Clareified

I’ve been trying to craft an answer to casca’s question for a week now. What caused this sad turn of events? And truth be told, it was a sad, sudden turn. I was truly, genuinely happy for…um…something going on four weeks before all this happened. I mean, really. I was filled was joy and empathy for all mankind. It’s true. Karol was all “who the hell are you and what happened to Dawn?” And I would giggle. It’s funny because I am never sure at which point during happiness, I should ever daresay “I’m happy.” Too risky, like asking “well, what else can go wrong?” in a sitcom. You’re just asking for it. Alas, I didn’t say it and it all crashed in on me anyway. And now, I feel a little bit like those excitable housewives being led back through the scene of a recent hurricane by a tabloid news crew as I think back on the events of the last couple of weeks. The woman walks a little ahead of the camera wearing an unflattering dress and slippers as her chubby arm points out where things used to be or where she and Billy Bob hid when the front door was blown open and, “oh, God, Nancy,” she says before starting to weep — all the while the camera laps up every peak and valley of emotion. What did happen? What are the dirty details?

It was all good just a few weeks ago.
No, it was better than good. I spent a relaxing weekend of barbecuing and sailing up in Westchester with friends, though rain was threatened, there were nothing but blue skies, hamburgers and cannonballs into the heated outdoor pool. This was the life I was meant to live. I left Dobbs early Monday morning to go to my annual physical in Manhattan. That too went swimmingly. My general internist of the last four years marveled at my health. I weighed like 115 pounds less than I did at my physical last year, my stamina was twice what it was then, and I felt good.
“You are in really good shape, Dawn” she said smiling at me, “I’m proud of you.”
“Yeah, I feel good,” I said back.
She sent me off to the lab for the blood tests and I figured I’d do them in Brooklyn and then get some lunch.
I found this little obscure lab on Kings Highway, so there was no line and I was done with the blood stuff in an unheard of ten minutes. I drove home. I was supposed to play poker that night in Manhattan and figured it would be a long night, so I decided to take a nap and then eat more of a lupper type dealie. I got a parking spot in front of my building, instead of going to the garage, because I would be out and about shortly. I waved to the doorman, checked my mail and headed upstairs.
That was the last of my happy, healthy gall-bladdered life.
I fell asleep watching “Rescue Me” Season 1. I woke up about two hours later with a sharp pain radiating across my back.
“Fuck.”
I shifted position to no avail.
I moved to the floor and tried to lie still.
Yeah…nope…still in agony.
It was nearing six o’clock and I decided I’d better call the poker game to cancel because standing wasn’t much of an option, forget about leaving the house.
After a while I realized it wasn’t my back, it was my stomach – but since I’d spent most of last year dealing with my stomach issues, it didn’t make sense that I should be in this much pain. I rifled through my bottles of pills and took some of the pain killers and antacids I used to survive on last spring. But the pain got worse. And then I started to throw up. Violently and frequently…except, since I hadn’t eaten anything since the day before…well, I knew I was in trouble. Based on my decades of hypochondria, I figured I was either having a heart attack or I was in stage four of stomach cancer.
I called my mother, explained that I had taken pretty much every drug in my possession and nothing was helping, said I was probably dying, reiterated that I did not break that lamp in 1985 and told her which locks I had locked, so she could come collect my body from the apartment.
My mother countered with, oh something like “stop being a jackass, put on clothes, take a cab to her house immediately and yes, you so did break that lamp in 1985.”
I couldn’t stand, so I put on sweatpants and a T-shirt over my pajamas and slipped flip-flops on between my toes. I somehow made it to the elevator and got myself to the first floor.
“Ms. Dawn. Are you okay?” the doorman asked as he rushed over to help me out of the elevator.
“No. Need. Cab.”
“What’s wrong?”
I skipped the heart attack/cancer diagnosis and went with “I don’t know. I just feel horrible.”
He called a cab for me and helped me outside to wait. That’s when I saw my newly washed green Honda sparkling at me from across the street.
Oh. Fuck. With New York’s awesome alternate side of the street rules parking, if I left the car there, it would almost certainly be towed and ticketed if and when I ever got back.
And I certainly couldn’t drive it.
I gave the doorman the keys and asked him if he could move it to my spot in the building garage.
“Sure, no problem…what number is your spot?”
Uh.
I then tried to explain where my parking space was in relation to various garage landmarks and the North Star. After three minutes or so of this, he said he’d just look up the number.
“Yeah. Good idea.”
I got in the cab and immediately asked the driver to pull over, so I could hurl.
We made it maybe 500 feet, when I asked him to pull over again.
Eventually, I just settled on keeping the back door slightly ajar and telling him to drive real slowly.
He nervously handed me a roll of paper towels.
My mom was waiting for me at the corner of my old block in her best friend’s car.
She paid for my cab and they pulled me from the backseat of the cab and put me in the backseat of the Maxima.
“I am going to die,” I groaned. “Give Pi the car.”
Years ago my mother told me she only ever worried about me when I left instructions for her about who to give my car to.
It’s funny to think about the Professor’s possible heirs through the years…it was probably much more of windfall seven years ago, and I don’t even talk to that guy anymore.
Having decided this was some kind of stomach issue, I chose to go to my gastroenterologist’s hospital on the upper west side. It took forever, but I finally got to the emergency room.
Here is where things got interesting. I have a history at this hospital, so I handed them my insurance card and they printed up a wristband admitting me to the ER in no time at all. The intake nurse took my temperature: 98.4. I was waved through the sliding doors to purgatory. A place filled with cots and curtains and people in various states of agony waiting for a doctor. Or a nurse. Or an orderly with aspirin. I was given a cot and assigned to “room” 9. I use quotes because the only thing roomish about the place was that it had a back wall. Who knows about the 9. I’m certainly no math whiz on my best days, and these were not my best days. I lay in bed in agony. Here I would die, in a T-shirt, sweatpants and flip-flops. I called my internist and left a message for her that I was in the emergency room. I also left a message with my stomach doctor that I was in his hospital and he had to come get me. He actually called back fairly quickly to say that he had just left for the evening and would send over one of his interns.
This is when I made my first vow of this ordeal.
“All I want is something to stop the pain. If they can stop the pain, I promise I’ll sit here quietly and not bother anyone again. I swear.”
How reasonable was I? I didn’t want to live or a miracle cure, I just wanted to die painlessly of my mystery illness.
After about two hours, a doctor finally came.
“Ms. Summers, so you seem to be having a bit of discomfort in your stomach?”
I will murder your whole family, while you watch, so that you may enjoy a touch of grief.
“Yes.”
I was given ye old “pain chart” test on which to describe how much pain I was in. I picked the picture of the guy with the red face, smoke coming out of his ears and tears streaming down his face.
I remember very clearly just wanting the pain to stop, but the doctor asking all these retarded questions about family history and allergies and then he goes:
“Hey! You went to Yale?! Me too! Branford ’98! What college were you in?,” he said staring at my T-shirt emblazoned with my college logo in the top left corner.
It was the first time I opened both my eyes since, I dunno, intake. And I used them to give him a look which clearly said:
“Seriously? Branford? That’s awesome. Do you know Sabrina? She was in Branford too, so what was your major? Oh wait, I am in crippling agony and could not give a flying fuck where you went to college, what you majored in or what your goddamn name is. Give. Me. Drugs. And. Give. Me. Drugs. Now.”
My mouth said “Berkeley.”
But he heard my eyes loud and clear.
“Um…here…drink this. That should ease the pain until we get you to x-ray.”
He handed me a cup filled with lidocane and anti-nausea medication.
My whole mouth went numb in a matter of minutes and the pain began to subside.
I sat upright.
My mother asked how I was feeling.
I garbled something that was my version of “better.”
I was wheeled into x-ray where I was second in line behind a young kid with a bloody shirt and a wrist handcuffed to his gurney. Two cops were questioning him in Spanish. My mother said that he had been in a knife fight of some sort and he was being uncooperative.
The x-ray people took pictures of my stomach, lungs and chest and wheeled me back to “room” 9.
The pain was returning.
The intern that my doctor promised finally arrived.
“We think it might be your gallbladder. We’ll know more once the x-rays come back. How do you feel?”
“Horrible. Pain is returning.”
“Okay, we’ll get you some pills for it. Anything else?”
“No, pain…pills…that about covers it.”
See? I am the very picture of reason. Even in a crisis.
Four hours later, at about five in the morning, the gall bladder was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. I was admitted to St. Luke’s and wheeled up to the ninth floor.
“We’re going to remove your gall bladder today, Dawn.”
By the time I got to my room, light was pouring in through the windows. It was morning. I was on a steady every-four-hours-or-else diet of vicodin and because of the impending surgery, I couldn’t have anything to eat or drink. They would shoot the vicodin right there into my IV.
“You are the most calm patient we’ve had all night,” the on-call ER nurse said as she signed me over to admitting.
The thing I hate about hospitals is the utter lack of privacy. At six a.m., a nurse strolls into your room, unannounced, she jabs you with needles, sometimes to inject liquids; other times to remove them. You are told to open your mouth, turn to this side or that, your fingers are pricked, and your temperature is taken.
My temperature on this particular morning was 100.8. Two degrees higher than when I was balled up in a chair in the ER.
An hour later the doctor parade strolled through. A gaggle of five or six white coated fresh faces sucking up to the head white coated guy.
“How are we this morning, Ms. Summers?” Now, this may seem strange, considering that I take great pride in referring to myself in the third person, but when others refer to me in the third person, I feel violent.
“My stomach hurts.”
“Yes, it looks like we’ll be taking out your gall bladder.”
“Great.”
One member of the gaggle removed the blanket from the lower half of my body and started poking at my stomach.
“OW.”
“Did that hurt?”
Insert glare.
“Yes.”
She poked some more. I screamed some more. A fun time was had by all.
My internist finally called me back all guiltily for pronouncing me fit as a fiddle less than ten hours before I was admitted to the ER for emergency surgery.
“Don’t worry Dawn…your gall bladder doesn’t do very much. People go on to lead perfectly healthy lives without them,” she said in a tone which I interpreted as “Don’t sue me.”
My surgeon came by that morning to say that they would do the surgery that afternoon. He came by that afternoon to say they would do the surgery the following morning.
Motherfucker.
As has been blogged before, my mother decided not to pay to turn on my television because she thought I was having my surgery that day and would be too out of it to watch TV, so that night I stayed awake watching my roommate’s TV without sound and wondering why on earth I had thought it was a good idea to scrap all the music on my iPod?
Luckily, I had downloaded The Simpsons Season Four to my iPod a couple of days earlier, so I watched a bunch of those until I fell asleep. I probably stayed asleep about…ohh…forty-five minutes, until my roommate’s IV started to beep.
Now, I don’t know how recently you’ve been admitted to a hospital, but they have these “automated nurses” that signal via loud annoying, incessant beeping whenever a patient is not getting the IV fluids properly, either because the tubes are bunched or the fluid bag is empty or something is disconnected. Theory being, beeping automated nurse goes off, real nurse comes in, problem solved. In reality, it goes something like: beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep. Patient hits the nurse call button. Beep beep beep beep beep beep. Nurse’s station eventually answers the call button with a surly “what do you want?” beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep. Patient says my IV is beeping. Half an hour later real nurse comes in and turns automated nurse off. Repeat.
Of course, it was my first night “on the floor,” so I didn’t know all this yet. Instead, I thought my roommate had set some alarm and was somehow sleeping through it. I wanted to make some noise or yell to wake her, so that she would turn the thing off and I could sleep.
Instead, I turned the volume up on my iPod, shut my eyes hard and waited.
We’ll call this the post womb fetal position. We’ll be returning to it often.
I “slept” in this manner until the gaggle returned for the 7 a.m. feeding – or as I came to refer to it — the race to find something else wrong with Dawn Summers to score points with head resident guy.
“Her complexion appears sallow!”
Yes! Good one, Lucy.
“Extreme tenderness in the abdomen!”
Excellent, Brad.
“Sharp blade pressed against my carotid!”
Oh no, call security!
I have come to hate doctors.
My temperature on this particular morning is 101.3.
The steady climb continues and this prompts a special visit from a lady doctor.
“You have a fever. It’s probably coming from your infected gall bladder, nevertheless, if it reaches 102, we will not be able to operate, so we’re going to keep a watch on it throughout the day, okay, Dawn?”
Okay.
It’s now Wednesday morning at around 10 a.m. I have not had any food or drink since late Sunday.
This is when I made my second vow of this ordeal.
“If I could just have one glass of water with ice, I swear I will never complain again.”
My mom and her friend show up a little while later, I tell her about the fever thing.
“Just don’t put it under your tongue.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Sure enough, my next two temperature readings show remarkable improvement: 99. 7 and 100.4.
Suckers.
Hope there’s no real reason for that no surgery with fever rule.
I am taken downstairs for more x-rays, when I return to my room, one of my flip-flops is missing. My mom and her friend search everywhere…including my roommate’s locker and nothing. My mom goes ballistic and calls security for the missing half of my $20 pair of flip-flops. *They were nice ones. But still.
My IV has also now been hooked up to the “virtual nurse” beeping thingie. So whenever, I move my arm, to hold the iPod screen to my face, the beeping starts. I, of course, have my earphones in and up to high, so I do not notice the beeping until a real nurse comes in and tells me to put my arm down.
This happens often.
By late Wednesday afternoon, I still haven’t heard anything about my surgery, the real nurses hate me and my iPod with the fiery passion of a thousand flaming arrows, so they’ve stopped giving me my IV vicodin AND I still haven’t had so much as a glass of water. And my mother…MY MOTHER…is all “you just have to be patient, dear.” DUDE.
Who are you and where is my mommy?! I lose it.
I call my doctor’s office from my cell and demand to speak to him. His secretary is all “I don’t handle his hospital work, only the in office patients.” I tell her that I am across the street and I’m pretty sure my IV pole will fit in the office if that’s what it takes. She tells me to hold.
I am also pressing the nurses call button nonstop at this point. They are ignoring me.
I wonder why I never spent more time mastering using the force to choke the life out of people without touching them.
Then my IV breaks and blood gushes out of my arm. (“Well, I wouldn’t say that’s gushing, but I guess you can write that in your post, if you want.” –Karol)
I press the call button…or…er…continue pressing the call button and this like eight year old nurse comes in, looks at the bloody mess and says “Oh, gosh…um…Miranda is on her lunch break…gosh.”
I immediately decide she is not going anywhere near me with anything…not even a sponge.
She stares at my arm, I stare at her and then I say “It can wait till Miranda comes back from lunch.”
Relieved she says “yeah, I think it can,” and backs out of the room.
Mind you, my mother is still just sitting there chillaxing instead of putting her foot in somebody’s ass. And I, for one, am highly irritated. Why do I have to be a crazy black lady when THE crazy black lady is sitting right there! Right there! Karol is meanwhile, laughing her little head off when my mom tells me, for the umpteenth time, to calm down. For my missing flip-flop, she goes off, but blood gushing out of my arm…nothing??
I am about to go off on a rant that includes visual aides from Alien about what my stomach feels like, not to mention the gushing arm wound and the burning dehydration, when men with a gurney finally come to tell me it’s time for my surgery.
Oh crap.
Wait. Why was I in a rush for this again?
They wheeled me down to the OR and I had to answer all these questions and there was an angry looking anesthesiologist there and suddenly I’m thinking about that horrible Jessica Biel movie where the guy is in surgery and he’s unconscious but he’s awake and can feel the whole procedure because he’s awake inside…I think it was called the bus that couldn’t slow down.
Suddenly, my stomach wasn’t hurting that much and hell, who doesn’t go through life in some kind of constant agony and no, wait…seriously, let’s talk about this…
I woke up in the recovery room. The clock on the wall said 9 o ‘clock.
I couldn’t feel anything.
My mother said something to me, but then I went back to sleep.
I woke up again at 11. I was back in my room by midnight.
It was the first night that I actually slept.
The gaggle was back and poking at their appointed 7 a.m. hour.
“How are you feeling, Ms. Summers?”
“My stomach hurts.”
“Yeah, it’ll be sore for a bit,” said the head coat, “you had a very sick gall bladder.”
His tone of voice and the pitiful expression on his face made me feel sad for my sick, now missing gall bladder. Poor, little…gally?…bladdery?…Carlos!
One minute, he’s cooling out with the intestines, storing his bile and having a grand old time, next thing he knows, BAM, someone’s sucking him out through the navel and he’ll never see the body again. I then imagine him in a cold Mexican prison somewhere doing pull-ups with one arm and vowing revenge as he gets stronger.
Oh, and he has a mustache. That he twirls.
What? It’s my gall bladder, I can attach as many crude Mexican stereotypes to him as I see fit. You don’t like it, I will send my gall bladder after you.
The gaggle left and I realized that I had a rubber tube ball sticking out of my side. WTF?
I also had these pressurized heating pads massaging my legs and of course, my IV tubes shackling me to the stupid IV pole.
I was trapped.
I climbed out of bed to go to the bathroom, but it took so long, I made up my mind I wasn’t doing that again till the next day.
Doing everything was painful – not that I did much more than check my Treo and replay Simpsons episodes that I had now memorized my heart and had grown quite weary of – but if it involved moving, breathing, touching, it hurt and I wanted no part of it. By the next morning, I was hooked up to an oxygen machine and the doctors were warning me that if I didn’t get my lungs working on their own again, I could get pneumonia. They may have add “and die,” but honestly “and have to stay here longer” would have sufficed by way of motivation.
That night, my roommate, who has been in that bed, in that room for 11 months, had her prayer group over for a meeting. She was big into Jesus. Her pastor then asked if he could include me and my mother in their prayer. He then came over to me and said something like “I don’t know what you’re in here for…but God has his plan and his reasons and whatever pain and suffering you have now, will be gone when you get to his kingdom. This life is but a prelude to glory.”
“Thank you, pastor,” my mother said, adding “what do you say Dawn?” as if I were a six year old who had just been given a cookie.
“Thank you,” I wheezed under the weight of my lazy lungs and breathing tube sore throat with the enthusiasm of a six year old that had been given a cookie that she didn’t like.
That all led to the horrible Friday of doom. When I declared the night shift nurse my mortal enemy and swore revenge. I even made a checklist:
My mortal enemy stupid Latina (possibly bi-racial) evil Nurse. Okay, so she has a job. One point for her.
And she controls whether I live or die at the moment: Two points for her.
But if I pee my bed she has to clean it up: One point for me. Well, half a point cause peeing your bed is just gross.
And so it was that my mind got stronger with anger and vengeance. The next morning I was already in my sitting chair by the time the gaggle got there.
“Good to see you up, Ms. Summers. I guess we’re feeling better?”
I add him to my mortal enemies list and begin to get even stronger.
He takes me off the oxygen and IV. I start walking around the 9th floor in newly bought flip-flops. I find a “private” bathroom on the other side of the ward and use that instead of my filthy shared bathroom. I start making a point of walking to this bathroom, both for my own peace of mind and exercising my lungs. On my final trip to the bathroom, I get caught coming out of it by a nurse.
“Hey! You!”
I run. Or…more accurately shuffle off back to my mortal coil as quickly as I can. When I get back to my room I am out of breath, but laughing my head off. Stupid nurses. Of course, that makes my side hurt, but I am feeling better. The temperature monitoring doctor comes in and says “I think we can take drain bag out of your side now.”
Terrif.
I assume some Xanax will be involved…or else I think maybe it’s just taped to my side somehow…like a trough…
But no.
As she begins to tug the rubber hose, I can feel it pulling out of my body, sliding past my organs and nerves…it feels like I imagine tapeworms would feel. She keeps pulling. Her hand is now filled with about an extra foot of hose, but she’s not done. “Hold on, I’ll be back.”
She doesn’t come back. Instead, another woman comes in and “finishes the job.” This lady doesn’t hesitate. She wraps the exposed rubber around her hand and pulls mercilessly.
I scream as the last of it plops out of my side with a bloody splash.
“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH”
Bitch then puts a band aid over the hole. I mean, it was a big band aid…but still…
I get back in bed. My O2 levels are getting closer to normal, so head white coat guy says that I can be discharged.
I call Pi and ask her to pick me up.
My mother comes to pack my things in a bag and take it down to the car. I put on the T-shirt and sweatpants that I came into the ER with. I stick my toes in the new flip-flops that have been bought for me.
I walk to the elevators and press down. I walk through the lobby and step outside for the first time in six days.
I carefully make my way into the shotgun seat and fasten my seatbelt. My mom gets in the back.
Pi pulls away from the hospital and we head back home.
Without Carlos.

This entry was posted by Dawn Summers on Sunday, August 10th, 2008 at 9:50 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.