I’m home now recovering from a spinal fusion operation. I can’t do opioids because they don’t work on except to constipate, so no pain pills. They say humor originates in pain. If so, I’ll be funny for the next few weeks.
All hospital stays are surreal. (Or is is only me.) This one had a weirdness of legendary proportions. My tale:
OK, First night in hospital. I have eight separate tubes, insertions, drains and devices connected to my body from literally head to foot. I’ve just have back surgery. Two separate incisions, one into the spine and one four inches to the left into the hip to withdraw bone to insert in between two vertebra that need separating. Both incisions have a shunt that is leaking blood into a collector bulb. You’d think that sleeping on one’s stomach would make sense at that point. You have never worked in a hospital. Nurses find the thought of anyone not sleeping on their back unfathomable. Certainly they think it’s physically impossible for anyone with iv’s in both wrists to succeed in the maneuver. They are fooled. Carefully and slowly I work my body from supine to prone. I grab all my pillows into a ball under my head. I even manage to fall asleep.
There is a pole next to the bed. It is the only thing in a hospital without a seven-syllable name. It is technically called a “pole.” If they want to get fancy in the sales department they call it an “iv pole,” because that’s where the bags of fluid hang. One glance at it and you, the patient, see the misnomer. Instruments abound. E.g. the bags’ contents are monitored. If one empties an alert is sent out. Not to the nurses station where a nurse might hear, no. That advanced our technology is not. Instead the pole beeps, steadily, incessantly, three feet from the patient’s head. Stopping the beeping is more than a matter of pressing a stop button. The idiot patient might have the wits to do that. A numbered code must be punched in. There are many codes. There are many beeps. Nurses remember the codes as well as they remember their passwords to myspace.friendster.com.
Still, my friends, the instruments have their pride in their technology. And for another example, what if a nurse should be so foolish as to forget to plug the furshlugginer thing in? Without an electronic sigh the instruments switch over to battery power. Now imagine an additional improbability, and I realize I’m heaping Pelion upon Ossa here, but improbabilities are the game we play, no? What if nobody has checked the reserve battery power in many a shift change? What if the batteries run out, without even the elementary low battery warning signal that a Dollar Store smoke detector would be embarrassed to lack?
The nurses must be told. Heck, the whole hospital must be told. The instruments find within themselves the AAA alkaline battery they have been carefully protecting since their birth at the pole plant and tell it, kid, this is your time to shine. With the will of an understudy taking the lead and dammit, coming back a star, it withdraws all its power to create a mighty din akin to the whistle of the steam locomotive bearing down at the helpless ingénue tied to the tracks.
Ladies and gentlemen, friends and relatives, members of the media, ambassadors from other nations, I am proud to tell you that at that exact instant I set the local, national, North American, and World records for the prone vault. This was the middle of the night in a darkened room. I had been sound asleep. In the forced interregnum of a hospital stay I had not, as is my normal wont, fallen asleep clutching a measuring tape should the occasion rise. Yet I say to you, beyond any possible human doubt, that at time t = .0001 no part of my body was with four feet of any part of the bed surface. The ineluctable equations of gravity therefore reveal that exactly 0.50 seconds later my body returned to the bed at a speed of 4.89 m/s or 10.93 mph. I take these numbers from The Splat Calculator. An exquisitely perfect name. At t = .5001 seconds I splat. During those 0.50 seconds, like a supernova temporarily eclipsing the rest of its galaxy, the noises I emitted overpowered the feeble efforts of the combined beepers and screams on the pole. At some point between t = .5001 and t = 2.50 I channeled the existential plight of all humankind and asked into the darkness: “What just happened?”
Despite the fact that I was not attached to a heart monitor, which therefore had no way to dramatically flatten an oscilloscope into a flat line with accompanying ominous beep, and despite the fact that missing a few drops of saline drip was a minimal lacunae in my medical treatment, the machine continued to scream at the top of its tweeter some dire message whose exact words left no long-term memory tracks in my scrambled brain. Hospitals no longer shout over ceiling-set loudspeakers every few minutes. Once or twice a day, though, a truly dire call for a stroke team or trauma team would bellow throughout the entire hospital. At that moment, t = 0, my plight was announced to the world at the same urgency as theirs, circumstances notwithstanding.
Two nurses emerged by my bedside. They read the codes on the instruments and deduced what had happened. They turned to me. What they saw gave them pause and faint heart. I had splatted. When things splat, smaller parts of the things or those attached to it fly off in all directions, sometimes oddly far. The least secure items attached to me were the oxygen to the nose – trivial – and the collector vials of blood from the shunts in my back – also medically trivial. In the non-medical, comfort of patient world, however, we had hit Code Red. The collectors opened up upon impact and were squeezed by my body during the following convulsions and convolutions. Blood was later found to be everywhere. The pillow that was once underneath my head and thereby protected as much as any item in the room was soaked in blood. The pole received its comeuppance and needed to be scrubbed. I needed to be scrubbed.
Scrub they did. I got a new gown. They pulled the bed apart to its foundation underneath me, finding blood, and built it up, layer by layer, sheet by pad by sheet, painfully rolling me over back and forth to work on whatever corner I did not occupy. My bulbs were recapped and taped shut as a precaution. My vitals were retaken, probably to give them numbers to laugh at in the lunchroom.
Finally, they left. The room went dark. I began the slow process of turning over to sleep on my stomach.
