Smells Like Strep pt. 4

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.