(Part one can be read here. Part two can be read here.)

Doctors don’t always agree on treatment, even in the rare event that they all have the same information at the same time. I had one internist, one infectious disease specialist, and one surgeon looking over my case. They were all kind. They were all busy. The information flows sluggishly through hospital filters, for reasons too arcane and manifold to list. So you have to ask a lot of questions. You have to remember what one doctor said and make sure your nurses and other doctors know what you know. But even then there’s miscommunication. It can’t be helped. As tired and awful as you feel, you have to be alert and sharp. If you’re lucky enough to have a loving advocate like a spouse, parent, or sibling, give that person all the information you get. People make mistakes. Even experts. It’s okay until it isn’t.

I went into the MRI machine for my leg. To cover the deafening noise of the machine, they piped pop music into my headset. I lay there and listened and tried not to move. The results of the MRI might determine if the surgeon would cut into my leg. Anxiety tightened everything to a high whine. The MRI field trip was a welcome break from the monotony of television shows watched on Netflix. I chatted with the intern who wheeled me to and from the MRI chamber. Despite everything, I made extra effort to be friendly and polite to everyone. Cracked jokes. I can do that with young women and not be creepy. Dad jokes. Most of the time I don’t know what to say to anyone.

The surgeon looked at the results a day later and said that he didn’t think surgery was necessary. You can imagine my relief. The swelling had subsided some. Despite the pain, I was improving, bit by bit. Then the infectious disease doctor came by and hinted at potential surgery again. Then the internist said the same thing. Cutting into me was back on the menu. What I didn’t know then was that they hadn’t spoken to the surgeon, so they didn’t get the memo. A fear-filled day passed. Then they all talked to each other. The infectious disease doctor thought I should have surgery, but the surgeon didn’t, so they went with the surgeon. When the person whose job it is to wield scalpels doesn’t want to cut into you, it sends a powerful message.

I felt good enough to eat a little more. I had no appetite, but I had to eat. I’d lost over twenty pounds. I’m not terribly unhappy about that, because they were pounds off my gut and face. That’s not a bad weight loss plan. To get food, your doctor assigns you a menu. For whatever reason I was assigned the Heart Healthy menu. You call the number on your menu and pick what you want for your meal. For breakfast every day I had fruit and a yogurt drink. You have to eat yogurt because the antibiotics kill the flora living in your gut and you don’t want to spend your hospital visit shitting brown water all day long into the miserable commode under the sink. I hated yogurt, so I got the yogurt drink. The drink wasn’t so bad. I also found that I don’t hate yogurt anymore. So I eat it every day now. For lunch I’d get a sandwich and the yogurt drink. For dinner, two yogurt drinks. I wasn’t hungry for anything else. Sometimes I’d get a small packet of Lorna Doone cookies that I’d eat if I wanted to celebrate something, like not having to go under the knife or being able to sleep more than 40 minutes at a time. You count your blessings.

Every morning around 3:00 someone would come in to take blood from me. A couple of times it was the same phlebotomist with an Eastern European accent, which tickled me to no end. At least she didn’t bite my neck. Eventually they got enough of my blood to narrow down the infection and give me more specific antibiotics. Now the question was: when would I leave? I’d been here for the best part of a week. One day they told me I’d be out by Friday. The next day they told me it might not be until Monday. I was reaching the end of my rope. I had to get out of there.

On Thursday they told me I was getting out the next day. I’d have to have a nurse come to my home a few days a week to change my bandages, but that was okay. That was…heaven. A final night, with more blood draws, blood pressure checks, stomach injections, and IV changes. My wife came by the next morning and waited with me. She’ll never know how much better she made me feel, just being there. I think they were probably sending me home because they’d done a bed count and had to close my ward anyway for lack of patients. Getting me out of their hair.

When I got home Friday I took a look at myself in the mirror and didn’t recognize the gaunt, hollow-eyed face staring back at me. He looked exhausted, with a head of thinning hair and a full beard. Who the hell was that? I’d shrunk. At least I was home. The worst part was over.

Later that day my wife went shopping and bought me a box of Lorna Doone cookies because I’d liked them in the hospital. I couldn’t help but laugh.

(Part one of this sad-but-true story can be read here.)

Despite (or because of) everyone’s best efforts, staying in the hospital overnight is not a fun experience. Multiply it by seven nights, and the experience goes from not-fun to very not-fun. Even in a private room like mine. Still, the bed is comfy, and you can adjust yourself to a sitting position with the handy-dandy remote control that also has the call button for the nurse and the television remote. Technology.

The first day of my stay, my IV port was stuck into my left hand. I’m left-handed. Oh well. On my right wrist, two bracelets: one declared me a FALL RISK and the other had bar codes that nurses and PCTs would scan before doing anything to me. A PCT is a Personal Care Technician, which I gathered is one level on the medical totem pole lower than a nurse. Nobody explained the distinction, so I had to guess from context. The worst a PCT can do to you is wake you up three times a night to stick a thermometer in your mouth, wrap a blood pressure cuff around your wrist, and jam your finger into a blood oxygen meter. The worst a nurse can do to you is inject you in the tummy every eight hours with something that prevents blood clots. If you’re lucky, they don’t come in the middle of the night to do this. I’m not lucky. My stomach is pocked with 2:00 AM injection sites.

A doctor came in to talk to me about what was happening, but he was going on vacation in a couple of days, so he’d pass my case to a different doctor. A surgeon came by to talk about things, but he was also going on vacation in a couple of days, so he’d pass my case to a different surgeon. Don’t get sick during vacation season. They also promised to have an infectious disease doctor come and take a look at me. The very term “infectious disease doctor” tends to make one nervous when you have to see one. As does the term “surgeon”. Nurses came and went to put up new bags of antibiotics in my IV. Everyone asked me how I got sick. I told them I didn’t know. I couldn’t point to a single event that precipitated my illness. So they gave me broad-spectrum antibiotics, and if my blood cultures came back with something specific, they’d give me something that was presumably less broad in spectrum.

I tried to rest, but couldn’t sleep. My only entertainments were daytime television, nurses and PCTs coming in to jab/stick me, and peeing.

Peeing was awful. They give you a plastic jug to piss in. (They call it a urinal. Hee hee.) I’d get up (which was agony), lift my gown, put my wedding tackle into the jug, and go. Then I’d close the jug, hang the handle on the edge of the bed, sit down, clean my hands with sanitizer, and breathe until the pain of being on my bad leg subsided. All the while, my jug would hang nearby, filled with hot yellow brine. A couple of times it unhooked itself and fell on the floor. Luckily, it didn’t open. More than once I thought of trucker bombs. A trucker bomb is a plastic bottle that used to hold water. On long trips, truckers would piss in them, close them up, and chuck them out the window. That’s your trucker bomb. When the PCTs came in, or the nurses, they’d see my jug/trucker bomb and empty it into the commode under the sink in my room. After a couple of days of using the jug, I just shuffled to the commode instead. It hurt to lurch there, but it was less dehumanizing. Still, the empty-but-stained jug remained hooked to the bed near my head my entire stay. My own personal trucker bomb. Once I stopped using the jug they asked me how often I’d pissed that day. I tried to drink as little as possible because standing up to pee was so painful, but with IVs going right into your bloodstream you have to go anyway, whether you want to or not. I’m pleased to report that I didn’t have any accidents.

I asked my wife to bring me my laptop and e-reader. Those were lifesavers. As is my wife. Another day of live television and I’d have begged the doctors to put me into a medically-induced coma until death or recovery. My son didn’t like the hospital smells. I tried to reassure him that I’d be all right, but he was concerned. I hated that part. He’s a little boy. I want him to worry about the quality of dessert, not about his dad’s health. I put a positive spin on everything, even though I was concerned, too. He can see me sick, but he won’t see me scared.

Early on, we didn’t know how long I would be here. And then the possibility of surgery came up. An anesthesiologist came by the next day to ask me to sign a piece of paper consenting to general anesthesia.

I haven’t been online so much of late because I fell ill, got worse, and spent eight days in the hospital receiving IV antibiotics. My recovery is slower than I’d like, but I’m glad to be back home. At the time of this writing, I can’t walk well and have to spend most of my time reclining, which is pretty much hell for me.

Like I like to say, it sucks that it happened, but it’d suck more if I didn’t learn anything from it. Hopefully you won’t make the same mistakes I did if you find yourself in a similar situation. If nothing else, it’s nice to be an example for wiser people not to follow.

One last bit of preface: I am amazingly lucky to have fallen ill during the 21st century in an American hospital. All of my healthcare providers have been professional, efficient, and kind, and have taken excellent care of me. Any complaints I have are minor, at best.

—

A couple of weeks ago I started to feel sick: sore throat, tired, headache. I figured it was a cold coming on until, a day or two later, my left leg started hurting. A lot. Weird. It hurt so much that I couldn’t walk on it: only lurch. Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. So I went to the local urgent care medical center, and after less than a one minute assessment of my leg the physician’s assistant declared that I had shingles. I’m younger than the average age for it. She sent me home with an anti-viral drug, an antibiotic, and instructions to go to the hospital if things didn’t get any better by Friday.

Things got worse. The pain increased. A day later my foot swelled to grotesque proportions. Do you remember in Big Trouble in Little China when Thunder got so angry he swelled up and exploded? It looked a bit like that. I should’ve gone to the hospital right there and then, but I blindly trusted the physician’s diagnosis and advice. That was a mistake. Always question everything. Even doctors. Even diagnoses. When conditions change that you can independently verify, like your foot and leg swelling horribly, go get that second opinion. So days passed in agony and blind trust, and I went to the hospital on Friday, days later than I should’ve.

They put me in a wheelchair because I couldn’t walk, wheeled me into the emergency room, and set me up on a gurney in a hospital gown. This is when I began to get scared. I’d been to the hospital before: a couple of times as a kid, and a few times as an adult when my son had to get stitches in his face for various booboos. I’d been fortunate. Not anymore. What was going on? Thank God my wife was there. She helped.

They drew blood, did tests, and told me I’d have to be admitted. Some kind of infection in my leg. Nobody could point to what the infection was, exactly. Maybe I’d scratched a bug bite on my calf. Maybe our new cat scratched me and I didn’t notice. Maybe Extraterrestrial Biological Entities stuck a needle in my leg instead of probing my anus. We never found out what had infected me. But it wasn’t good. And it wasn’t shingles. Red lines were traveling up my thigh toward my heart. Hours later I lay in a private room (luckily) with an IV in the back of my hand, pumping antibiotics into my bloodstream. I’d stay like that for eight days straight.