Public Hospital

I haven’t blogged since Palestine, but I have been thinking about it again, hoping to bring some blogging into my new venture, my forthcoming art and architecture practice Public Studio – so stay tuned. In the meantime, sitting here in the hospital with not much to do, I decided to take stock of my most recent adventures over the past week in the medical system, having experienced a mysterious pain in my abdomen last week. I apologize for the lack of visuals, I usually like to include more.

It all started on October 23^rd, when, having just come home from a funeral I had a full bladder and went to relieve myself. Elle had taken Walter (1) downstairs to do the same, and by the time she came back upstairs, she found me in the bedroom on all fours unable to move and barely speak. Our family prides itself on our high pain thresholds – it is a Menno thing for sure (2)– so when I described it as ‘agony’, Elle knew she needed to get me to the hospital. We decided on St. Joe’s, simply because it was the closest, and in retrospect, it may have been worth a little more suffering to go further afield.

St. Joseph’s has a bad rap, and if you add the weekend factor, it pretty much lived up to its reputation as I viewed the stream of cops and handcuffed patients from my stretcher. I was shunted from emergency doctor to emergency doctor, from one misdiagnosis to another, finally being sent home with a catheter and little understanding about what had just happened to me. Admittedly, it was a tough case and seemed to stump everyone including my gynecologist who performed a laparoscopy on me 3 weeks ago, my family doctor, and the other physicians in my life: my sister, and one of my best friends, Leah. We had consulted with Leah throughout the weekend, forcing the doctors at St. Joseph’s to talk to her on the phone, as she seemed to always be one step ahead of them. Funny how doctors don’t like when you ask them to consult with your doctor friend - or your lawyer friends for that matter….

Yet for every cold and incompetent nurse (3) there is a warm and über-competent one, and for every dense and arrogant doctor, a thoughtful gifted one. I can’t say my hospital stay was completely miserable, for I realized that I was in a moment of complete dependence, and small communities based on time and space began to form around me, completely out of my control. As my stretcher moved from hallway to room, from room to room and back shuttled by those who knew me and didn’t, parked next to strangers, I started forming relationships with those around me, even if they were only for a few hours.

How else could we have met Pauline, the 89 year-old who needed Pam to lift her up in bed? Of course Pam (supportive friend and babysitter of Walter) did more than lift her physically, she lifted her spirits as well. In the course of their conversation, Pauline, who was a once a great beauty, discovered that Pam was Jewish and a woman, both to her disappointment. Yet they seemed to work it out, as Pauline wasn’t about to turn down her attentions. Things improved between Pam and the geriatric set at Mount Sinai (4) where she met Florence, the 94 year-old who needed some advocacy. Poor Florence (who seemed to have no issues with Jews) had been sitting in the hallway out with the rest of us and couldn’t even reach her meds that were dumped on her stretcher until Pam came to the rescue. I didn’t mind that Pam gave her my magazines and chocolate chip cookies, or lobbied hard for Florence, but I was certainly relieved that Pam decided to let loose into the nurses once I was well out of that animal house of an emergency ward and into my corner suite up on the urology ward.

But anyway, back to all of my ailments. I was hoping this would be a tale in retrospect but it seems I am yet undiagnosed. In a very un-Mennonite exposé, rather than go through the tedious tale of my ‘healing journey’ (5) I have compiled some statistics to date over the past 8 days:

2 hospitals
2 doctors offices
13 doctors
12 nurses
6 porters
14 bags of IV
4 doses of morphine
4 doses of Gravol
2 doses of Dilaudid (whoa……!)
2 doses Stemitol
14 blood collections
3 urine samples
5 doses Cipro
5 doses Keflex
1 laxative
6 abdominal exams
3 ultrasounds (2 internal)
2 CT scans (that’s a lot of radiation!)
4 catheters
1 cystoscopy (camera in ureter)
1 intravenous Pyelogram (X-rays of bladder filled with dye)
1 Paracentesis (siphoning off of abdominal fluid with needle)

My nurse Julie called me a model patient today: I never press the call button, I never ask for pain medication and I never complain. That would also make me a model Mennonite, but for the fact that I have just divulged every bit of medical information online to pretty much everyone I know.

Footnotes

1. our new Pooch – see picture.

2. For example, when we brought my mother into the emergency ward in Kenora this summer after she suffered a stroke at the cottage on the island, my sister (the doctor) described it to the nurse as ‘a mini-stroke but she seems to have fully recovered’. Even my brother who is also a stoic thought it a bit much!

3. The chart-topper being Lorna, the night-nurse who told me as a 41-year old woman I shouldn’t send my friends out to do my bidding (as I lay moaning) but press the call button. She was sitting at her station about 4 feet from my bed.

4. After being sent home from St. Joseph’s with a catheter which was subsequently removed, I began to feel a different sort of pain in my abdomen, more of the bloated tender type, and ended up going to Mount Sinai Saturday morning.

5. In the words of our friend Javan.