. I thought I began to feel a slightly tingling, like my arm was being dipped in frosty, liquid metal, but my mind may have just been playing tricks on me.
I lay in bed some more. I heard the woman over in the other part of the room ranting about how “they had taken [her] bra.” I over heard that I was in the only double room on the floor, and that the entire wing of the hospital was about to be remodeled. That explained a lot. The doctor came back in after a while to check on the IV. I asked if I was going to have to stay in overnight. He said he wasn’t sure, but it was likely, and that the ENT guy would know more.
I began dying of thirst again. Maybe the IV was rehydrating my body, but it sure as shit wasn’t helping to wet the roof of my mouth. A different nurse came in to replace the linens in the room, and I asked her for a glass of water. She said she would talk to the doctor, but she never did. I asked the student nurse if I could have some water when she came in to check on me. She said she would ask they doc. She, at least, got back to me, but told me I couldn’t have anything until after the ENT guy had a look at me.
Then she asked if I thought the morphine was helping. I told her maybe a little. She asked me to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten. This set off a long internal debate in my head. Is 10 the worst pain in the world? Because I’ve never been shot or had a limb chopped off or been set on fire or, god, been blown up by a IED, so how could I possibly rate that pain? Or is ten just the worst pain I’ve ever felt? Because I’ve never broken a bone or even been seriously sick. Could this be the worst pain I’ve ever experienced? Impossible. There was the period when I thought I was dying freshman year when my allergies hit me like a ton of bricks. But was that really pain? Or just illness? Could this really be the worst pain I’ve ever felt? Or what about emotional pain?
“Four,” I told her.
“Oh! That’s not so bad, is it?” she said cheerily.
I grunted something in response.
The doctor came to give the woman in the room some good news. She was going to be okay. She was being released. She told her friend with her that she still couldn’t find her bra. Her friend told her just to pull on a sweater. “But none of my sweaters are zip-up, Lolaaaa,” she responded.
Then the Ear, Nose, Throat guy showed up. I could tell immediately that he hadn’t been at the hospital beforehand, that he had been called in from whatever he was doing, and that he wanted to get back to whatever that was, probably a glass of scotch, as soon as possible. He took a look in my throat.
“Yeah, we’re going to have to drain that.”
He then told me the two option for draining the collected pus from a throat abscess. Option one was sticking a needle into the abscess and sucking the pus out through the needle. I thought that sounded painful, and hoped that option two was the nice, simple, slow, painless option. Option two, in fact, involve cutting the abscess open with a scalpel and draining the pus in that manner. Option two was more effective and, naturally, more invasive. There was a chance that if I went with option one it wouldn’t work and I’d have to go back in to let them have at it again. Since they both sounded unpleasant, I told him to go with option two.
He told me we were going to have to find a different room to do the procedure. I sent a text to Will telling him they were about to cut my throat open. He returned shortly and told me he had found a room. With my IV in tow, he lead me down the hall to my new room, basically a closet separated from the hallway by a curtain with a dentist’s chair in the middle. He sat me down and prepared for the procedure.
As Meg and I drove to the ER, I sent a text message to my parents, explaining that I was on my way to the hospital, and that I was texting rather than calling because I literally could not talk.
Meg dropped me off at the ER and went to park the car while I checked in. They took my info again and instructed me to take a seat in the waiting room. After sitting for just a minute or two, I was called into a cubicle office just off of the waiting room, where I was asked to explain my condition once again. Two nurses sat in the cubicle, and one announced to the other that I “smelled like strep.” My fears confirmed, I resolved to start showering every day lest I carry the scent of strep throat with me everywhere I go.
I met Meg again as I left that cubicle and went back to the waiting room. A few minutes after that, I was called into another cubicle where a woman took my insurance information. After that, I was sent back into the waiting room, and told to wait until they were ready for me.
The waiting room was a grim place. There was a single TV that was showing the day’s Vikings football game. There was also a sole magazine in the entire area, a Time from late June. Needless to say I pounced on that. A few seats across from me sat a guy with a combination of what looked like scales and goiters growing all over his face. Surprisingly, I don’t even think he was there to be admitted to the hospital, I think he was there with his sick wife. It took me about an hour to read completely through the magazine. Meg sat patiently beside me the entire time. At that point, with no end of my waiting in sight, I told her that she should go home and that I would call her when I knew more. I also told her I could just take the bus home from the hospital, a thought that seems foolish in retrospect. She went home, and I was left by my lonesome in the waiting room.
I didn’t have anything to do after, so I just sat in mu seat waiting for my name to be called. I couldn’t even see the clock from where I was, and since cellphones had to be turned off in the hospital, I had no good indicator of how much time had passed. So I sat, and watched people all around me be admitted. People who were there before me were admitted. People who got there after me were admitted. I guess I just wasn’t serious enough a case to be at the top of the list for admittance.
That didn’t mean, however, that I wasn’t suffering. I hadn’t had anything to drink since leaving the house, and even then it wasn’t much since it hurt so much to swallow. So I contented myself by licking the roof of my mouth with my tongue, thankful for every bit of beauteous moisture that this provided. Soon my tongue grew too dry for this to be of any help, so I had to settle for swallowing the excessive saliva that gathered in my engorged throat. This didn’t do much to rehydrate me, after all, any hydration was simply being recycled, but it brought momentary relief. It still hurt to fucking swallow though. I grew desperate as time passed and searched the waiting room for a water fountain. Instead, I only found a Pepsi machine, which I figured would do more harm then good, so I sat back down and waited.
After waiting for two hours (I got up from time to time to check the clock) I went up to the reception desk to say how much longer it was going to be. The receptionist told me, curtly, that I would be admitted when a room became available, and that, really, two hours was a pretty typical wait time. Jesus. I sat back down and waited some more.
About fifteen minutes later I thought I heard somebody call my name. I looked around, but didn’t see anybody. I heard my name again, got up, looked around again, but still didn’t see anybody. I glanced at a Hispanic man waiting with his young son. He pointed to the reception desk. I smiled, thanked him, and made my way to the desk, hopeful that my time had finally come. Instead, they told me that I had a message from Will. I stepped out into the vestibule between the two sets of sliding doors, turned on my cell and gave him a call. He just wanted to know what was up, so I gave him the low down. He said that he would come by if I was going to be in overnight. I went back to the waiting room and sat down and waited again.
I’ve started playing World of WarCraft again. My life is over. Goodbye, friends.
I suffered through another night of Obama campaign related dreams. My main concern throughout the night was trying to figure out the rules of the dreamworld. Was I bedridden in my dream as well? Were staffers coming to my bedside to receive advice and instruction? No, I concluded, I must have been healthy in my dream. In fact, one dream vignette involved me traveling to the house of a wealthy donor, so clearly I must have been free of disease.
In real life that was not the case. I woke up every two hours on the dot all night long to go to the bathroom and spit out the mucus that collected in the back of my throat. At one point, around 3am or so, I really hocked back and spit out a vile greenyellow glob of slime. I thought I felt something in the back of my throat tear; I assumed I had just dislodged the mucus repository constructed in my mouth. I went back to bed and tossed and turned some more, not really sleeping, not really awake.
The night before I had set my alarm for noon, wanting to get plenty of sleep, but also enough time to prepare for my shift at the Tea Garden that was set to begin at two. I woke up on my own volition shortly after 10am. I felt pretty much like shit, but I attributed that to my fitful sleep. I didn’t want to go to work that afternoon–too much homework to do–but I didn’t think a crappy night’s sleep was a good excuse to call in.
Then I tried to talk.
I just wanted to test my voice. I guess I had a suspicion that something might not sound quite right. So when I tried talking to myself, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that it sounded like I had a handful of gauze stuffed down my throat. I would say I sounded liked a less sexy, more froggy version of Brando in The Godfather. Meg later said it just sounded like I had swallowed a few ping pong balls.
Luckily Meg was awake and I tried to make small talk with her. Each word, each small intake of breath, felt like a nail file rubbing against my throat. She asked if I wanted her to drive me to an urgent care clinic nearby. I told her I was going to take some ibuprofen and I’d get back to her. Swallowing the pills was, naturally, a chore. Even getting small sips of water down my throat was a great anguish.
I decided there was no way I could work in that condition so I called Jessie, the associate manager of the Tea Garden, who just happened to be working that morning. Of course, these days my cellphone only works when turned to speakerphone, so I went downstairs, dialed her number, and set the phone down on the chest before me.
I forget exactly how the conversation went. I know I croaked through a few lines about how my throat had been bothering me for the past few days and that I woke up and could barely talk. She said something about how that was fine, about how customers wouldn’t want to be served by someone who was so obviously sick. I learned later that she had barely understood a word out of my mouth.
Back upstairs, I found Meg again and told her that I probably really should go to urgent care. I looked the clinic up on the Macalester Health and Wellness website. Apparently they didn’t open until noon. I watched an interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger on CNN to pass the time.
We left for the clinic at about five minutes to noon, hoping to be among the first people their so I could be treated quickly. Meg dropped me off at the curb so I could checkin while she found a place to park. I walked inside and fumbled around the reception area before a woman behind the counter directed me to a small form that I needed to fill out. I smiled in gratitude and sat down to fill it out. Under the section asking for symptoms, I wrote “sore throat/painful to swallow/can barely talk,” hoping that explanation would spare me from having to answer too many questions.
After turning in the form, I was called up to the counter where I had provide the receptionist with my insurance info, along with my emergency contact information. I’m amazed she was able to discern anything from my croaking. Shortly after that I was called back to see a doctor. I was lead into a room where a nurse asked me about my symptoms, then took a swab of my throat to test for strep. She left to test the swab and told me the doctor would be in shortly.
The doctor came in later, sat down beside me, an immediately said “Well, you certainly smell like strep. It has this kind of sweaty, sweet smell, you know?” I nodded in ascent, relieved that I probably only had strep, but concerned that strep smells a lot like I do when I go for a day without showering. She had me sit up on the examination table and examined my mouth. “Hmmm,” she said, “That doesn’t look like strep.”
“Oh, no?” I replied.
“No, it looks like you have a throat abscess. It’s pretty serious.”
She left to get another doctor to confirm her suspicion. They came back in together, and the first doctor mentioned that my strep test came back negative. The new doctor looked in my mouth for about half a second and confirmed my original doc’s diagnosis. “Yeah, you’ve got an abscess.”
“You’re going to need to go to the E.R.” my first doctor said. “They’re going to pump you full of a lot of antibiotics that we can’t give you here. And you need to go now, because this abscess could move from your throat into your brain, and that would be really bad.”
I nodded, assuring her that I would go straight to the emergency room. I went out to the waiting room to tell Meg about this new development.
“So where’s the emergency room?” she asked.
I told her I didn’t know, she secretly wondered why she, a Twin Cities suburbs native, didn’t know where a hospital was. What can I say, I was sick and a little cranky. Meg went up to the receptionist to ask where the closest ER was. She thought for a moment, then asked what sort of insurance I had. I told her I had Anthem. She had clearly never heard of my crazy Virginia insurance. She went to ask another receptionist, who went to go ask my doctor. A different doctor came back and asked us where we lived, then began listing off different hospitals in the area. Meg said we didn’t know anything about hospitals, that we just wanted something close by. She recommended United in downtown Saint Paul. We said that would be fine. She printed off directions, we got our parking validated, and we pulled out of the parking lot, on our way to the ER.
