Blue Wool Ski Cap to the Rescue

It was a bone-chilling November day when I called 911. Despite whatever demons were bedeviling the living daylights out of my gut, I had the presence of mind to grab my blue wool ski cap before the EMT wheeled me out to the waiting ambulance. Later I would regret not clicking the square, magnetized light gizmo onto the cap. At the time, I just wanted the warmth and the shield from one of Seattle’s winter-rare dazzingly sunny days.

I had been in intense pain – 15 on a scale of 10, I told the emergency dispatcher. Nonetheless, my coping mechanism of sarcasm was intact when I got to the hospital. It bubbled up silently to counter the frustration of being at the mercy of the health care system. I had avoided involvement with conventional Western medicine since 1984 when a high risk pregnancy forced a six week incarceration. I had forgotten how mechanistic it is.

Although standard procedure forced me out of my sweatpants and turtleneck, I kept the ski cap on, pulling it down over my eyes like a blindfold. The cap was a nice match for the blue print hospital gown, so at least I was making a color coordinated fashion statement. Never underestimate the healing power of the little things, I told myself as a nurse inserted an IV into my left arm while an ER doc was the first of three others to take my history in the next 2 hours.

In the ER, the overhead lights tortured my brain. I suppose it’s useful for docs and nurses to see what they’re doing, my inner curmudgeon muttered to no one but me. I suppressed a laugh. No good would come from the nurses calling in a psych consult for the crazy lady cackling out loud with a ski cap over her eyes.

“Are you sensitive to light?” someone asked. Like that was a symptom.

“Yes. Always. That’s not new,” I reassured them, not wanting treatment for something that wasn’t the problem.

Wanting to show my cooperative side, I lifted one edge of the cap up to an eyebrow to make eye contact when a doctor who hadn’t introduced himself announced that they wanted a CT scan, like he was seeking permission to treat me.

“Yes, I think that would be best.” I easily stepped into the role of a consulting physician. I had flunked out of my improv theater class in college, but this seemed natural to my Capricorn inner self who often assumed authority I was not getting paid to use. Someone rolled me down a cold, bright hallway, then asked if I needed help getting onto the scan table. “I can manage,” I said, and did.

“Can I keep my hat on?” I asked blindly, momentarily confusing a computed tomography (CT) scan with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). I didn’t want to end up stuck to the inside of what I thought of as a medical tunnel. Or because of the metal points that held the cap’s light gizmo to stick on, I didn’t want my head ripped off accidentally due to magnetic force.

“No problem. The scan is only taking images of your abdomen,” a new voice behind me answered. “Can you raise your arms above your head, and rest them on the pillow?” the voice asked. “I’m going to use your IV port here,” he tapped my left arm, “to run some contrast in so we can get good pictures.”

I appreciated being told the procedure’s process. I’m sure they do that so that people don’t jump or yell or move in a way that wrecks placement of IVs, or in some other way causes problems for themselves and the technicians. They didn’t know I wouldn’t have done that. I assumed I’d be touched, poked, or handled in maybe uncomfortable ways and was using a kind of meditative breathing to keep myself receptive in order to hasten things along. Meditative breathing is very useful in establishing equanimity – that is, in not over-reacting to the unfamiliar and distressing.

After the scan, I was returned to my ER room. Someone had paid attention to my aversion to bright light and had just one small side light on when I was wheeled in.

“Is there anything you need?” the someone asked as he pulled the curtain closed across the glass wall facing the overly lit nurses station. He probably wondered if I needed to go to the bathroom but didn’t ask. He got a warm blanket out of a cabinet and draped it over my legs. I dragged it up to my neck. “A nurse will be in soon to hook you back up to the IV,” he said while putting an automatic blood pressure cuff on my right bicept.

The every 20 minutes’ pinching pain of that cuff rivaled the gut pain that had started this odyssey. I tolerated it for about an hour. Then, when no one had come to tell me about the scan, I removed the cuff. That brought nurses to my room, just as I had planned.  I stifled a grin.

“Any word on what the CT showed?” Before anyone answered, one of them was trying to reattach the cuff. “I don’t want that. It’s too painful,” I said. To my surprise, they left it off.

A new white coated doc entered, stood against the room’s counter, and introduced himself as an infectious disease specialist. “You have several things we are concerned about,” he said. I pulled the cap up a bit so I could be respectful. “There’s an abscess near an ovary we’ll want to drain. And a mass in the intestines to investigate more. There are some spots on the liver and what looks like a nodule on a lung. It’s a good thing you came in when you did. Did you know about any of these?”

“No. But that all explains a lot.”

“So we’re going to admit you, and as soon as a room is ready you’ll go upstairs. We’ll start you on 24/7 IV antibiotics tonight, and get a drain put in tomorrow. You should start to feel better soon,” he said. I liked him. He was straight-forward, didn’t dumb down the delivery of his information. He was a well-seasoned specialist.

“Any questions for me?” he asked.

“Not now. Maybe tomorrow.”

“Good. Then have a good night and I’ll see you after the drain is in.” He smiled in what seemed a genuinely friendly way, and left.

A few minutes later another white coat came in and introduced herself as a hospitalist. I‘d heard that term before but it never made sense to me. What is that, a doctor who treats sick hospitals? the inner curmudgeon snarked in my mind. She sat on a low stool and rolled close to my bedside. “I’d like to get a history,” she said.

Do these people not write stuff down, or talk to each other, the curmudgeon continued her criticisms. I nodded and said yeah, while a nurse on one side was hanging a second bag for my IV and one on the other side was manually taking another blood pressure reading. The hospitalist asked me something just as someone else stuck a thermometer in my mouth.

Don’t they have instruments for that that don’t have to be inserted? Good question, I thought picturing the tool the eye doc’s receptionist rolled over my forehead in the covid years. Since I temporarily couldn’t speak, the doctor said, “It looks like you have diverticulitis. That’s likely been the cause of your pain.”

Huh. New information. So the scarier sounding things the infectious disease guy talked about wasn’t the main problem? That seemed contradictory and confusing. I would get used to every physician telling me something different that often wouldn’t connect with what a previous one had just said.

I felt relieved though. I had researched gut problems, and diverticulitis was manageable if not permanently ended with changes in diet.

She then proceeded to ask most of the same history-taking questions, and I tried not to be completely creative, or sarcastic, with this round of answers. But I sighed loudly and thought, how dull to repeat all the same info over and over again. Is this a mental test? Why doesn’t she just ask me to remember “person, women, man, camera, tv.”

It was close to 11 pm by the time I got settled into a private room. The night nurse came in, flipped on the glaring overhead lights, introduced herself, and before anything else, asked my name and birthdate. Then she explained someone had prescribed a pain killer and an anti-nausea med. She asked if I wanted a snack like a packet of peanut butter, a cup of pudding, or graham crackers to help them go down. I hadn’t eaten all day, but none of those sounded appetizing.

Before the nurse left, the night technician came in, asked my name and birthdate, and took my vitals. Both women were clearly competent in their jobs and quite pleasant to have around, but the tech forgot to turn off the lights, and I had to get up, still tethered to an IV, and go turn them off. Well, no matter, I thought. I’ll get them trained.

Each one came in three more, separate, times during the night to take vitals, ask if I needed more meds, see if I wanted help getting to the private bathroom. I got no sleep, and was pretty cranky by the morning.

Mornings apparently start in hospitals at 5 AM when a lab tech comes to siphon out blood so decisions can be made about how many more medications I’d be given that day. Low potassium? Magnesium not where we’d like it? Anemic? They had a pharmaceutical for that.

Then, as if because staff is awake, everyone else should be too, nurses change shifts at 7 AM and come to get acquainted, followed quickly by physician rounds. “How did you sleep?” one of them wanted to know. “I haven’t yet,” I growled. “How do you feel?” someone asked. “How would I know? I’m not conscious yet,”  I groaned under my ski cap.

Mornings in my world don’t usually start until 9 AM. This was middle of night, sleep abuse to me. And they didn’t turn out the g-damn lights! I can’t form coherent sentences until I’ve had coffee and several hours of encouraging my brain to function.

I’d never been so glad for my blue wool ski cap. And it had never been worn for so long over my eyes. I just knew at some point a psych consult would be in my future.

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© 2024 Deah Curry

This post is part of The End Creeps Closer story, and is not yet assigned to a chapter.