THE LAST OF THE HEART
I was planning to go on at great length about my five days of convalescence at the mercy of the Florida Hospital Orlando, but really - who wants to hear old people going on about their health? Next, I'll be pinching your cheeks and asking if you're married yet. I'll try to stick to the highlights (or lowlights) and if I start going off on tangents about customer service in general, just start slapping me around. Seriously. Stop reading, send me email, and insist that I go back and edit this thing further.
So where were we? Through the stent procedure and into intensive care? Right. For the record, I'd had three blocked coronary arteries: one totally blocked but naturally bypassed by other arteries in the neighborhood, one 90% blocked and one 80% blocked. The two partially blocked arteries were opened up with angioplasty balloons and had stents inserted into them.
Friday night/Saturday: Pretty uneventful. IV needles stuck in both arms, heart monitors stuck to my chest, oxygen stuffed up my nose, catheter shoved up - well, you get the picture. My recuperation was to be nothing if not invasive. The saline drip wasn't properly stuck into the back of my left hand and every time I moved my fingers, it blocked the flow of the solution and set off some alarm above the headboard: beep-beep, pause, beep-beep, pause, beep-beep... Minutes later (sometimes many minutes later), a nurse would arrive, switch the alarm off and leave. This went on at about fifteen minute intervals all night and through the next two days. Apparently, it never occurred to someone to just remove the IV and start over. Until I mentioned it Sunday afternoon. Anyway, I was still a bit groggy, so maybe it only went off ten or twelve times rather than the several dozen that it seemed.
I did mention that I was vastly dehydrated due to the oxygen and that one could have shot Lawrence of Arabia in my sinuses. This prompted the nurse to suggest that a hydrator or hydrolyzer or something could be attached to the oxygen feed - a process which first prompted her to check the O2 level in my blood. It turns out I no longer needed the oxygen at all - if I ever had.
Saturday night/Sunday: I had my first encounter with Egg Beaters. Sugar substitutes seem to have gone through something of an evolution. Saccharin begat cyclamates, cyclamates begat aspartame, aspartame begat sucralose, etc. With egg substitutes, they seem to have come up with Egg Beaters and simply said, "Okay, that'll do." Uh, no - no, it won't do. An Egg Beater omelet is possibly the worst thing one can put int one's mouth for potential ingestion (and, trust me, I've ingested some dodgy substances). If anyone is looking for a lucrative career opportunity, finding an egg substitute that, oh, remotely resembles the characteristics of an egg (any characteristic - color, taste, consistency, properties when cooked) could make you your fortune.
Late on Sunday, I asked if the catheter was still necessary. It was uncomfortable and had been inserted, I'd thought, just to relieve pressure from my bladder. It wasn't like I was unable to urinate. Sure enough, when someone finally checked, I didn't need the catheter. But let me tell you one thing: having one of these devices removed is even more painful than having one inserted. And peeing for the first time after a catheter has been removed is even more painful. Unless one is a serious masochist, this procedure should be avoided if at all possible. If one is a serious masochist, forget everything else: invest in a catheter and you can dismantle your entire dungeon.
Not long after urinating naturally for the first time in two days, I was moved from the ICU to the CVPCU, which I eventually worked out stands for Cardio-Vascular Primary Care Unit. As I was doing well, I was told I might be released Monday afternoon.
Sunday night/Monday: Despite having scrawled "NO EGG BEATERS" on my menu request card for two days, I was awoken to the delights of yet another Egg Beater omelet. So "If I ever see another Egg Beater, I will kill myself right here in the PCU and instruct my heirs to hold Florida Hospital Orlando responsible" became my new request. I saw no more Egg Beaters. This ghastly substance may not have been so bad if the rest of the food hadn't been quite so dire. Now I realize that hospitals are not famous for their haute cuisine, but less than a month ago, I'd spent two days in a hospital where the food was at least edible. Where's the nutritional value in boiling every vegetable to mush? Seriously: one could rest one's fork on a carrot and the weight of the utensil would cause it to sink through the taproot. Indeed, the dietary philosophy here seemed to be simply "Boil everything".
A nurse - and I should mention here that, unlike the EMS team, everyone that attended me in hospital was female and either singularly unattractive or ridiculously over made-up (people still wear a quarter-inch of foundation under their mascara, blush, lip-gloss, eye-liner, and shadow?) - asked if I'd been bathed (I hadn't) and said she'd be back at 9:30 to unattach me from various medical instruments and assist me into the shower. She wasn't. In fact the promised bath didn't materialize for another 24 hours. This was sadly typical. Sunday night, for example, I was told a tech would be in at about 3am to draw blood. As I was still watching Adult Swim (it was either that, CNN, or TCM the whole time I was in) by 2am, I decided I might as well just stay up for the blood ceremony. No one showed until 5:15. The best one, though, was the superfluous IV needle in the back of my left hand that was left flopping about for three days longer than it was needed.
Speaking of nurses, I was astonished by the extent to which hospital roles are still dictated by gender. Every EMS team member is male. Every nurse is female. Every orderly is male. Every lab technician is female. Every doctor is male. Every housekeeper is female. And so on. There was not a single exception to this rule. Not one. You've come a long way, baby.
Anyway, I saw my first doctor - apparently a colleague of my new cardiologist - Monday afternoon and, as I was doing well, was told I might be released Tuesday morning.
Monday night/Tuesday: Okay, my sleep patterns had been erratic. There were people in every couple of hours to wake me for blood samples or some damned thing and I spent a lot of time napping for half-hours at a time during the day. By Monday night I was actually feeling tired and was delighted to be drifting off to sleep by about 1am. At 2:30, I was awoken by The Voice. This was not some near-death experience, it was a member of the staff sitting in the corridor talking on her cell phone to a hapless friend. As I later saw, she was a middle-aged bleached blonde with a totally bad perm and thick, frameless glasses, who was shaped roughly like an eggplant. Hearing her, she reminded me of the woman sampled from talk radio on the Butthole Surfer's "22 Going On 23" as she droned on and on and on about how lonely she was and how she still checked her answering service every morning even though there were never any calls except from her kids or her sister or her friend in North Carolina, but how she kept checking anyway, and how difficult it was coming to work and seeing all these pregnant women going on and on about their husbands and families, and how she'd never previously understood all the seventy-nine-year-old patients who'd lost a spouse two years ago, but how she now understood them completely, and how she was thinking of going back to church because at least it was a chance to see other people, and how she might eventually meet someone there... Ah! was that it? Had I been listening to this woman give out for forty-five minutes now because she needed dick? And, really, is church the best place to meet desperate widowers keen to lay some rail through cattle country? I crawled to the foot of the bed and pushed the door shut. Harder than I thought, I guess, because it resulted in an almighty SLAM - which, at least, brought quiet to the hospital. For a moment.
Then the corridor was full of nurses and orderlies and techs and the Charge RN - "What was that?" - "Sounded like a door slamming" - "Did anyone see anything?"
I crawled out of bed, made my way to the door, and greeted a sea of faces attempting to project alarmed concern. "Uh, I was just shutting my door. I was trying to sleep and it was impossible with this woman [still seated in the corridor holding her cellphone] going on and on and on about her miserable life." I was tempted to continue - expounding on hospitals having once been considered fortresses of silence and the dubious value of staff members making hour-long personal calls while on duty and the lack of recuperative benefit to be derived from listening to a suicidally depressing account of someone else's pathetic life - but the poor soul already looked quite abashed and I was tired. As it was, I couldn't sleep for another few hours in the fear that someone sociopathic enough to unself-consciously share the intimate details of their bathos in full voice in the middle of the night might not be past slipping into the room of someone who interrupted their disconsolate dissertation and advancing on them with a scalpel. I was ready to go home.
A few hours later, I finally met my new cardiologist. He was mildly concerned about my white blood cell count being somewhat elevated (though there was no evidence of infection or anything) and said he'd keep me another day to monitor my bloodwork. Seeing my look of panic, he said he'd get in touch with the Infectious Disease Specialist to see if my release could be "expedited". Said Infectious Disease Specialist showed up that afternoon, spent thirty seconds in the room, and said "Of course your WBC is up. You had a heart attack." This seemed obvious. "It's coming down." As it had moved from 16.4 to 15.1 to 13.0 in the past few days, this, too, seemed obvious. "As far as I'm concerned, you're fine. Go home." He left. But the cardiologist was nowhere to be found. And probably wouldn't be found before morning. Grrr.
Tuesday night/Wednesday: At this point I've had little sustained sleep in three days. Sean, who (as part of his New York chauvinism) doesn't drive, has been unable to get here due to miserable public transport and having been let down by a couple of friends and colleagues three times and I therefore still have no glasses. And am therefore weary of reading with book held at arm's length. I've seen enough television over four days to last the rest of the year, but have had no computer access since LAST THURSDAY. Plus I should be outta here in the morning. So I'm looking forward to a bit of sleep - if nothing else, to pass the time.
Just as I'm drifting off, there's an ungodly crash/thump, accompanied by a startled groan and followed by the sound of clattering metal and shattering glass. To me, this seems a bit more serious than a slamming door. Nevertheless, a full two minutes go by before a single set of footsteps approaches a nearby room with a blithe "Are we all right?" I have no idea what happened, but it only seemed to take a follow-up by a housekeeper to sort out. Fine. back to sleep. Half an hour later: beep-beep... beep-beep... beep-beep... This sounds very like my IV alarm from the ICU. Except it's someone else's. Like next door. And no one is responding. After about five minutes, I buzz the nurse's station. After about two minutes, the intercom crackles: "Can we help you?"
"Yeah. Can we find out what that beeping is and make it stop?"
"Oh."
Two minutes later, someone approaches and the beeping stops. Half an hour later, it starts again. Five to ten minutes later it is stopped. Repeat at unpredictable intervals for six hours. Add chatter echoing from the nurse's station that is reminiscent of an elementary school hallway at recess thoughout the night. The day nurse, arriving at 7am to check my vital signs, makes the unfortunate mistake of asking how I slept. The response begins with "Slept???" and ends, a few minutes later, with "I am leaving this hospital at noon and, if anyone tries to stop me, I will call the Orange County Sheriff and report them for false imprisonment" or words to that effect.
The day nurse processes the prescriptions pending my discharge and both the attending physician and cardiologist sign my release by 9am. But because the Infectious Disease Specialist had been called in to "expedite" the situation, he also had to sign off on my discharge. And now he was nowhere to be found. Aaaaghh! He finally turns up around 11:30 - and, by noon, I'm in a taxi home.
Make no mistake, the staff was uniformly nice - very personable, moderately attentive, well-groomed (after a fashion), and of a generally pleasant demeanor. It's just that they weren't competent. As with so much else in this country, it's become all about selling. The quality of the product is irrelevant.
Anyway, all that remained was to sort through the seven prescriptions I received as a parting gift, haggle by phone with the cardiologist for generic brands, and make a pharmacy run. Prinivil, Lipitor, Plavix... "Geez," I said to Sean, "half of these are like 'as seen on TV'."
"Yeah," he tells me, "you have to take up golf now."
We now return you to your regularly scheduled lives...
So where were we? Through the stent procedure and into intensive care? Right. For the record, I'd had three blocked coronary arteries: one totally blocked but naturally bypassed by other arteries in the neighborhood, one 90% blocked and one 80% blocked. The two partially blocked arteries were opened up with angioplasty balloons and had stents inserted into them.
Friday night/Saturday: Pretty uneventful. IV needles stuck in both arms, heart monitors stuck to my chest, oxygen stuffed up my nose, catheter shoved up - well, you get the picture. My recuperation was to be nothing if not invasive. The saline drip wasn't properly stuck into the back of my left hand and every time I moved my fingers, it blocked the flow of the solution and set off some alarm above the headboard: beep-beep, pause, beep-beep, pause, beep-beep... Minutes later (sometimes many minutes later), a nurse would arrive, switch the alarm off and leave. This went on at about fifteen minute intervals all night and through the next two days. Apparently, it never occurred to someone to just remove the IV and start over. Until I mentioned it Sunday afternoon. Anyway, I was still a bit groggy, so maybe it only went off ten or twelve times rather than the several dozen that it seemed.
I did mention that I was vastly dehydrated due to the oxygen and that one could have shot Lawrence of Arabia in my sinuses. This prompted the nurse to suggest that a hydrator or hydrolyzer or something could be attached to the oxygen feed - a process which first prompted her to check the O2 level in my blood. It turns out I no longer needed the oxygen at all - if I ever had.
Saturday night/Sunday: I had my first encounter with Egg Beaters. Sugar substitutes seem to have gone through something of an evolution. Saccharin begat cyclamates, cyclamates begat aspartame, aspartame begat sucralose, etc. With egg substitutes, they seem to have come up with Egg Beaters and simply said, "Okay, that'll do." Uh, no - no, it won't do. An Egg Beater omelet is possibly the worst thing one can put int one's mouth for potential ingestion (and, trust me, I've ingested some dodgy substances). If anyone is looking for a lucrative career opportunity, finding an egg substitute that, oh, remotely resembles the characteristics of an egg (any characteristic - color, taste, consistency, properties when cooked) could make you your fortune.
Late on Sunday, I asked if the catheter was still necessary. It was uncomfortable and had been inserted, I'd thought, just to relieve pressure from my bladder. It wasn't like I was unable to urinate. Sure enough, when someone finally checked, I didn't need the catheter. But let me tell you one thing: having one of these devices removed is even more painful than having one inserted. And peeing for the first time after a catheter has been removed is even more painful. Unless one is a serious masochist, this procedure should be avoided if at all possible. If one is a serious masochist, forget everything else: invest in a catheter and you can dismantle your entire dungeon.
Not long after urinating naturally for the first time in two days, I was moved from the ICU to the CVPCU, which I eventually worked out stands for Cardio-Vascular Primary Care Unit. As I was doing well, I was told I might be released Monday afternoon.
Sunday night/Monday: Despite having scrawled "NO EGG BEATERS" on my menu request card for two days, I was awoken to the delights of yet another Egg Beater omelet. So "If I ever see another Egg Beater, I will kill myself right here in the PCU and instruct my heirs to hold Florida Hospital Orlando responsible" became my new request. I saw no more Egg Beaters. This ghastly substance may not have been so bad if the rest of the food hadn't been quite so dire. Now I realize that hospitals are not famous for their haute cuisine, but less than a month ago, I'd spent two days in a hospital where the food was at least edible. Where's the nutritional value in boiling every vegetable to mush? Seriously: one could rest one's fork on a carrot and the weight of the utensil would cause it to sink through the taproot. Indeed, the dietary philosophy here seemed to be simply "Boil everything".
A nurse - and I should mention here that, unlike the EMS team, everyone that attended me in hospital was female and either singularly unattractive or ridiculously over made-up (people still wear a quarter-inch of foundation under their mascara, blush, lip-gloss, eye-liner, and shadow?) - asked if I'd been bathed (I hadn't) and said she'd be back at 9:30 to unattach me from various medical instruments and assist me into the shower. She wasn't. In fact the promised bath didn't materialize for another 24 hours. This was sadly typical. Sunday night, for example, I was told a tech would be in at about 3am to draw blood. As I was still watching Adult Swim (it was either that, CNN, or TCM the whole time I was in) by 2am, I decided I might as well just stay up for the blood ceremony. No one showed until 5:15. The best one, though, was the superfluous IV needle in the back of my left hand that was left flopping about for three days longer than it was needed.
Speaking of nurses, I was astonished by the extent to which hospital roles are still dictated by gender. Every EMS team member is male. Every nurse is female. Every orderly is male. Every lab technician is female. Every doctor is male. Every housekeeper is female. And so on. There was not a single exception to this rule. Not one. You've come a long way, baby.
Anyway, I saw my first doctor - apparently a colleague of my new cardiologist - Monday afternoon and, as I was doing well, was told I might be released Tuesday morning.
Monday night/Tuesday: Okay, my sleep patterns had been erratic. There were people in every couple of hours to wake me for blood samples or some damned thing and I spent a lot of time napping for half-hours at a time during the day. By Monday night I was actually feeling tired and was delighted to be drifting off to sleep by about 1am. At 2:30, I was awoken by The Voice. This was not some near-death experience, it was a member of the staff sitting in the corridor talking on her cell phone to a hapless friend. As I later saw, she was a middle-aged bleached blonde with a totally bad perm and thick, frameless glasses, who was shaped roughly like an eggplant. Hearing her, she reminded me of the woman sampled from talk radio on the Butthole Surfer's "22 Going On 23" as she droned on and on and on about how lonely she was and how she still checked her answering service every morning even though there were never any calls except from her kids or her sister or her friend in North Carolina, but how she kept checking anyway, and how difficult it was coming to work and seeing all these pregnant women going on and on about their husbands and families, and how she'd never previously understood all the seventy-nine-year-old patients who'd lost a spouse two years ago, but how she now understood them completely, and how she was thinking of going back to church because at least it was a chance to see other people, and how she might eventually meet someone there... Ah! was that it? Had I been listening to this woman give out for forty-five minutes now because she needed dick? And, really, is church the best place to meet desperate widowers keen to lay some rail through cattle country? I crawled to the foot of the bed and pushed the door shut. Harder than I thought, I guess, because it resulted in an almighty SLAM - which, at least, brought quiet to the hospital. For a moment.
Then the corridor was full of nurses and orderlies and techs and the Charge RN - "What was that?" - "Sounded like a door slamming" - "Did anyone see anything?"
I crawled out of bed, made my way to the door, and greeted a sea of faces attempting to project alarmed concern. "Uh, I was just shutting my door. I was trying to sleep and it was impossible with this woman [still seated in the corridor holding her cellphone] going on and on and on about her miserable life." I was tempted to continue - expounding on hospitals having once been considered fortresses of silence and the dubious value of staff members making hour-long personal calls while on duty and the lack of recuperative benefit to be derived from listening to a suicidally depressing account of someone else's pathetic life - but the poor soul already looked quite abashed and I was tired. As it was, I couldn't sleep for another few hours in the fear that someone sociopathic enough to unself-consciously share the intimate details of their bathos in full voice in the middle of the night might not be past slipping into the room of someone who interrupted their disconsolate dissertation and advancing on them with a scalpel. I was ready to go home.
A few hours later, I finally met my new cardiologist. He was mildly concerned about my white blood cell count being somewhat elevated (though there was no evidence of infection or anything) and said he'd keep me another day to monitor my bloodwork. Seeing my look of panic, he said he'd get in touch with the Infectious Disease Specialist to see if my release could be "expedited". Said Infectious Disease Specialist showed up that afternoon, spent thirty seconds in the room, and said "Of course your WBC is up. You had a heart attack." This seemed obvious. "It's coming down." As it had moved from 16.4 to 15.1 to 13.0 in the past few days, this, too, seemed obvious. "As far as I'm concerned, you're fine. Go home." He left. But the cardiologist was nowhere to be found. And probably wouldn't be found before morning. Grrr.
Tuesday night/Wednesday: At this point I've had little sustained sleep in three days. Sean, who (as part of his New York chauvinism) doesn't drive, has been unable to get here due to miserable public transport and having been let down by a couple of friends and colleagues three times and I therefore still have no glasses. And am therefore weary of reading with book held at arm's length. I've seen enough television over four days to last the rest of the year, but have had no computer access since LAST THURSDAY. Plus I should be outta here in the morning. So I'm looking forward to a bit of sleep - if nothing else, to pass the time.
Just as I'm drifting off, there's an ungodly crash/thump, accompanied by a startled groan and followed by the sound of clattering metal and shattering glass. To me, this seems a bit more serious than a slamming door. Nevertheless, a full two minutes go by before a single set of footsteps approaches a nearby room with a blithe "Are we all right?" I have no idea what happened, but it only seemed to take a follow-up by a housekeeper to sort out. Fine. back to sleep. Half an hour later: beep-beep... beep-beep... beep-beep... This sounds very like my IV alarm from the ICU. Except it's someone else's. Like next door. And no one is responding. After about five minutes, I buzz the nurse's station. After about two minutes, the intercom crackles: "Can we help you?"
"Yeah. Can we find out what that beeping is and make it stop?"
"Oh."
Two minutes later, someone approaches and the beeping stops. Half an hour later, it starts again. Five to ten minutes later it is stopped. Repeat at unpredictable intervals for six hours. Add chatter echoing from the nurse's station that is reminiscent of an elementary school hallway at recess thoughout the night. The day nurse, arriving at 7am to check my vital signs, makes the unfortunate mistake of asking how I slept. The response begins with "Slept???" and ends, a few minutes later, with "I am leaving this hospital at noon and, if anyone tries to stop me, I will call the Orange County Sheriff and report them for false imprisonment" or words to that effect.
The day nurse processes the prescriptions pending my discharge and both the attending physician and cardiologist sign my release by 9am. But because the Infectious Disease Specialist had been called in to "expedite" the situation, he also had to sign off on my discharge. And now he was nowhere to be found. Aaaaghh! He finally turns up around 11:30 - and, by noon, I'm in a taxi home.
Make no mistake, the staff was uniformly nice - very personable, moderately attentive, well-groomed (after a fashion), and of a generally pleasant demeanor. It's just that they weren't competent. As with so much else in this country, it's become all about selling. The quality of the product is irrelevant.
Anyway, all that remained was to sort through the seven prescriptions I received as a parting gift, haggle by phone with the cardiologist for generic brands, and make a pharmacy run. Prinivil, Lipitor, Plavix... "Geez," I said to Sean, "half of these are like 'as seen on TV'."
"Yeah," he tells me, "you have to take up golf now."
We now return you to your regularly scheduled lives...