Hospital Reflection 2
Hey this is a hard one. 3:00 AM comes around and I need to make a decision to stay or go. The emergency room stinks like sick bodies and looks ghost-like flourescent. My mind reflects this too. Kate says to go–save yourself, save your job, go to India. As I’m pondering this, doctors file in and inform us nothing will be known until 6:00 AM. Shift change, different doctors. What this means is that these new doctors will ask the same questions as the old ones, pontificate about new tests, slowly reviewing a medical file that is feet long. Not much continuity in the emergency room.
I used to work in these places, clocking in endless hours in my EMT uniform chain smoking cigarettes outside waiting for the right nurse to come to get the information for my patient. But this time the patient is my sister, and every fucked up thing I know about emergency rooms and the bureaucracy surrounding them swirls around my head like evil swimming germs.
Kate says: Call the cardiologists. They need to know I am here. We called them, doctors say. Left messages. It’s early. Right about now I realize my brain is fried and I haven’t slept in days. A million more questions, mostly irrelevant. I am fascinated by the wit and intensely controlled frustration put forth by my sister. She lies there, in serious body pain, and with the knowledge something is seriously wrong but not knowing what, and calmly asks the doctors medical questions that not even a medical student would ask. And she’s nineteen.
She knows. She knew before she even came here. Something’s really wrong. Not like a quick fix drugs type of thing or an antibiotic treatment type of thing, but something else. They will do all the tests and nothing will happen until they do an echo and find out her heart is malfunctioning–spurting infection all through her body like a diseased fountain. Stemming from an artificial aortic valve, stainless steel and lifeless without the life cells a normal body has to fight off intruders. Spreading everywhere–burning her hands, feet, stomach, finertips, toes. And also her brain. But we don’t know it’s that serious yet. This is endocarditis, a heart infection only IV drug users and people with artificial valves get. Of course it’s highly unlikely, but many things that happen in a life are highly unlikely, aren’t they? Or maybe it’s just me.
Ok then take her away, stick IV’s in both her arms, and inject some ink into her body for a CT scan which causes her to have a panic attack. Of course I find out about this later, when I am allowed to come into her room again and her face is all read and defeated and she’s crying. What happened, I say. The attending technician who fucked up this procedure looks at me sweating, and says ‘I think she had a panic attack back there’. As if that just happens for no reason. I find out later he injected the ink for the CT scan too fast, causing hyperventilation and a very serious feeling that the insides of your whole body are on fire.
All this frustration stems from the fact that my sister knows the complications and mazes inherent in this medical world. And so do I, which makes it hard to stay calm so she stays calm. It’s not really the doctor’s fault of course, nor the nurses or other white suited folk milling about in this labrynth. But they, and the nurses, and me too–all of us telling her to calm down, to take some deep breaths–all of us surrounding this struggling body and mind–are complicit because we are the face looking back at the thing we cannot understand underneath–the thing she feels in her body that all of us can only understand theoretically.
Ever since she has been old enough to know, she has been forced to defend her body and navigate through a sea of experts and know-it-alls who have been wrong some of the time in her life. But some of the time is also enough of the time to make one worry, and also to lose trust. Given, people with her condition didn’t live at all ten years before she was born, and all of the knowledge surrounding this medical condition can be relatively new, but it seems to be hard for some doctors to say they really don’t know something. Some doctors would come in and ask questions so outlandish it was obvious they hadn’t read her file, and then one doctor asked not once but three times if she bruised her legs on something or fell and hit them.
All of the frustration about getting her out of the emergency room fast is justified when two days later I am approached by a surgeon who is operating on her and he tells me: She had about two hours to live. I think about all the doctors that saw her, read her file, and still insisted on trying to “figure it all out”, rather than just handing her over to the fucking cardiology department. It’s amazing how information filters down through the hierarchy of the hospital zones. It makes me wonder and also dream about endless stacks of paper, each piece containing some sort of important but partial information, sitting unidentified in a locked filing cabinet I am clawing my way into.
A few months back she and everyone else thought maybe it was her diet. Just went up north to go to college, adjusting to a new climate, walking too much, not eating right. Seeing her around this time she was miserable, thinking she was doing something wrong to make herself feel so tired, but could not find the reason why. I got angry with her many times about her intense outward frustration which made all of us family a bit on edge, but looking back I regret this. People say to have no regrets, but I am not one of them. It is a good thing to take a few steps back from my assumptions, my confused life, my busy mind. What’s really important? And fuck you if you think this question is meaningless.