At 10:00 pm, I took off all my clothes and changed into a hospital gown and climbed onto a bed with wheels, a stretcher, whatever. An ultrasound technician wheeled me into her room (an IV had been inserted into my arm after many attempts at finding a vein due to dehydration), and by the time she was done with my tests she had invited me to see Barbra Streisand with her and to find her on facebook. I'm not entirely sure how that came to be, but my husband heard the tail end of our conversation when I got wheeled back to the examining room where he waited. I was on drugs.
When the doctor came, he commented first on my glasses, and then looked at a screen by my head and said, "Wow, you have Pancreatitis. Most people who have Pancreatitis are really sick. You look really good."
This is me pumped full of drugs with an IV stuck in my arm after five hours of dry heaving in the ER bathroom. I was absolutely drenched in cold sweat.
I spent three nights in the hospital. My roommate was an elderly woman named Jean, who ate all kinds of food during the day (my body was still unable to digest food for the majority of that time and the smells of chicken and hearing the words tapioca pudding were too much) and had a slew of visitors, other old ladies and children and grandchildren, who came to sit and talk with her in shifts. Jean was there for shortness of breath, but she seemed to be doing OK. I got up and wheeled my IV behind me every time I had to use the restroom, passing her bed on the other side of the curtain. We said hello on occasion, but most of the time I didn't feel well enough.
I sat in my hospital bed and opened my calendar and canceled every appointment I had that week, every lunch date, everything. I woke up several times each night during the course of my stay to the sound of a nurse asking if I needed more medication, to the feel of a needle drawing more blood, to people shouting in the halls (one man in particular complaining of being discharged before he was ready). I used to feel the need to be completely on at all times and I would worry obsessively if I failed. I wanted to say the funny thing, to wear something surprising, to act appropriately for the occasion, to make everyone like me. Even as I started getting sick, I would pretend I wasn't sick, and instead of just canceling that dinner date and staying home, I would run to the bathroom afterward. I reached a point, however, where it didn't matter if anyone in that hospital saw me naked, if I smelled bad, if Jean and her friends could hear me puking into a basin from the other side of that curtain. I reached a point where it didn't matter that relinquishing control and submitting to something like this was absolutely necessary, I would do it; that the thought of surgery has always scared the shit out of me, but it was going to happen and it was the only way I was going to get better. And it did.
