Met by Angels on the Way

Yesterday's awful hospitalization is now yesterday.  The tests showed I had not had a heart attack, and had no lung problems or infections to explain the vertigo.  I was very happy to talk with an intelligent and respectful doctor, and be discharged.  And home, and had the best night's sleep of my life.  The vertigo is less today.  What I've learned is that there are many possible causes for it, and sometimes (a nurse told me this) they can test you for everything and come up with no diagnosis. We'll be alert.

But I wanted to write here about what happened yesterday after I got through the (awful) nuclear stress test.  Here's what I wrote in my journal:

There was Kim, the nurse's aide, so friendly, reassuring, happy to help with coffee and extra cookies.  Then, being wheeled back to my room, talking to Barb on my phone - and she is great, she'd delivered my medicines - there was Rod, an elderly wheelchair valet who told me he was a retired doctor, and reassured me that I’d done the right thing to refuse contrast dye, and humorously encouraged my revenge fantasy, probably thinking it would fade.  There was Kathleen on the phone [a friend who is a chaplain].  Then the male nurse’s aide who came in and put Abbott and Costello on the TV for me, laughing, "You've got to see this."  Then Cassie calling again to stay in touch. 

One person after another.  It felt better and better.  And I thought, it's like I was surrounded by those angels Teri S. had wished for me when she read what I was going through.  We got home, there was Gini on the phone, and we talked and laughed like crazy.  Then Chris and Scott called.  The thought persisted - What if these are angels flocking toward me?  What if there is something felt in the universe - which is made up of energies - among people who are connected and care for each other, some intuition that draws the compassionate toward a person in need?

That idea gives me a little thrill of goose bumps even now.  I first heard the prayer from Hansel and Gretel as a girl, and I loved that idea of a protecting squad of angels.  And why not?  Anything's possible.

Letter from an American Hospital

It is 3:08 am and I am sitting in bed in a luxury hospital thinking about writing an open letter to the doctor who woke me three hours ago to express contempt for my conviction that I cannot take steroids or contrast dye, though he had accepted that to the extent of cancelling the scheduled scan.

Dr. Doctor:
Okay, you're short.  I wouldn't have noticed except that you were so aggressive, so angry at the possibility that I thought I know something about my body that you don't.  So had to be on top. Contemptuous.  What?  You're short, animals recognize power in size, it is not fair.  And you know what?  Nobody cares if you are king of your little mountain of being right. Get over it.  We're grown us now, we don't care who's tallest.

So you were so pissed off when the nurse told you at 10 p.m. that I refused steroids and cannot have a test with contrast dye, that you came bustling into the room two hours later to wake up a deaf 70 year old lady who has apparently had a heart attack for only one reason: to do your power thing.  You and the fiery nurse who had already talked to me like I was an idiot, "Do you have any idea what you're risking?"

Yes, I do.  If I let you do the test you so imperiously wanted, it could damage my kidney - the only working kidney I have or ever will get.  That would be a sentence to death. You didn't know that, and it really pisses you off that a woman, an old woman yet, would think she knew something you don't.   Okay, you won.  You woke me up.  I can't get back to sleep. Good for my health.

You're playing doctor here as if it were a war game.  Interested only in towering over me, not in discussing the other ways we could examine the issue, or in calling my transplant doc. Did not want his name.

That nurse earlier informed me she would be giving me a heparin shot.  I know all about that, Christ I was in and out of hospitals for ten years.  It's a blood thinner.  I said, "I just had four aspirins two hours ago.". Oh. (And why didn't urgent care give me an aspirin at noon when they saw symptoms of heart?  Why didn't the ER they sent me to?  Don't you people watch TV?  Everyone knows you take an aspirin.  I knew it, but didn't know vertigo was a symptom, but you knew that.). No heparin shot.

No use trying to go to sleep now. Someone will wake me to do another blood draw because that's protocol no matter that I only have one arm you can stick.  Then someone will wake me to do vitals.  Then someone will come in shouting at me to rate my pain. This is Western medicine.  It has a great kill rate.