At 10:00 a.m. a hospital emergency-room doctor declared that I had pneumonia and needed to be admitted. I agreed, despite the fact that my own doctor didn’t have privileges in that hospital. Big mistake! Once admitted, eager-beaver hospital doctors had big plans for me (or maybe it was for themselves) and, over a four-day period, I was tested for everything and anything. They didn’t miss a trick.
It was 6:00 p.m. before I was finally settled into a room. My daughters were with me and telling me to relax. With doctors waltzing in and out every few minutes, relaxing wasn’t even a hope. By midnight, everyone had departed, except for the daughter who insisted upon spending the night in a chair next to my bed. She closed the light and I closed my eyes. But, just as I was drifting off to sleep, another doctor popped into my room to say that a test result had just come back indicating that there could be clots in my lungs. I needed an immediate CT scan. It was not a comforting moment.
At 1:00 a.m. I was returned to my room to find a reception committee. Three doctors surrounded my bed and told me that the scan showed pneumonia but there were no clots. However (there was always a however) the results of other tests I’d had during the day were just now coming back and indicating other possible problems. They were scaring me half to death with possibilities. “You possibly have a heart problem and you possibly have a kidney problem.†The only thing I didn’t possibly have was dog fleas! “You need an angiogram first thing tomorrow but you’ll need to give signed permission for a stent in case there’s a blockage and for transfer to another facility in case you need open heart surgery.†That was when I knew why the windows in my room didn’t open. It was to prevent patients from jumping out.
Silently, I called for Arnie. But Hubby was a no-show. He didn’t appear until I came to my senses and allowed him to. And this I did by reminding myself what he would have said and how he would have said it. Then I heard him. “Hannah, if you haven’t had a heart attack after today, you never will. Stop worrying. There’s nothing wrong with your heart.†He was with me and I relaxed.
Before the angiogram, I was to have nothing to eat or drink for several hours and, despite my hacking cough, I wasn’t allowed a single drop of water. No one but my daughter seemed to care that I was choking. She held my hand and we waited. The test was scheduled for 9:00 a.m. but when no one came for me by 10:30, she went to inquire about the delay and learned that the test had been cancelled but that the nurse had forgotten to tell us. I prayed my daughter wouldn’t hurt her! Now that was a real possibility.
Later, a doctor came to explain that I’d had dye for the lung scan and that injecting me with more dye for the angiogram would be too taxing for my less than perfect kidneys. That was why the test had been cancelled. Apparently they aren’t all that worried about a heart blockage. I heard Hubby’s “What did I tell you?†I lay there and smiled and the doctor probably thought I was being sociable.
Confused by so many contradictions, I asked questions. “If no clots were found in my lungs, why did one of the tests indicate that there might be? If the scan showed pneumonia why didn’t the X-ray show it? Why did only a few of the doctors who ‘listened’ to my chest hear the pneumonia?†And there was Hubby again, whispering, “Wait till you hear the bubbeh meisa answers you’re going to get now.†As always, he was right on target.
“No test is perfect so we don’t know why your D-dimer test results were so elevated but we had to check it out.†I didn’t know what a D-dimer test was or why I’d had one but I opted not to ask. “Pneumonia can’t always be seen on an X-ray and yours was not.†And lastly, “Not all doctors interpret chest sounds the same way.â€
The answers weren’t satisfactory, but it made little difference because by then I had figured out that I wasn’t merely a hospital patient, I was also a prisoner. Thank G-d everything turned out fine but it was one of the most frightening days of my life. It was also one of the longest.
The next day, still insisting that I might have a heart problem, a doctor ordered that I be fitted with a Holter monitor and transferred to the telemetry ward for monitoring. So off I went, rolled in my bed, into an elevator, and down to another floor. New room, new nurse, new everything! This was getting to be a habit.
The first days in the hospital, I was attended to at all times by my daughters but I insisted that they were not to stay with me over the holiday. That called for another conference and together they left my room, returning a few minutes later to inform me that a decision had been reached. My friend Idella would stay with me over Shavuos. She would be my companion and my advocate and she would sleep at a hospitality house next to the hospital. I almost wept with relief. If I’d had the energy I would have done a horah. My hovering daughters would go home and Idella would stay. Idella is one of my soulmates. I’m privileged to have several of those. Note: Only mature women have soulmates. It rarely happens early in life and almost never happens between two men. Optimally, husbands and wives are soulmates to each other but that’s about it for males. It’s rare even between mothers and children regardless of how much love exists between them.
I loved having my daughters with me but they belonged at home with their families for Shavuos. Having Idella with me would be perfect. And the hospital staff would be overjoyed to see my girls leave. When my nurse took an entire day to call my cardiologist’s office to request a fax of my recent test results, one daughter screamed, “Our holiday starts at sundown and the doctor’s office is closing in two hours. Do it right now!†Another daughter said, “I don’t want interns or residents, I want an attending physician to take care of my mother.†My nurse rolled her eyes and explained hospital facts of life to her. A third daughter asked every doctor who approached my bed where he did his training. I was embarrassed but too sick to do anything about any of it so I just let Larry, Curly, and Moe do their thing, and took comfort in the fact that within a few hours this loving triumvirate would depart and Idella would arrive.
Lab technicians were constantly taking blood from me and what was left of my blood was being thinned by Heparin in my IV and a diet of Plavix and Aspirin. And they were wondering why I felt weak? I was wondering why they were wondering! And I wanted to tell them but, lacking the energy, I just quietly lay there with IV lines in both arms and oxygen cannulas in my nostrils, feeling as helpless as an infant.
On a brutally hot day I was sent for a nuclear stress test. The outdoor temperature was 94 degrees but in the nuclear department it was bone-chillingly cold. I sat shivering in my designer hospital gown until one kind soul noticed my discomfort and quickly covered me with one blanket and draped a second one around my neck and shoulders. The blankets were a replica of my mother’s dairy dish towels from the 1950s; white, with three blue stripes at each end. I resembled a cross between an overstuffed dish towel and the late Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Later that same day, my daughters departed, yom tov arrived and so did Idella who, not surprisingly, was a huge comfort.
I had come into the hospital with only the clothes on my back but my daughters had somehow managed to bring everything from my house that wasn’t nailed down. I was surrounded with all the comforts of home, with one exception; I would have killed for tissues that didn’t feel like sandpaper.
As I suspected, as sick as I was, from the time Idella arrived until the time she left, I smiled. I was unable to laugh because when I attempted to do that I would cough and choke. But she kept me entertained and relaxed—something my daughters, because of their inexperience with illness combined with their youth, were unable to do.
Eventually I improved and was discharged with instructions to have another chest X-ray in three weeks, in order to chart my progress. And I thought, if the original X-ray didn’t show the pneumonia, how will another one show if it’s better? I didn’t bother to voice that question aloud because I knew from experience that the answer wasn’t likely to make sense to me. So I simply pasted a smile on my kisser, said my goodbyes, and left. And as I did, I thought, this hospital experience was no picnic, but it’s true that every cloud has a silver lining because Hubby had been by my side. And, this time, my smile was genuine.
Hannah Berman lives in Woodmere and is a licensed real-estate broker associated with Marjorie Hausman Realty. She can be reached at Savtahannah@aol.com or 516-902-3733.
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