This is how you sleep in a hospital. Plugs to block the beeps, bleats, whirrs, and squeaking crocs. Bandanna across the eyes to keep out as much of the permanent lighting--growing dawn if you haven't slept, or piercing top-light when they come in to change, adjust, check, prod, remove, or verify something.
But why, you might ask, does this photo appear here? A good two weeks almost since getting out, and a good two weeks at least before going back in?
Well, that's where the fever comes in, screaming (to lift a violent image from Judas Priest) for vengeance. The world is a damnable place.
After the Halford/Ozzy show, things were going along just fine. I was tired but improving, counts responding as they tended to. I get a couple fake-OK days before the bottom drops out, and usually by then I still just need to be careful and take it easy and then the Neulasta catches up to the damage and I start a slow climb back to OK enough to--ta dah!--get hit again.
Mom and Jim were up for last weekend and we took a nice long cold walk to the Little Red Lighthouse that stands at the river's edge beneath the George Washington Bridge. A good four miles total from subway to subway, I would say.
After they left I went to the gym and did a little chemathlon: a mile on foot, 20 super-easy minutes on the bike, 20 laps. Came home tired--N said I looked too tired--but that was about it.
Monday is all day at the clinic: White count down to .2 and I need blood and platelets, so had to postpone a job; but that's how it goes these days and the employer was OK with it.
Tuesday I started the first day of a new audiobook, meeting a new director and new engineer at a publishing house I hope to work for again. That day went well; I got a lot of pages read and things seemed fine.
On the way home I feel a chill--which makes sense because it is in the high 20's and blowin' like a bitch out there.
As soon as I get home I take a hot shower to warm up--which should have been a signal flare, right there.
After the shower I just kind of lay about, saying I was beat but didn't want to sleep because if I went to bed at 6:30 I would get up at 3am and have a horrible Zombie dawn, padding around the apartment thinking about nothing other than the fact that I wanted to sleep.
N, smarter and more observant, as is her wont, suggests maybe we take my temperature.
Except she has a superstition that if I see the results it will turn out better. So she holds the fancy-schmancy unit we bought because we saw the hospital staff using them and figured, hell, if your temperature is this important, this a a perfectly good hundred bucks spent (and we were right). She slips the protective one-use sleeve over the temp probe, puts it under my tongue, and then turns the hand-held unit to face me, so I can watch the little cursor spin and spin and spin until...
101.9
Oh, hell.
Just for the record, 100.5 is the supposed 'go to the ER' number. But we learned after the second HYPER CVAD round that Neulasta makes me run a little hot and 100.5, while unpleasant, would be more of a 'call the clinic or service or whomever, calm down, and take your temp again an hour later.'
We waited fifteen minutes (N unknowingly draining all the humour from one of the few funny moments I ever had from the handful of times I tried weed when she yelled in anguish "it's been 6:13 for way too long!") and took it again.
101.9.
Fuck. Now I'm scared, and N is existing in this hard-to-watch state of fear, exhaustion, control, planning, preparation, despair, and worry. I think she kinda lives that way a lot, but the rubber-meets-the-road moments like this are when you can really see it. This will not be the first time I apologize to her, as we gather together a night's worth of stuff, my meds, the essentials we keep near the door for just such an occasion.
We've had a fifty dollar bill under a magnet next to an ever-updated list of the meds I am 'currently' on. And, for some reason, we never use it. It it grab-fast cab fare, specifically set aside so that it can be manhandled as fast as need be when the frantic 'OK get to a hospital right now!' moment finally comes. But we never use it. We use the money in our wallets, money laying around somewhere else in the apartment, the ATM, anything but that money magneted there for that purpose.
And I think it because grabbing the 'emergency' fifty is calling it an emergency, and that's just too scary. There's already enough going wrong every day; adding that kind of stress on top just isn't worth the four extra minutes it might take to ascertain where cab fare to the Upper East will come from.
It takes 10 minutes or so to get gathered, and we put in a call to the Cancer Floor because the Drs offices are closed and we will likely know one of the people there. It is 7 or so, during shift change, so why not?
We get the redheaded Norwegian shipbuilder with whom we've had many a great chat--she loves the night shift because she got into this field to work with patients, not Drs [the logic is so inescapable I have since wondered how day-shifts stay populated].
We take my temp again as we call, so we can tell her it is...
99.4
Well, shit. Now what do we do? 99.4, while high, is well within the Neulasta range from two months ago, and that cleared up on its own.
But there were two 101.9s, and the PA on the phone would clearly prefer that we get looked at. So it is settled. My Echinacea tea will just have to steep overnight: we're off.
Traffic is mediocre, but I am a mess. I am crying and apologizing to N. All I can feel--as we put little micro-lives into ever-smaller places for our stuff (Nod to Carlin for the framework and the genius to illuminate it), as we overturn one schedule after another, as we fall farther and farther away from what we thought our lives would be at this point--is bad. Bad husband, bad friend, bad person.
I have stolen a year of her life. Her second book is out, is great, and she should be freewheeling the country if not the globe basking in the reactions of people she urges to read it.
Instead we're in a cab on 3rd Avenue, on our way to the ER. Again.
She, of course, will have none of this. Tells me that bonding together as friends and partners involves the shitty and the sublime both. That she would still rather be with me, even right now, as we dig through our pockets for the 19 bucks it took to get us to the City-state.
She's right--shocker--and I am feeling self-pity to mask the fear that this is the one, the fever that turns septic and burns a hole in my weakened GI tract and swirls my battered innards down the drain of my pelvis and I am found dead, midriff blotchy and rank, on the cold paving stones between the cab stand and the ER.
Or not.
The PA from the Cancer Floor has told us to make sure and say at check-in that I am neutropenic (white count .2 the day before, so I'm pretty much dead-tropenic, for what it is worth) so that they can fast-track us at the ER.
Or not.
There seems to be some acknowledgment of my heightened, cancerous state, but not a lot. "A Charlie Brown Christmas" is blaring from all screens in the waiting room. I actually look forward to the moment when Linus steps on stage and recites a bible passage, bold and quiet. Even for the late sixties, or whenever it was first aired, that blunt, brief, grounded attempt to place Christmas somewhere other than the north pole always touched me, even as I eschewed the ghost stories and mind-control of most religious storytelling.
A local semi-celebrity news guy and his wife come in while we're waiting. She's recently given birth and is having issues.
They get treated exactly as we did. Which is a comfort. "That's nice, dear. Sit down."
I wonder if celebrities know that part of their service to society is as counterweights to the feeling that most of us are getting the shitty end of the stick. Nicke Nolte's horrid, startling mug shot goes a long way to making people who bemoan their lack of the best beauty products and personal chefs feel better. And that's nice.
N has taken it upon herself to get noticed--and, for the record, when she does that the unfortunate people on the other end of whatever it is she is attempting would best be served just doing what he wants, because she's gonna win; just face it, she's a tiny quiet slim wand of devastation. You lose.
We get noticed--shocker--and taken into a curtained area to be prepped and questioned etc. A nice NP from the Islands and his local counterpart were both incapable of getting a rattlesnake into my port, so I was poked and bled from many a spot up to then needle-free.
My low numbers did earn us a closed room in the ER, where we spent the first night. N, in a chair, with her coat on and her head on the edge of my bed, slept maybe twenty-five minutes that night: Tuesday.
Some time Wednesday we were brought upstairs, but, because of the packed Cancer Floor that kept us downstairs last night, we end up on the Geriatric wing that abuts the Cancer Floor. Our roommate turned one hundred one the day before, and he is getting over the flu. And coughing. Sharp as a tack, but coughing, hacking.
I had to cancel pretty much the entire week of work, which will either be a setback or a loss of work--can't know until I get out and am available if they will still want to use me.
The fever is horrid. Awful. In many ways worse than just about anything else I have gone through with this. Knocked down, screaming headache for days, no desire to eat or drink, heart averaging 100 beats per minute to keep up with the self-immolation, blood pressure dangling above dangerously low as I sweat out what little fluid is still in me.
There are times when I am hooked to lots and lots of drips.
There are time when three blankets can't stop the shivering.
There are times when N and a nurse are trying to help me find places for all the cold-packs they want me to push up against the spots where blood flows. Side of the neck, behind the knee, in the armpit, between the thighs.
The one under the bandanna against my bald head hurts the most. But I guess it does the job.
N and I miss a wonderful Christmas Jazz concert by a colleague from the union; a calm and musical date we were both very excited about.
We miss my agent's birthday party, a celebration of his aged-ness and universally-beloved-ness we were both sad to have to watch float by without us.
Time creases and folds, sleep is broken. Sweat, chill, languish, sweat, burn, chill.
Then it ends. Supposedly the last time I spiked a fever was yesterday (Thursday) mid-morning, which means they think I can go home tomorrow.
The Chief Dr came by last night, and this episode may or may not effect when we come back in for the last hit. Too soon to tell.
But that's what you get. That's what you get for thinking it was going well, thinking about Maintenance, thinking about what's next. Planning for trips, saying things like 'When I feel better we'll..."
That's what you friggin' get. You get a fever. And that is more than enough to drag your eyes right back to the little piece of road right in front of you.
Do not look left, do not look right, do not nod off, do not day dream.
Left foot, right foot, repeat.
