Subtitled, My Fourth Time in an Emergency Room for 2004

 

Somewhere someone got fired on her first day of work. I am not that person, thank God. I am, however, going to give the girl who spilled coffee on herself and the guy who shredded the wrong documents a run for their money on who had the worst first day of work. Like those two losers, I will have to show my face at work on Monday, groan.

 

I went to work for the first time last Wednesday. I woke up from a nightmare at 5:30 in the morning: flamenco dancing onstage in pitch darkness with a rock band. My eyes were swollen, and I only barley managed to stuff my corpulent self into a business suit and ugly shoes. I picked up some mutant dust at the community super-mart on the way to work. The swelling of my face got worse as the minutes trickled by. I was an hour and a half early for work, itchy, irritated, with my eyes bulging from their sockets.

 

I started out with three other girls, one of whom was a good friend of mine. Since I didn’t really know the other two girls I had to issue the disclaimer that I normally don’t look like (literally) a fish out of water. Yeah, all goggle-eyed girls say that. We filled out a bunch of forms for work: identification cards, personnel records, insurance, social security and went on a mini-tour of our labyrinthine office. It became apparent during the day that that mini tour was wholly inadequate, when I spent most of the afternoon trying to figure out where my office was.

 

My mini-tour was made even mini-er by the interruption of a partner who suddenly wanted something done ASAP by any one of us newbies. I had to proofread a client’s brochure which was alternately in our national language, English and Spanish, within an hour. This was relatively easy work, if I understood what I was reading. Surprisingly I was able to make enough corrections to make it apparent that I knew what I was doing. I did a few more things for this partner for the rest of the day. I also proofread another document for an associate who had been my teacher two years ago. She got my name mixed up with one of my other classmates, which made me cringe. I racked up three and a half hours of billable time on my first day, which isn’t so bad. Okay, I admit it, technically, my first day wasn’t so bad except that I was butt-ugly and swollen the whole day!

 

I had to tell anyone with eyes and ears that I normally look better than I did that day.

 

I frightened an associate in the elevator when the doors opened and she saw me looking like Mack the Knife, with my gauze mask and scalpel… okay, fine, I had no scalpel.

 

I scared my secretary when I gave her a list of my allergies, emergency numbers and showed her my last-resort adrenalin syringe for the onset of anaphylactic shock.

 

I was too scared to eat turon

 

And the clincher was going home. Not home yet, actually. I waited for months to go my friend’s baby shower, and at 6 P.M. I was on my way to the party in a taxi. Thirty minutes later I was less than a kilometer from where I started, surrounded by a sea of other vehicles. My body could no longer take the added stress and dirt that was weighing on me. And so the air began to thin around me, or maybe it was my lungs that grew thick within me. I felt like I was being smothered by my swollen flesh and dread began to creep into my consciousness, dread that was telling me I couldn’t ignore my allergies for a second more.

 

I started sending messages to my friends to tell them I was not feeling well. Initially I just wanted to warn them, so that when I get to the party looking like shit that couldn’t get hit on in a bar full of merchant marines, no one would get too alarmed. But later, after I talked to my doctor on the phone and she told me to get the driver to drop me off at a hospital instead, I had to tell my friends that I couldn’t come to the shower after all. They called me, one by one, offering rides to the hospital, especially after they found out that I was alone in the cab and very frightened. I told them not to worry, and that I would call them if things got worse.

 

Then I called my mother. I just ushered her into her worst  nightmare: I was sick again. She told my sister to gather my things and meet me at the hospital. True enough when I staggered out of the cab my sister and my father were there to help me walk to the emergency room.

 

I was once again lying on the bed where I almost died on June 26, 2004. My sister told me this since I don’t really remember that night. Actually as I walked into the emergency room I realized it was the first time I was ever able to do that. A nurse took my blood pressure, which was low, and hooked me to the oxygen tank. I spend about a couple hours on that bed under observation. I just wanted to eat dinner and go home. My father was completely upset by the whole thing. He was abroad for duration of my hospitalization and ordeal as an outpatient. He grumpily stood watch by my bed, ever angry at the things that were wrong in my body. My sister on the other hand was cheerfully greeting all the medical staff she knew around the emergency room, even in Admitting, Billing (where she saw my pulmonologist) and the hallways between them.

 

After a bunch of phone calls to my two immunologists I was set to go home. I was told not to work for the next two days, and for good reason. I almost fell down the stairs when I got home because I was so weak. My mother and sister had to give me a warm bath because I could barely keep my head up, let alone wash myself before going to bed. That night I had a dream again, it’s just that I don’t remember exactly what happened. I think it had something to do with cowboys and (Punjabi) Indians.

 

I could barely leave my bed the next day. My sister called in sick for me. All my meals were brought into my room. I was taken to the hospital in the afternoon for a medical reevaluation. I ended up with the prescription that fixed me right up:

Montelukast Singulair ^TM 10 mg tablet

Desloratadine Aerius ^TM 5 mg tablet

Ranitidine Zantac ^R 150 mg tablet

Methylprednisolone Medrol ^R 16 mg tablet

Levocetirizine diHCl Xysal ^R 5 mg tablet

Budesonide Formoterol Symbicort ^R Turbuhaler ^R

 

Yes, I took all those on Friday morning (Except Xysal, which I took in the evening) and I managed to pee fifteen times, all that was necessary to rid me of the swelling that distorted my face, the same face that will have to show itself at the office after disappearing for the rest of the work week. Sigh. Hopefully no one will recognize me, and no one cares that I’ve been on leave longer than I worked.

 

My good friend, the one I ate friend chicken with when I got home between hospitalizations last June, told me that the other day some girls from our high school had a field trip in her office (a little place we call the Supreme Court) where she razzle-dazzled them with her wit, charm and brilliance. Oh well. Here’s hoping I’d have a day like that.

I am in thick of waiting, my one month’s respite before I start work in November, and this has been my life of late.

 

Rest is good; God invented it. He made everything and then he rested – that’s pretty clear; but what he did while he was resting no one really knows. That’s problem number one: what does one do while resting? If you do something are you still resting? Realize that it is impossible to do nothing: even if one were to lie down stock still one would still be lying down stock still. Breathing, of course, digesting, pumping blood. Hair would go on growing, plus nails, and skin would be shed.

 

I suppose to the untrained eye I would appear to be doing nothing. Perhaps I am, if doing nothing were not to be taken literally, because I’m so bored. Blame the recession: if I could afford it I would be in the movie theater by now, or inviting my friends to eat out. I could be on vacation; one that has the appearance of a vacation -- sand and sea, hotel rooms and mini bars, dancing in the evening, that sort of thing. Instead I’m just making myself progressively more anxious about “doing nothing” with every day that passes.

 

When was the last time something like this happened to me? Oh yes, let’s not forget my infamous turn at the intensive care unit. No TV, no books, no visitors for twenty-two agonizingly long hours. There were whole afternoons spent sitting semi-upright in my bed where I just sat, propped up on pillows, waiting for nothing. At least at the time I was busy getting well. Every time my oxygen levels dropped my machine would come alive with harried beeps – that sort of entertained me after the initial panic that is having a sound to go with the troubles in your body. A nurse would come in and feed me grapes, drain my catheter bag, and make small talk about ruling out renal failure.

 

Before that time the only other occasion for mind-numbing waiting would be the last two months of my life in the womb. Actually, it’s presumptuous of me to assume that the waiting at the time was mind-numbing, for who could attest to what it was like to float around for two months with hands and feet completely formed, head ready with nascent thoughts? That is problem number two: for most people the only time they spent waiting around doing nothing was that time before they were born, and no one remembers that time. How can they apply what they learned there? Maybe it’s irrelevant: can one do now what one did for two months ensconced in a bubble of proteins? I have this nagging feeling I enjoyed those days. Ha! Every time I can’t remember if something was a good or bad thing I always assume it was good, and add to my frustration. Who else would make my life hard if I weren't up to the task?

 

Which leads me to problem number three: why can’t we remember only the things we want to recall? I don’t understand why people tell me to forget things. How do I do that? Can anyone do that? I would give anything to forget on demand. If I found out how that was done I’d make an enterprise out of it because I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who suffers from remembering.

 

If boredom spawned creativity I would have more insight than any reader can handle. Instead I release to the universe a long drawn-out whine, a complaint completely articulated but offering no resolution, no moral. I’m sure that I’ll never figure out the problems I wrote about today. All I can really hope for at this point is that I forget them, and we know how that goes.

When Cop 633 saw Faye for the first time in Chungking Express, she was wiping the canteen counter and windows with a soapy rag. Not every one who meets at a greasy spoon finds love, but for those two, in that movie in the span of one year as portrayed in one hour and twenty minutes of film --they found it.

 

If I could be at a food counter just in time to be found by love or find it I know it could be any guy, on any day, at any time of the day, but never on a Saturday morning.

 

Yesterday was the twenty-third day since my release from the hospital, and my fourth Saturday as an outpatient. Once I had to see the internist on a Wednesday, once the EENT on a Thursday, next week the pulmonologist on a Tuesday, but Saturdays are staple days at the hospital. I could be sleeping, dreaming, eating, or drinking at any given time, but never on a Saturday morning.

 

Every Saturday at around nine, I take my place in a long white corridor at the doctor’s clinics, selecting the blue chair-of-the-week where I will sit and wait at least one hour and twenty minutes for my allergologist to see me. For three Saturdays I arrived on or about nine-thirty to have the privilege of being first or second on the patient’s list. But on my fourth Saturday, I arrived nine minutes before ten o’clock and was fourth on the list. When the receptionist told me I stepped back then out of the office into the crowded hallway and braced myself for the horror that was already gathering around me.

 

Did you know that I am afraid of sick people? The irony is killing me. No, my allergies are killing me; the irony is just there to entertain you.

 

It’s true: whether I arrive early or late I will wait one hour and twenty minutes. But one hour and twenty minutes when I’m early is an hour and twenty minutes spent in relative peace as patients come every ten minutes like sporadic sneezes. One hour and twenty minutes when I’m late is a crazy hour and twenty minutes, when people practically spill into the hospital, their children and relatives carried under their current, toting their lab results and x-rays in bulky manila envelopes that conceal the reasons behind this surge of humanity, this legion of illness clogging the clinics. The sheer number of them grows dramatically, and their cloying odors -- their collective cologne, packed lunches, sweaty armpits, dried saliva and sweat and rubbing alcohol – attack me from every direction. They walk to stare at me, try to guess why I’m there, compete in the mind (who is sicker?) and walk away. These rituals increase exponentially with every new pair of eyes that sizes me up as I sit and wait for the minutes to pass. At the end of the hall, a hacking cough rose above the chatter; a little boy ran past with his father close behind.

 

I forgot to bring a book so I just sat at there until boredom took over, folding my hands neatly on my lap to avoid touching anything contaminated by hepatitis or other infectious diseases (seats, walls, doors). After half an hour I could not help but do my share of staring and guessing as people walked past me. To my right, ten feet away, a man about my age was wheeled to a stop in front of one of the clinics. His mother was with him, a tall woman, with soft brown curls and radiant skin; the only one in my immediate vicinity who actually looked fragrant, if being fragrant was a matter for the eyes. She was talking sternly to another son while this son, the one on the wheelchair, rocked himself ever so slightly, his head bent to his left, his face contorted in pain.

 

What was I doing there? Hospitals were made for people like that man, men in pain, those who cannot walk, cannot talk, cannot even sit properly and size up and guess what was wrong with everyone else.

 

His mother left with his brother, presumably to argue with her other son somewhere else, leaving the man in pain alone in his wheelchair unattended. I could not look away. He was making the softest groaning sounds; they walked softly out of his throat through his lips and traveled ten feet for my ears to hear. In these situations one would want to ask, are you all right, but cannot. After all, it is a stupid question to ask in a place like this. No one in a hospital is supposed to be all right. But maybe, my idle mind said, he is feeling worse than usual, and he needs help. How do you ask a person in pain if he hurts?

 

“Relative to the usual degree of pain you feel, are you about normal, or are you in extraordinary pain?”

 

I didn’t ask him, although I wanted to. I really wanted to. Mercifully, his mother returned and the receptionist called my name.

 

If all these sick people, with their children, their lab results, their x-rays and their relatives, their coughs, sneezes, groans and wheelchairs were transplanted from a hospital corridor to a sidewalk canteen, would love find them, or will love have to fall ill, make an appointment and chance upon these sick people right where they are on a Saturday morning? Will she arrive just in time for the man on the wheelchair, or the guy on my right, who is reading Tom Clancy and chuckling quietly? Probably not.

 

Beside me, the boy who had been running a while ago squirmed in his seat as I got up to enter the allergologist’s office. His mother and father were talking; the three of them looked healthy, but one of them was bound to be ill. Which one, and did it matter? His parents had one less problem: they found each other (presumably anywhere but here) and they had a son to prove it. I have to get out of this hospital or I’ll never have a son.

 

I spent forty minutes in the allergologist’s, discussing symptoms and medicine, last week’s blood test, next week’s blood test, a shift in medicine and my life so far. I told her that I wanted to marry a doctor so I could get free checkups. She smiled (but didn’t even give me a discount). I asked her if marrying a doctor was even possible, knowing what doctors know about heredity. I could finally ask a question, “Am I, genetically, shit?”

 

She said no. If I find someone who has no history of allergies, our children will only have a twenty percent chance of inheriting my legacy of runny noses, rashes, blotches, blood examinations, shots, shots, shots, antibiotics and antihistamines. However, finding a man with this profile is difficult, she said. My allergologist is an unmarried female with allergies. The rest of the competition is sneezing, coughing, scratching, wheezing, and looking around very seriously.

 

At noon, my appointment was over. Somewhere someone was meeting someone else. I stopped telling myself it could have been me as I hailed a taxi and went home. Saturday morning was finally over as I rode into the afternoon.

I recommend it to anyone who has plenty of stress to go around: cut your own hair. Cutting your own hair flies in the face of the things that breed stress in your life.

 

Think of all those times you made mistakes, mistakes that people don’t really know about and gnaw at your conscience. It’s secrets like these that tend to weigh me down. A lot of people go crazy because they hide the things they find terrible or repulsive. Hiding is clearly not healthy. When I cut my hair I know that any mistake I make I can’t hide. And that’s okay. When my hair is too long on one side or I cut the front too much, these things scream at family members and passersby indiscriminately: My hair is too long on one side! I cut the front too much! A self-inflicted bad haircut will not gnaw at my conscience; it will simply sit on my head. I flaunt it by default, and I love that.

 

Even people who live in regret need vacations from self-flagellation. Cutting my own hair displays what talent I have in grooming myself. I discover that I have few skills in the grooming department, but those skills are my own. It’s a rare moment of being unabashedly unapologetic for the weaknesses and deficiencies I inevitably have to deal with anyway, and it’s liberating.

 

Some people have to pay for bad haircuts. Well, this bad hair cut is free! And this bad haircut is me, giving myself a bad haircut. Remember the days when you riled about the various injustices done to you by the worst people who managed to crawl into your life? Well, sometimes it comes: that moment when you realize you had a hand in pissing yourself off. And then it becomes quiet.

 

So why live to hide, breathe to apologize and pay to get pissed, when you can take a pair of scissors and give yourself a chance to do something you can learn to not regret, and give yourself a choice to do your worst or your best, depending on what you naturally have in store. Cutting your own hair is a lesson in accepting who you are. And let the critics criticize; what never stopped them before is likely to not stop them now, whether you cut your own hair or bought something to wear or ate something you wanted to eat. It’s about time the only opinion you listened to is yours.

I wrote two entries in my blog, not realizing that I would have to deal with the subjects of both those entries in one incident.

 

I was writing my second entry on a Friday night. I had a headache and sweat was crawling all over my body. The funny thing is I was more concerned about not being able to change my blog header than the drama that was unfolding inside me. After logging out I tried to sleep but I kept throwing up. I was so exhausted I spread my towel on the bathroom floor to rest between retches. I knew my blood pressure was going down. This happened to me two months ago, and the doctor surmised that I fainted because of a sinus infection. Talk about being wrong, it was the onset of a slow anaphylactic shock that was draining my body of fluids and thickening my blood.

 

On Saturday morning I collapsed twice: once in a hallway, once at a clinic. The doctor at the clinic sent me home with medicine to stop throwing up, Gatorade, and a warning that if feel worse I should go to a hospital. I tried to sleep, but it was difficult. By evening, I threw up again, collapsed again, and then everything started happening in excruciating slowness: trying to get out of the house, waiting by the curb for my friend to take me to the emergency room, being carried into the car, hearing my mother calling out to me but being too weak to answer. From the time I arrived at the hospital until I was transferred to the ward, I opened my eyes three times: once to stop a nurse from goring me with dialysis needles, once to apologize to my friend for interfering with his Saturday night plans, and once to eat a hotdog from 7-11 because I was so hungry. With what little energy I had I explained my condition to a slew of doctors. I lay in my room, with intravenous catheters in both my hands. In the next twelve days, they would have removed and replaced the catheters that stuck out of my hands, wrists and arms eight times, as they infused me with saline, glucose, antibiotics, potassium and other vitamins. Bottles of clear or yellow liquids hung above me from metal hangers on either side of my bed, connected to my body through tubes and tubes and tubes. I looked like a marionette, and as the fluids were infused I began to bloat. My best friend cried when she saw my face which had become lumpy with edema.

 

It was difficult to move my hands and legs which were stiff with bloat and dotted with holes from numerous blood extractions. The initial finding was gastroenteritis, with something more sinister lurking in my veins. Blood does not thicken to the consistency of honey just because of a bad dinner, so the gastroenterologist called on a hematologist to figure out if I had a blood disease. She came to my room one afternoon and told me she has never seen anyone with a hemoglobin count like mine. The gastroenterologist and hematologist called on a cardiologist to see if there was anything wrong with my heart. The cardiologist came to check up on my heart every day, and every day he told me I had a healthy heart. Finally my allergologist arrived. We met once before at her clinic ten months earlier. I had feared I was allergic to something in my house because my periorbital edema refused to subside. She gave me Cetirizine, and that was it. Neither she nor I expected to see each other ten months later, with me on my back, peering at her with swollen eyes, and her telling me that I cheated death by coming to the hospital shortly before it would have become impossible to revive me.

 

Sunday and Monday were days of infusions and extractions; hours were marked by temperature and blood pressure taking, the occasional shift in bottles, steady beams of oxygen forced into my nose via canella, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Monday was the last time I could eat chicken. The allergologist forbade me to eat chicken, eggs and nuts in addition to my already long list of food allergies that included all kinds of fish, seafood and chocolate. I should be glad that I can still eat vegetables, pork and beef but the loss of chicken in my diet is somehow devastating. Chicken is a metaphor of the things that satisfy me and make me happy. That sounds dysfunctional, and I agree. Losing chicken is probably a good thing.

 

By Tuesday my blood pressure normalized. I really wanted to go home because my hospital bills were increasing with each passing day. I requested transfer to a cheaper room in the ward. There was a mirror on the wall by the foot of my bed in the new room and I saw myself for the first time in four days. My ugliness surprised me, even after the years of having edema, even if I had seen how taut my extremities were from all the fluid that dripped steadily into me. After lunch they wheeled me out to get an electrocardiogram. I looked around to see if there were patients who were uglier than I, but there were none. I was the ugliest girl in the hospital.

 

After the electrocardiogram I was cleared for release in the afternoon by the doctors. I went home in the evening in high spirits. I ate some dinner; I even invited my good friend to eat at my house as I was not used to not seeing her every day. I watched the news, and Oprah, and fought hard to claim sleep but it eluded me. I coughed up thick globs of phlegm into the night and into the early morning. Exhausted, I fell asleep for a few hours then woke up at around three-thirty. It was so dark, and I was the only one awake. In the darkness I coughed up looser liquids onto a towel and thought that my cough was on its way to resolving. I could hear the hammering of my heart and thirst motivated me to leave the bed, walk across the room, open the door and shut it, pad across the hall and walk down the stairs to the kitchen where cold water waited for me in the refrigerator. I drank two glasses and sat quietly while I listened to my hammering heart.

 

I had a theory that if I ate something the blood would rush to my liver for digestion and my heart would stop beating so loudly. I ate a banana and I prayed silently. Then I coughed. I went to the bathroom to spit. I spat out watery blood, which slipped quietly into the drain before I could react. Unsure of what I saw I waited to cough again. The blood that I spat on the sink traveled to the drain discreetly and disappeared into the pipes along with any feeling I had that I was healed.

 

I looked at the towel that I left on the dining table. It was white, with roses printed on one side. I saw how the blood made roses on the white side of the towel as well. I prayed and I cried and I felt my temperature rise as I sat there digesting a banana and coughing up more blood. I tried to take my temperature but the thermometer from the hospital seemed defective. It was stuck at 37 degrees, even if the bulb was immersed in half a glass of cold water. I shook it hard in an attempt to properly determine if I had the fever I was feeling. The bulb hit the wooden table edge and drops of mercury skated on the plastic covering. I called out to the maid to help me wipe away the mercury on the table. I told her that the mercury was toxic, but she still used a dishrag to clean it up, a dishrag which could be reused on plates and glasses. I began to cry out of frustration: frustrated by the maid who refused to believe me that mercury was poison, frustrated that I was not well after all they put me through at the hospital. My cries woke my mother. She went downstairs and helped clean up the broken glass and mercury on the table. Then she helped me climb the stairs and told me to try and get some sleep.

 

Less than an hour later I could hear something gurgling inside my chest. I felt like I was drowning, and I called out to my sister who was sleeping nearby to help me. I asked my mother if she could call on our neighbor, a doctor, but she said that the neighbor wasn’t home. And then it came, the precise moment when denial ends, and your mind resolves to help you. I told my mother that my symptoms were unbearable and that we had to go back to the hospital.

 

My second time at the emergency room was different. I was hot one second, then cold the next. Bursts of adrenaline from fear of my mortality alternated with the weakness of my true condition. I was conscious, lucid, awake as another intravenous catheter was efficiently but painfully inserted in my arm. To counteract my bloating they injected something to help me urinate. I urinated on the emergency room bed nine times; the initial embarrassment of being seen in a puddle of my urine lessened with each volley of liquid. They even managed to take an x-ray of my chest while my sister mopped up watery blood from my mouth, and I continued to urinate on myself. Daylight began to flood the emergency room. It was midmorning; my sister was looking for a diaper while I coughed and coughed and coughed.

 

They took me to a different ward. The allergologist came and told my mother to consider moving me to the intensive care unit. She looked at me with naked fear that I began to fear as well. My mother did not want to put me in the ICU. It was too expensive, and the allergologist did not move her.

 

There are fewer nurses and doctors in the new ward and the minutes were long as blood began to seep out of the hole of my IV catheter and dried on my hand. My sister managed to squeeze me into a too-small diaper while we waited for someone to help me. The minutes turned into hours, and I began to feel neglected as I lay with my backside soaked, my pillows streaked with blood coming from my mouth.

 

One of the resident doctors from my first confinement found me in the state I was in and chastised the nurses for not telling her that I was readmitted. She took one look at my bloody catheter and decided it was time to replace it, only she loathed to be the one to do it. A few days ago she tried to put an IV on my right wrist. The hole she made from that unsuccessful attempt was still sore that Wednesday morning. She tried to page another resident, the one who successfully inserted my IV, but he never came, so we each took a deep breath and she managed to slip one into my vein. She left a few minutes later to attend to other patients. She was the last doctor to attend to me in that ward.

 

All day a string of medical technologists drew blood from me for different tests. They came almost every two hours with their tourniquets, needles and vials. You can tell that the tests are different because there are times they allow you to make a fist, which is the least painful of all the tests, and there are times when they prop your elbow on a plastic box and you cannot make a fist. The most painful one is when they draw from your hand and you are told not to move even if the pain is almost unbearable. The worst part is when they cannot draw blood at all and they have to repeat the procedure again: tying the tourniquet tightly, opening the sterile syringe packaging, slapping the veins into plain view, pushing the needle in, pulling up the plunger, drawing blood or air into the syringe, taking out the needle and taping up the hole with a cotton ball and Micropore.

 

The IV catheter is not the worst catheter in the hospital. They have one that inserts into the urethra and causes a patient to urinate steadily. This catheter was the one that helped me the most. It drained the water in my bloated body for five days without fail, and spared me from a respirator as it drained the water that infiltrated my lungs.

 

The oxygen in my blood was dangerously low, but I did not wear my oxygen mask because the blood and water from my lungs would ricochet inside it when I coughed, and it was hard to wipe away my excretions with the mask covering my mouth. This was a mistake because the air from the canella was insufficient. I lay there woozy from lack of oxygen, hunger, fatigue and sadness. It was the perfect time for a lunchtime miracle. I was coughing steadily all morning when a voice in my head told me to stop coughing, and I stopped. In my mind’s eye I saw Jesus asleep on a boat while his disciples panicked in the face of a gathering storm. Jesus arose, lifted his hands, and stopped the storm and the waves. The turbulence in my body ceased as well.

 

Friends came to visit me after lunch. At this time, my mother gave in to the suggestion of the allergologist that I be transferred to intensive care. My friends came and went, and hours passed, hours lost that I will never get back. The six-hour wait for my transfer to the intensive care unit was on.

 

In the evening my best friend came to see me. She shared my frustration from being at the hospital again with no doctor to mind me, unable to eat the fish they callously served me and sitting awkwardly with pain in my bones from wearing a soaked diaper all day. She felt the anger that I felt, the anger I fought to control all day as I waited and waited and waited. Then finally another resident from my first confinement started the paperwork required for my transfer to the ICU. That took forever or one hour; it didn’t make a difference. I was at the edge of my patience, and anger, like the water inside me, filled me to bloating.

 

Finally, I was on a gurney with a tank of oxygen beneath me. While the doctor was pulling me to intensive care he stopped to ask me if I could wear a mask instead of the canella because my blood oxygen was too low. That made me cry. I told him, please do not put any plastic over my face. I have been drowning all day. I waited all day for someone to help me, but no one came. No one cared while I drowned in water and drowned in blood. You neglected me, I told him. You neglected me, and I wonder what I did wrong to deserve the kind of treatment I received today.

 

He stopped pulling me, and we stared at each other for a few seconds. My grief was so great I could scarcely care about how my words affected him. The expression on his face was inscrutable. This doctor never came to the ICU after the night he brought me there. One night at the ICU when all was calm and I could finally think, I remembered the look that doctor gave me and I regretted telling him the terrible things I said.

 

At the ICU I was told that I could not wear the canella anymore because I needed more oxygen than it could give me. They put on my mask, changed my hospital gown and diaper, strung up some potassium which burned in my veins, and hooked me to a monitor. I was connected to a hulk of a machine through five or so wires connected to my chest with sticky electrode patches. The steady beeping warned everyone in the room that I lacked oxygen in my blood. After I settled in my best friend took my mother home, because no one was allowed to keep me company there except for visiting hours.

 

The pulmonologist finally came. He listened to the sounds my chest had been making all day. That night I dreamed that he told me I was well enough to go home. The residents clapped as he carried me out of the intensive care unit. The walls of the hospital split, and I walked into a giant shopping mall where I got lost after happily walking around, riding the elevators to every floor, feeling alive. I believed that silly dream. When I woke up and found myself still in intensive care I cried, longing to be healthy.

 

On the same night I dreamed that I tricked the nurses into taking my medicine and they were very angry at me. I was in a state of half-consciousness when the nurses in the real world informed me that they were going to bathe me. They rubbed me down in the cold cavern of intensive care while I, not fully awake or aware of where my dreams ended, protested weakly to what I thought was punishment from the nurses. When they finished bathing me and I lay shivering under the blanket with my hair all wet I cried again, not fully comprehending what just transpired.

 

I was not bored in the ICU, even if I spent three days and three nights just sitting or lying on my bed. Not only did the nurses bathe me, they also fed me, brushed my teeth, changed my diaper, wiped the sweat on my back. They pushed antibiotics into my IV catheter, prepared cups of pills and tablets, measured my codeine and regulated my oxygen. More blood was taken from my arm, sputum harvested and skin tests performed to protect me from further shock. I had pneumonia and pulmonary edema, but the catheter was steadily draining liters of fluid from my body. I shrank more and more each day. They took x-rays and an echo cardiogram. I saw my heart beating strongly as blood leapt from one valve to the next. There was a day that I had to fast because they had to take an ultrasound of my stomach. The doctors feared that water infiltrated my abdomen as well, but the test was negative. They considered the possibility of renal failure, but that came out negative too. My only problem was that my lung had collapsed, but I was healing.

 

The miracles were not confined to the physical aspect of my hospitalization, but also the emotional and financial burdens that I carried. I said at the beginning of this entry that I reckoned with two things, the subjects of my two other blogs: the trauma of my first hospitalization, and my fractured relationship with a person who used to be my friend.

 

When I had my eye operation at age three or four there was a day when my mother left me at the ward to go work. I cried and I begged her to stay but she did not. I grew up feeling that my mother did not love me very much; much less than the love I had for her. This feeling translated itself and transmuted to other people, and I lived my life feeling that I would always love others more than they loved me, but I was wrong. My mother spent days at the hospital during the work-week, caring for me and assuring me of her love. The best part was that my friends, who knew of my family’s financial distress, raised money to pay my enormous hospital bills. They pooled their money, held a garage sale and wrote letters to my teachers. I have so many friends, and they love me as much as I love them. They literally paid for my hospital bills. They crowded around my window at the ICU for my lunchtime visiting hour, and dinnertime visiting hours. They wrote me cards and prayed for me, every one of them. I can live my life now knowing that I am loved because of what happened to me.

 

I was at the ICU when the girl who narrowed her eyes came to speak to me after two and a half years. She held my hand for half a second, and then I pressed her fingers against my temple and wept for a long time. We did not say much to each other but I know we share the same remorse, the same relief, and I am content with that.

 

On my last night at the ICU, the man in the room beside mine died. Another man had died earlier, but he died quietly and I did not even know he died until a day after when a nurse told me. The dying man next door took about an hour and a half to pass. His monitor was a sonata of warning sounds, drowning out the gentle beeping protestations of my machine which only signaled my lack of oxygen. I lay quietly, wishing the Benadryl would put me to sleep but instead I lay fully awake as I watched the doctors and nurses wheel machine after machine to revive the dying man. I could see his relatives pacing in front of my room, talking on their cellular phones. At one point I heard one of them shouting at the patient, begging him to live. Sometimes they stared at me. I prayed that he live, but the damage done by organ rejection was too great to be overcome by the ministrations of the doctors. It was a relief to be discharged from the ICU the following noon, ushered into the rooms of the ones who live.

 

I spent six more days at the hospital, awakened at three o’clock for nebulization and again at five o’clock for blood extractions, blood-pressure taking, temperature-reading and medicine administering. My prognosis improved as the water in my lungs drained completely. The catheter was removed on a Sunday afternoon. I was back at my favorite ward where the nurses came into my room just to see what I really looked like, when all the swelling had subsided. They finally saw the true set of my eyes, the slant of my cheekbones, my nose and my lips when reduced to their original size and shape. Visitors continued to come with good cheer, some money, a lot of fruit, and love.

 

I finally saw the doctor who brought me to the ICU. My sister looked for him at the hospital while I was still at intensive care. On the day I was transferred to the ward, she found him walking alone in one of the hospital corridors. My sister told him that I wanted to apologize for the things I said to him. He said it was unnecessary, but he came to see me anyway a few hours after I was placed in a ward. I could not look at him as he bent over to listen to the sound of my heart. My heart could not say what I wanted to say, so my mouth had to help form the words “sorry” and “thank you”, while my eyes trained my vision on the trees outside my window. I looked away. I heard him say that it was all right, felt him straighten as he pulled away and left.

 

The next few days in the ward were uneventful. The medicine in my plastic cup lessened. My four doctors: the pulmonologist, the allergologist, the cardiologist and the internist appeared less worried with every day that passed, and many of my symptoms disappeared. Soon I could sit up, go to the bathroom, record my own intake and output, and walk around the ward.

 

I went home on a Thursday, twelve days after the day I could have died. The night before I prayed to God to give me the strength to leave the hospital, which no longer felt like a place of pain and death, but a sanctuary of miracles, a place where I discovered that I made true friends. It was hard to leave the place where people showed me unequivocally how much they cared about me. If a person’s value could be measured by the love of one’s friends and family, I could have paid my hospital bills a hundred times over.

 

The best discovery was this: without a doubt I know now that God is real. He met me at the hospital and took my suffering. With gentle fingers he touched my eyes so that I could at last see the beauty of the life I am living. My life is a gift, not a burden. And if anyone asks I will tell them that the best thing that ever happened to me was when I almost died, because I lived to find out that I've always had what I was looking for.

I have. I was around three of four years old when one of my eyes decided it wanted to have a look at my other eye. Being young, it felt like I had been cross-eyed for years, but my mother said it had only been for a few months. I do not have any memories of the things that I did at that age except for the things that had something to do with being cross-eyed, like wearing thick glasses, not going to pre-school, going to the doctor again and again and again, and my operation, particularly being wheeled to the operating room without underwear, inhaling the anesthetic and how blurry the world looked when the bandage was removed. I don’t remember which eye caused all this trouble, but I remember being told that all my suffering stemmed from watching too much television.

 

And I didn’t learn. My hobby of late has been watching movies. I don’t have the time to go to a movie theater, so I hardly ever go there. But for some strange reason I do have time to travel across the city to Chinatown and spend hours looking for videos of my favorite actors. Then, like the child that I was I watch and watch and watch these movies, ignoring schedules, commitments, and better judgment. So far, watching all these movies has not impaired my eyesight in any way. However I’m convinced that the movies are tying knots in my brain. Credits roll as a psyche drops. I wish it were someone else’s, but I know that old bag anywhere.

 

Why else would I have so much to regret in life?

 

Movies are tricky. The viewer is privy to the thoughts of every character encountered. In particularly distressing scenes involving secrets where everything would be resolved in seconds if only someone told the truth, I would have to hold myself down to keep me from yelling, say it! These kinds of movies have created in me a feeling that, in my own life, a lot of things would have resolved themselves if only someone had the courage to speak up. Add a rainy day, and then you have regret.

 

Add the internet and then you have a blog.

 

I want to store in these pages the elements of a self-inflicted drama that I want to remove from deep inside me. I promise myself to write every thing that carries a hatchet in my head. I will live my life, and then remove the things I have written when I heal.

 

If there’s anything good that came out of being cross-eyed it would have to be the discovery that just when you think things will get worse and worse, you get better.

 

(now if time would cooperate I would have my happy endings)

Do you regret meeting people?

 

There was this time I was standing in the main hall of my school, holding a sandwich and minding my own business when these two girls stood beside me. How can three people agree to be friends without saying anything? Actually, there were four of us: an angel-faced girl who I sat with during the orientation, a smart and beautiful girl who towered above me, and the last girl, the prettiest one, looking at me with narrowed eyes.

 

I wish someone told me then, look away, ignore her, she will betray you; but no one did.

 

It’s been four years since the orientation, and two years since I spoke to the girl who narrowed her eyes. I don’t know if I miss her, or if I’ll ever talk to her again, but I do know I regret meeting her, and she is not the only one. There are others, at different times and different places, leaving the same emotions, the same memories.

 

I want to hide our stories here, those people who broke off pieces of me. My diary of regret.