Having now been in an emergency room—in fact, the
same emergency room—for reasons both physical and mental, I can definitely say that you should choose the former wherever possible. Because this time, my stay lasted just eight hours instead of fourteen days. And that reason seems good enough, until I remember that people with physical issues can stay for longer than fourteen days in the hospital, and some never come out. So, my adjusted advice: just choose not to be sick, if you can. Because spending time in an emergency room makes you conscious of how illness, of any type, can be an intensely individual experience. Although you share the emergency room, you’re very much alone.
Alone, and wishing you had bothered to read Susan Sontag’s
Illness as Metaphor. Then you would have had a nice literary quote for this blog post.
My problems began a few days before, with persistent chest pain. I thought I had just pulled a muscle at the baseball game I went to on Friday night, because baseball is always guaranteed to give you extra innings of misery. But it would get worse when I would lean forward, and I would wake up groaning in pain. My mom made me call the health line, and although I didn’t have any of the telling signs or risks for a heart attack, stroke, or blood clot, the TeleHealth Nurse made me go to the emergency room. Older female guilt is a powerful force.
Cardiac issues were quickly ruled out, so I waited. It was very early, and the only other person there was extremely constipated. He was annoyed when they called me in first, even though I had arrived moments before. “Just tell them the constipation is causing chest pain!” I wanted to yell, as I walked into the next room. “Then they’ll see you quickly.”
Except, there was more waiting. No
ER or
Grey’s Anatomy-type crises to see though; someone had broken bones in his hand from punching someone, and someone had probably broken his hand falling off his skateboard. My D-dimer levels, which were supposed to be in the hundreds, were in the thousands. Although I’ve been mostly downwardly mobile as an adult, it seems I can still exceed expectations on tests.
Time in this room was like time in a casino; it didn’t run normally. Like a casino, there was no natural light, no ready source of news from the outside world, and possibly a clock but I couldn’t find it. I suppose I could have just left, but I didn’t. I read, and waited. After test results like that, the next step was a CT scan. This requires a larger-bore needle for the radioactive dye, and my veins were still being difficult. Teams of two nurses would rotate in and out on my arms, slapping and injecting. Six attempts later, a nurse with perfect bone structure managed to get a usable IV in my hand. I fell in love with her.
Most of us patients had an understanding to ignore whatever was behind the curtain. By the nature of the room, sensitive information had to be shared, and by its nature, it couldn’t be a secret. Through the curtains (if you were either lucky, or simply unlucky enough to be unable to sit) you would hear specific details about someone else’s medical issue and they would learn all about yours. I felt like there was an unspoken injunction against acting on any of this knowledge in solidarity, but there I was, sitting next to one of the chatty exceptions to this rule when my CT results came back. There were clots in my lungs, just in time for me to miss the drug benefits from the job I had suddenly quit.
I wish my time as a millennial cautionary tale had ended there, but no. The thrombosis clinic—it’s on the same floor as the osteoporosis clinic, with the result that I lower the mean age in the waiting room by a decade or two every time I walk in—warned me that the blood thinners would increase the flow of my period. What they didn’t tell me is that I would be recreating the elevator scene from The Shining every hour, on the hour. However, I made it through that, and telling a cisgender-looking male TTC driver that I had
Carried a bus seat, and napping my afternoons away instead of studying thanks to my low iron, to be sitting here, typing into the void.
I’ve now made it through June, and can’t wait to see what July will bring. Shingles? So don’t be sick, and if you must, try to time so that you have sick leave, medical benefits, and limited need for public transit.
