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
I spent six more days at the hospital, awakened at
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.
