HAC – Enter the Hospital
I’ve made it to the emergency room. It took me five days, a few hundred miles of motorcycle riding and some encouragement from family members to get me here, but I’m in the hospital now. I check in with the emergency room nurse and tell her I’m having chest pains. She takes my information and has me sit down. Sitting is good at this point because the pain and burning in my chest, a result of my walk to my car from my apartment and later from my car to the emergency room, is not fading. This kind of pain had been coming on after walks to stairs all weekend, but it would fade if I sat down. Now the pain just sits in my chest and doesn’t let go. Still, sitting feels better than walking.
I spend 5 or 10 minutes in the chair watching the TV, checking my phone and trying to avoid any flying particles of sputum being flung about the room by the other inhabitants of the emergency room waiting area. A nurse arrives and just like that, I’m being led to a room to get hooked up to an EKG. I once had a leaking appendix that was on the verge of bursting and it took me five hours to get some attention (and some emergency surgery), but I complain of chest pains and I’m getting cared for in minutes. Perhaps there’s an upside to this heart attack thing? Nah, probably not.
The nurse attaches the leads for the EKG and monitors me for a few minutes. She takes the readout somewhere and, after a few more minutes, she’s back to put me in a wheelchair and take me down to an emergency triage area where a line of beds separated by curtains is awaiting customers. I get laid down on a bed in the middle of the room, get some blood drawn and an oxygen feed hooked into my nose. I was hooked up to some kind of IV but don’t recall if I was given any drugs at this point. I do remember that I was bummed because I was going to miss both the new Simpsons and the new Family Guy (my priorities are normal, right?). Then I heard the head nurse, an Irish-accented guy named Gary, tell one of his coworkers that he was going to see if he could change the channels of the two TVs in the room to Fox to watch those shows. Talk about lucking out! Then I realized I couldn’t actually see either of the TVs on the wall. I was smack in the middle of the room and the TVs were both blocked by the curtains that separated me from my neighbors on the right and the left.
Gary and I started chatting about the shows and he made an attempt to get me access to at least one of the TVs by pulling back the curtains of the bed on my right halfway while no one was in there. That was great, but didn’t last long because another patient was wheeled in after just a few minutes. I would have asked if they minded leaving the curtain back a little, but the woman was crying and I figured that she probably wasn’t in the best of spirits to accommodate my TV watching habits. I listened instead and waited in my bed. After a good time a doctor, perhaps performing his residency, comes by my bed and informs me that I have, indeed, suffered a heart attack. He tells me that they’re going to check me in as soon as they find an available room. At that point I felt a little drop in my stomach, but really it wasn’t that big of a shock so I wasn’t really upset. In fact, if anything, I was probably more embarrassed that I’d gotten myself into this situation, and then took five days getting to the hospital. Regardless, I’m on the mindset that once something like this has happened, there’s pretty much nothing you can do about it so you might as well look to the future (assuming there is one) and work on the next steps.
I made some phone calls to let my parents know what was up as well as my sister up in Vermont. I then called my boss and asked him if her remembered that my vacation was over and I was supposed to be at work the next day. After a pause and a suspicious-sounding “yes”, I told him that I would have to take a few more days off because I was in the hospital with a heart attack. I’m all about the comedy.
Not too long after that, some nurses came over and started wheeling me away from the triage area to my room. As they wheeled I called out to Gary, a fellow Simpsons-nerd, and said, “Hey Gary, is it sad that my first thought after being told I’d had a heart attack was the Simpsons episode where Homer has a heart attack and says to Doctor Hibbert, ‘but the worst is behind me, what doesn’t kill me only makes me stronger, right?’ and the doctor says, ‘oh no, quite the contrary. You’re frail as a kitten’ and then starts smacking Homer around?” Gary got a good laugh out of that and even the nurses pushing my fat ass around chuckled a bit. I made some small talk and joked around with the nurses and assistants pushing me up to my room, especially how half the hospital was pitch black for some reason, and before long I was deposited in my room – a private one, at that. Apparently the cardiac care units are all private rooms, so yet another (dubious) benefit of having a heart attack.
By this time I was pretty wrecked, and to be honest I’m still pretty hazy on the details of my time spent in my hospital room. This is especially true now, some 8 months after the event. I can’t say for sure who came to my room that first night, what drugs I was on or even whether I had dinner or not (I think I did). I know that eventually I met up with my cardiologist, Dr. Bartholomew Woods, who asked me about my lifestyle and health history. I remember that he put on Ativan as an anti-anxiety drug because he was worried about the amount I drank. As a drinker, you cannot explain to non-drinkers that you’re not an alcoholic without them assuming that, because you’re denying it, you must be one. Didn’t really bother me one way or the other, but I figured it was better to be honest about the amount and frequency of my drinking, as well as everything else. It’s hard enough trying to diagnose someone when they’re not giving you the whole truth.
All I can say for sure was that I was pretty comfortable in that room and that I slept pretty well, except for the expected awakenings by the nurses as regular intervals for drug administration. I was hooked up to a telemetry unit that transmitted my vital stats to monitors at the nurses station. I was soon to learn just how much body hair I would lose during my week’s stay at the hospital from the constant attaching, detaching and reattaching of leads for these telemetry units as well as the various IVs and blood-taking bandages.
Soon I would have my parents at my side as often as they could. My mother was a saint spending as much time as she did in my room and acting as my second set of ears and eyes on everything the nurses and doctors told me. You can never go wrong having a friend or family member present when this kind of thing happens, because I was hopped up on drugs and the sheer experience of having a heart attack that I couldn’t remember most things for more than a little while and that extra set of ears is invaluable. My mother knows this from experience and made it a point to act in that role, as well as providing all the love and support that great moms do. My father was there a ton as well, and many of my family came from all over to see me, which was great. Those that could sent great gifts and their love, which was excellent. Plus I got some surprise visits from coworkers, both past and present, and some of my friends. It’s great to have that kind of support when you’re in a situation like that and I thank them all once more for taking the time out to come to one of the least hospitable places in the world in order to give me a little support – much appreciated!
So that’s the story of my entrance to the hospital. Next up will be the details of my catheterizations and the other tests I was subjected too while in the hospital.
