health care

Several times during the last few months when friends have asked what’s going on with me, I’ve felt an unfamiliar type of hesitation. I’m reluctant to even answer, because I worry that even my oldest friends may doubt me – at least a little. It’s time to confront the fact that my life has jumped the shark.

Here, then, is an as-briefly-as-I-can-do-it summary of the events that have led me to this pronouncement:
Late last October – early November: My wife ended up in the Emergency Room on two consecutive Saturdays.

• FIRST TRIP
  • Symptoms: intense lower abdominal pain, moderate nausea
  • Treatment: temporary painkillers and a battery of tests
  • Eventual diagnosis: urinary tract infection
  • Total elapsed time at the ER: 8 hours
• TRIP #2 – ELECTRIC BOOGALOO
  • Symptoms: sudden, dramatic swelling of the feet during a SAG film society screening of The Matador; resultant inability to walk
  • Treatment: Movie ruled out as possible pathogen (too well acted, script is quirky and character-driven); battery of tests
  • Diagnosis: allergic reaction to antibiotic prescribed the previous week
  • Elapsed time: estimate around half an eternity (lost track). Carried the wife bodily into the house at 5:30 A.M. Unable to walk normally again for 5 or 6 days, she was relegated to rolling herself around the house on an Aeron desk chair.

November 18: Four days after he’d been admitted to the vet, it became clear that our 12-year-old Sheltie, Maxim, was too weakened by Cushing’s Disease to recover. The decision to let our beloved little guy go was utter agony. The wife had owned Furry Max since he was eight weeks old; I’d come into the picture about 10 months later, so we had to mourn the faithful companion who’d been with us since the very beginning of our relationship (and, appropriately, had rounded out our wedding party as the ring bearer).

December 17th: The Mrs. and I were slammed into from behind on the 405 freeway by a guy who fell asleep at the wheel of his Ford F-150 truck. Damage assessment:

• My ’97 Accord — totaled
• Me and the wife — injured, but fortunately not totaled
• Our schedules — thrown into a tailspin of appointments with orthopedists, chiropractors, physical therapists, insurance adjusters, and yes, personal injury lawyers (we don’t relish the thought of suing, but it’s the only way for us to [probably] recoup the $$$ we’re paying out as a result of his hitting us. Speaking of which…
• Our just-begun home remodeling — knocked off its foundation. We had to postpone the interior finishing of our garage in order to pay for my new used Toyota Camry. Cost: $3,000 beyond the insurance payout for my Accord, plus $500 in maintenance to get it to prime operating condition. The garage postponement caused our contractor to throw a hissy fit and stop showing up, leaving the exterior of the garage job incomplete. We even had to cajole him into (mostly) finishing it before we could fire his ass.

January 13-19, 2006: My wife is selected as a juror in a personal injury trial despite her best efforts to emphasize her bias on the subject. She ended up a helpless dissenter, outvoted by her moronic fellow jurors. They ignored the evidence, the testimony and the law itself in their determination to deny restitution to a young middle-eastern man who’d been hit by a white suburban grandma as he tried to cross the street on foot — with the light, and inside the crosswalk. The wife was deeply shaken by the injustice itself, and mortified at being connected to it.

January 20: The Mrs. and I bring home a new puppy. She has been brimming over with anticipation about the doggie for several weeks.

January 20 (later): I once again take my wife to the Emergency Room. She had spent the entire afternoon yodeling in the porcelain canyon, and had been re-afflicted with severe stomach pain. When a CAT scan reveals two mysterious masses, she is admitted to the hospital and slated for surgery within 48 hours. The doctor tells us that they won’t know until the surgery what the masses are. I stay at the hospital as her advocate, dealing with some (not all) asshole doctors who didn’t like to tell us what was going on with her treatment, and with some (not all) bitchy, lackadaisical nurses.

January 24: I spend the evening of my birthday waiting in an uncomfortable hallway while my wife undergoes surgery. My friends Amy and Assaf are kind enough to keep me company during the wait — Assaf even went out to get me a sandwich and a mocha frappucino. When the doctors emerge, the wife’s condition turns out not to be cancer, cysts or one of the usual suspects, but rather an abcess — or in layman’s terms, “a big nasty bacterial infection.” To our delight, this meant they didn’t have to remove any of her internal parts. She is put on an aggressive course of IV antibiotics.

January 28 – February 3: After being released from the hospital, my wife is pretty much incapacitated at home — constantly fatigued from the all-out war between the antibiotics and the… um, biotics being waged within her at the cellular level (and no, smartass, that doesn’t mean she could get updates from the front lines on Verizon Wireless). I do my best to go to work for eight hours a day, hurry home, take care of Sweetie, and contend with Hyperbully the puppy, who is proving not to be as good-natured as we’d thought he was.

February 4: A numerically appropriate day for ER visit #4, so why not? Experiencing chest pain, the wife is referred by our primary doctor’s Urgent Care Center to the ER so that the possibility of a blood clot can be ruled out. Unfortunately, the two ERs in our network are both warning possible patients away due to the imminent arrivals at each trauma center of 30 or so casualties from that day’s prison riots in Castaic, about 40 miles to the north. We return to the same ER of our last 3 visits, where we are by now on a first-name basis with several of the nurses. Wait… wait… blood test… wait… CAT scan…wait… wait… more blood work… wait… no blood clot, must’ve tweaked a muscle on the inside of your chest cavity, nothing to worry about. See you next ti-… um, I mean, take care.

February 5, wee hours: Home from the ER at a bit after midnight, blotchy redness has begun to appear on the wife’s elbows and feet. At about 5 A.M., she tells me that her feet are swelling up again, and that her throat feels a little swollen too. This subsides long enough for us to get a little more sleep.

February 5, late morning: Having realized that Hyperbully the puppy is just not really a people-oriented dog, we swallow hard and return him to his litter at the rescue organization. He’s not a bad dog, he’s just way more dominant than he let on during his original audition. He’s a very handsome pup, and he’s in no danger of not getting a good adoptive home, probably soon.

February 5, afternoon: As the wife’s hives continue to come in increasingly painful waves, we become sure that she’s having a reaction to one or more of the medications. It finally gets bad enough for me to take her back to Urgent Care at halftime of the Super Bowl. The doctor there says that hives, while uncomfortable, are very, very unlikely to worsen into an anaphylactic reaction (the really dangerous kind). We actually get out of there and head home in a little less than two hours. I catch myself wondering what I’ll do with all the time I’d already written off to sitting around in an ER.

February 6 – present: The wife’s original doctor (from the surgery) takes her off of all four antibiotics due to the reaction, reasoning that she was nearly done with her dose anyway. Afterward she languishes at home, tormented by wave after wave of hives. Desperate for relief, she applies Benadryl anti-itch spray in such quantities that I wonder if she is in danger of shellacking herself.

So how’s all this been for me? Hmm… put it this way: many a time and oft have I claimed to be exhausted, or “wiped,” “forkin’ tired,” “bleary,” etc., and relatively speaking, I was. After the past few weeks of worrying about the Mrs., trying to help her, sleeping in hospital chairs, chasing a recalcitrant puppy, massaging my own whiplashed spinal column, worrying about missing too much work, trying to keep house for the both of us, yadda yadda yadda. Hold on a second, it makes me tired thinking about it…

…aaaand I’m OKwherewasI — ah yes, I have operated at a baseline of fatigue heretofore unknown to me. “Running on fumes” doesn’t quite cover it; a better description would be, “running on the fumes of low-octane moonshine siphoned from the tank of a jalopy parked on a well-browned lawn in Santa Ana, belching exhaust and rolling unsteadily forward despite the half-disengagement of various parts from the undercarriage, which drag clamorously along the pebbly pavement.”

On Monday at work, my fatigue and ache were joined by a hint of nausea and fever, and if I hadn’t just burned through several sick days I would have been, like, so out of there. The sick feeling persisted on Tuesday, but since has tapered off. Clearly, the persistent physical and emotional strain were causing my body to indignantly start flipping switches to the “OFF” position. Sometimes my head pounded, sometimes my neck cracks, and this one time I bent over and distinctly heard my back go “are you fucking kidding me?”

So anyway, other than that… nothing much goin’ on.