I found myself unexpectedly back in the hospital last month, some 10 years after my last treatment for an aggressive prostate cancer. Fortunately, it had nothing to do with my cancer; my P.S.A. level, a measure of prostate cancer progression, has been undetectable since 2009.
Rather, I was there because of a thick, solid rash that covered my stomach and flowed down to my pubic bone. It had arrived after 24 hours of shakes, shivers and sheet-soaking night sweats, accompanied by joint pain, weakness and fatigue beyond fatigue. I had slept for more than 20 hours each of the first two days I was sick. My body was in the throes of anarchy.
I’m a veteran patient. But every time I’d been hospitalized before, the diagnosis had been obvious: knee tumor, a raging ulcerative colitis, dehydration caused by the flu. This time around, though, there was no clear answer. I was a flesh-and-blood question mark.
The eyes of each medical professional who focused on the sunset-red eruption on my torso widened into shock. A couple even gasped. Was it viral? Fungal? Bacterial? The Andromeda Strain? It’s unnerving to be a puzzle-patient, a potential biohazard.
Some things about hospitals haven’t changed. I still adore nurses and their devotion to healing the world, one person at a time. The CT scanner still sounds like a washing machine. And the pokes, pricks and prods toward health still seem infinite.
Similarly, I was again startled and impressed by the furious energy on the hospital floor at all hours, as nurses and doctors, techs and aides, tried to lay some scrim of order on all these human bodies in revolt. And I, too, was a reluctant front in their daily battle.
I typically walk more than an hour each day, and last year I ran or walked some 1,700 miles; I had even been at the track the night before I got sick. So I couldn’t quite believe that my body, without warning, had gone from 60 to zero in just one night. Then I languished at home for a couple days more before my physician banished me to the E.R.
I was blasted with IV antibiotics and constantly eyeballed. My blood flowed into what looked like fancy little wine bottles. Those acts were complemented by the dutiful hour-in-and-hour-out basics: blood pressure (110/70), pulse (60), and temp (99.1 — nobody’s perfect).
One of the biggest changes in 10 years was the constant scanning of my patient wristband: No. 61151734, Male, 62, each check-in marked by the electronic sound of the scanner. Nurse: boop! Doctor: boop! Phlebotomist:, boop! Aide: boop! I felt like a quart of skim milk at the supermarket checkout.
Waiting for my CT scan, I watched a bent old man wearing a worn brown sweater stroke the arm of his wife as she dozed in a gurney. His movements were patient, practiced, full of love. Nearby, a whistling maintenance man, yellow-and-black drill in hand, repaired the door to one of the scanning rooms; it wouldn’t shut all the way. In healing the world, we all have our jobs to do.
As I awoke after a solid night of sleep, I overheard a nurse speaking matter-of-factly on the house phone outside my room: “Would you tell security that we’re going to send that body down?” Then, a moment later, a corpse draped in a crisp white sheet ghosted past my door.
As we age, the stakes seem to rise with each hospitalization. Part of that feeling is wisdom, knowledge. Besides my own hospital stays, I’ve coped with one of my sons having two lung operations when he was a teenager, and then the autoimmune liver failure that nearly killed him. And my parents have been treated for metastatic cancers in the past couple years.
It’s a long way from the summer of 1969, when my sister and I had our tonsils out. Back then, surgery seemed a lark, something to brag about at school. Even when I spent six weeks in the hospital in 1984, as my entire colon shriveled and died, I never imagined that I wouldn’t return to health.
But now, whether patient or visitor, hospitals trigger in me a kind of post-traumatic stress. Those all-too-familiar rooms and hallways set off an uneasy blend of dread, resignation and defiance.
My latest diagnosis ended up vague: some kind of bacterial infection that the doctors said might have been some sort of cellulitis. The throwing of the antibiotic dart worked, though, the rash fading to possum-nose pink, and I was back at work two days later.
What sticks most in my mind about my stay, though, is this: As I waited to be admitted to the hospital, cool antibiotics already coursing through my veins, I listened to a little girl in the E.R. cubicle next to mine. Reassured by her mother, the child, under 10, I guessed, tried hard to be brave. But when a nurse arrived to insert her IV needle, the poor girl dissolved:
“No! No! I’m scared! But I’m scared!”
In her tears and fear I heard the weight of how being in the hospital bears down on the patient, no matter our age. How suddenly potential pain appears, how uncertainty settles on the soul like a carrion crow on a dead squirrel.
And in solidarity, and in my hard-earned wisdom, I couldn’t help but start sobbing, too.