I woke up on January 19th, 2022 with a massive headache, feeling cold and shivering. Every muscle in my body is cramping alternately all the way down one side and then the other. My first thought is “Maybe this is just a bad migraine.” After a bit it became clear that this is getting worse not better.
My wife Jane checks and I have a fever of 103.5 F, so we go to the emergency room. I don't realize this is the very peak of the Omicron surge.
Fortunately, I am admitted right into the emergency room with no delay. I get something for the pain, x-rayed and hooked up to an IV.
I mentioned to the nurse that the last time I had been here I had the option of a private room. She chuckles and asks, “How long ago was that?” “Oh, a couple of years ago.” She says, “You're lucky to even get a bed today. There are folks who have had to wait down here in the hallway all night, until we can find them one.”
The nurse comes in and says “Your blood work has come in and it indicates that you have an abscess in your colon that has blown out, and now you have sepsis. We are going to put you on three IV antibiotics and get you up to the ICU.”
On the way up I recalled that Jim Henson had died from sepsis. He died because he was in Africa and didn’t get immediate attention. I felt so grateful to be so privileged.
The next couple of days are a blur with fentanyl and folks looking in on me every few hours.
I am not allowed to eat or drink anything for days until my lactic acid (a symptom of sepsis) gets back to normal. That is why I was having such severe muscle cramps, a symptom of sepsis.
Since I am hooked up to a monitor and an IV bag, I can't go to the bathroom by myself and have to call for someone to take me. Given the schedule of care in the ICU, sleep was at its best, short and interrupted
A couple of days later I am put on a liquid diet. I will always remember that first taste of apple juice. It is like ambrosia. I say to Jane, “My whole body feels orgasmic, It's so good.”
I am pretty lucky that my roommate here in intensive care makes almost no noise. He had sustained some brain damage that left him barely aware and largely unable to speak. I felt bad for the guy. Fortunately he is beginning to recover and has improved a little while I am here.
It’s the third day I am being moved to the general recovery area. This is a completely different situation. In intensive care there is a much greater awareness of disturbing patients, since contact has to practically be hourly in order to monitor vitals, and whatnot.
The first thing I notice is how much louder it is.
I am directly across from the nurse's station and can hear everything they are saying. It is clear they are short-staffed and scrambling to get help. Some of the nurses are talking about being drafted from other departments, and working 12-hour shifts just to keep up with the need. My door is rarely closed, even at night and since I have really good hearing, I am being bombarded by all of the loud beeping from the entire area. At one point I hit the call button because I thought my roommate’s monitor was beeping. A nurse comes in and says “It's not your roommate, it's a couple doors down the hall. But you must have really good hearing!”
My first roommate is a guy who had had his hip broken and was recovering from the repair. There is only a thin curtain between us. I can hear everything he is going through. He can’t get to the bathroom by himself.
He would let someone know he couldn't wait to go, but by the time they got back with help, it was about cleanup. I feel bad for him having gone through a similar process for the last 3 days. If that wasn't bad enough, the pain of just being moved periodically was clearly agonizing for him and impossible not to hear and empathize.
He is discharged in the early evening and within half an hour I have a new roommate.
Duane has a thick southern accent and a mushy drawl, which makes it almost impossible to understand him.
Quickly he makes it clear how rude and crude he truly is.
His first question for anyone who comes in the room is, “Can someone go down to that room I was in, and see if my cigarettes and the three lighters are still there? I only smoked a couple and just want to make sure nothin’ happened to em.”
Of course there are a million questions that need to be asked to get checked in. Everyone has to ask him to repeat themselves, just to understand if his answers had anything to do with the questions. Making things even more challenging, his answers often are tangential or nonsensical. I wonder if he might have brain damage or was drunk.
Also , everything he says is loud, he has no indoor voice. It is as if he knew no one could understand him, and is talking louder to compensate. Or, to avoid actually answering anything.
He is also constantly inappropriate with his comments.
An aide comes in to take his temperature. When she is done and tells him his temp he says “Wow, that must mean I have hot lips.” She leaves and is not seen again.
Another aide comes in to listen to his heart and chest with a stethoscope. After she is finished he blurts out ” Can you do that to my butt?” She immediately says “SIR we're not doing that here!” His immediate response is ”I need to know if anyone went down to check on my cigarettes?”
After a while a male nurse comes in and tells him “We’ve checked and there are no cigarette lighters anywhere downstairs, and even if there were, there's no smoking in this Hospital.” I wonder if the aide told him this just to get him to shut up.
He then launches into a story about how a friend had told him that “if you was in the hospital and had to smoke, you could just go into the bathroom and lock it. But you have to wait long enough for the fan to get rid of it, or you will get caught.” He then confessed that he had done just that while in the emergency room and someone had caught him anyway.
When asked if there was someone like family who could be contacted if something happened to him he said, “No, but I told the landlord at my trailer park that I had a 25,000 dollar insurance policy he could use to bury me if he finds me dead. And maybe it would be better if I just fell down and that was it.”
I can hear the silent alarms go off in the nurses head. He did not know what he had just set in motion. Hospitals are legally required to take those kinds of statements very seriously. He gets a grilling from the nurse and a subsequent visit from the local psychiatrist just to make sure he isn't in danger of hurting himself.
He never stopped talking, when someone wasn't in the room he would talk to himself. Later, I found out he even talked at full volume in his sleep, as if someone was in the room.
By 10 that night I am beside myself and ready to pull my own hair out, or strangle him.
I am also plagued by having to pee every 20 minutes urgently. Fortunately, I have a portable urinal and don't have to trudge to the bathroom every time I need to go. I asked the nurse if we could turn down the volume on the IV so I could get some sleep. She checked with the doctor and he did not want to lessen the amount of fluids, due to my condition.
The later it gets, the louder the noise seems to become. I repeatedly ask if they can keep the door closed, which lasts until the next person comes in 15 minutes later. At the end of my rope and having had very little sleep over the last three days, I say to myself, “You just need to get a hold of yourself and accept what can not be changed.”
It was very frustrating that there was so little I could do to control the sheer chaos all around me, but what could I do? I realize that one thing I have some control over are my feelings about all this, and how I am responding to it. Playing the victim is not serving me one bit.
I try to have some compassion for my roommate and myself, and recognize that we are both suffering human beings in the same boat. Thinking this way helps me shift from blaming my hopelessness on everything around me, and gives me a little space to consider how I might improve my own condition.
There is a bright blue light above my bed that I can see even if my eyes are closed. I have the thought that I can use my mask to cover my eyes since I don't need it to breathe through it. I am heartened that it actually works really well!
The sheer level of sound is overwhelming, so I try to roll up some paper towels to stick in my ears. Even when I get them wet and jam them in there, it still does almost nothing. I remember that I had asked Jane to bring me my in-ear headphones. I try them out, thinking, “It can't be any worse than what I am trying to use.” It turns out they are awesome, I can hear almost nothing.
The only distraction remaining is my bladder. I remember that I am wearing an adult diaper, and come to the conclusion that I can just piss in it, and get some sleep.
I go to sleep on my back and sleep deeply, until I wake myself up with my own snoring. I roll on my side where I don't snore as much. Before I go back to sleep, I take the headphones out just to see if the noise has abated at all. I am grateful to put them back in, since it is just as loud as it had been, including my loudly ruminating roommate.
I get a good solid 4 hours of sleep and wake up at around 4:30 in the morning. I decide to stay awake, since 5:00 is when they roll around to take blood, check vitals.
I am anxious waiting for my doctor to come in to do his rounds. I'd been rehearsing what I wanted to say, and was prepared when he showed up. I said, “For the love of God and all that is Holy can you please get me out of this place. Just tell me what I need to do and it's done.“ He smiles and says “It is pretty chaotic here, and I bet you would love to sleep in your own bed. I can't promise you anything, but if your progress continues, I will get you out sometime today. Also, you are well enough to have some real food, so we're going to bump you up to a “low fiber diet” this morning.” I am immensely relieved and even manage to get a little sleep before breakfast.
Turns out my snoring has not gone unnoticed. This morning every time someone comes in to ask how he had slept, Duane would say, “I didn’t get any sleep because my roommate was bringing the roof down with his snoring,” and proceeds to do an imitation of me snoring that illustrates how truly epic it was.
My snoring becomes like his cigarettes. He is compelled to let everyone know who comes in and shows the slightest interest. At this point a little part of me gloats “At least I gave as good as I got.” I’m not proud of the thought and don't dwell on it.
Duane was admitted with rectal bleeding, which was what I am also dealing with. I can't help but have some sympathy for him when they come in and stick a finger up his ass to see what was going on. He gots a lot quieter after that, it seems like it has really taken something out of him.
After we get breakfast, he is complaining about how awful the food is and how it tastes like cardboard. I feel like maybe we have a little bit of common ground, so I make the comment that “The reason that Jello tastes like crap is because it's made out of horse hooves.” (It's not quite true, but close enough).
He surprises me and starts talking to me rather than the room. and says that “The first thing I will do, as soon as I get out, will be to have a big steak and a cigarette.”
Something seems to have shifted for him and he starts to tell me his life story, all about his family, where he lived (only a couple miles away from me), about the family Bible his brother the preacher gave him and reads every day.
A rather unexpected and interesting thing has happened. He has lost most of his mumbly drawl and is reasonably understandable. It's almost as if the mumbly drawl was a kind of defense against answering any questions.
As would be expected, he talks to me almost incessantly. I get a phone call and he thinks I am still talking to him. I let him know I am on the phone, and he actually gets quiet for a while.
A little later on my way to the bathroom I say to him, “I have some good news for you, I'm getting out tonight so you won't have to listen to my snoring anymore. So at least you can count that as some good fortune.” He gives me a sideways look and goes on pouring his heart out to me.
Shortly before I leave for good I say to him, “I know what you're going through here and I wish you the best of luck. The doctors are good and they will take excellent care of you.” He gets a little quiet and starts praying for me and mine to be well, and to have all the good things in life and so on, in a completely humble way.
I am immensely relieved to get out of what has felt like being in prison “gen pop,”, and grateful to have never actually had that experience. I am feeling grateful for the lessons I am hoping I have learned.
I need to remember that a little compassion and generosity goes a long way, especially under impossible circumstances.
Experiencing my own mortality has changed my perspective, a lot of the things that have been bugging me seem petty at this point. Surrendering to what I could not change had presented me with opportunities I had never expected.
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