When it started I cannot tell you; nor can I tell you
when—or even if—it will end.
Right—“it” may not be the word, unless you mean a
three-month period of torrential pain, hospitalizations, emergency room visits,
and terror. But perhaps “they” is the better word, since the whole ordeal began
with stomach virus.
“Eat,” adjured Mr. Fernández, my husband, “you have to eat!”
It had become well past annoying. I had lost any appetite
for fried—however lightly—food: the smell of it was nauseating. And much of the
meat we eat is lightly sautéed in whatever the healthy oil of the month is. So
mealtimes became agonizing: I would pick at my food, arrange wine bottles
strategically in front of my plate, invent excuses of eating late lunches.
The loss of appetite was the one mentionable symptom of the
virus, which I must have had for years. In fact, in those years of working at
the home office of Walmart, I had assumed that I—like every other middle
manager—had irritable bowel syndrome. It was almost a badge of honor—like
working until they closed the building, or sending emails from home at 3 AM.
After the weekly bloodbath on Friday morning—that was when the complete team
would assemble—there would be a stampede for the bathrooms, and it was always
the stalls, never the urinals, that were needed.
So my stomach was bad, and my guts were contorted but guess
what? That was the price you paid. But why, six months ago, did everything get
worse?
It’s one of the mysteries of the virus, Helicobacter
pylori, which apparently lives contentedly in the guts for years, before it
gets uppity, goes on a rampage, and decides to kill its host. And so for months
I suffered every indignity the gastric system could devise, until one Monday I
could bear it no longer: I called my doctor. When she heard about the various
eruptions from all orifices, she told me what any sensible practitioner would:
go to the emergency room.
Going to the emergency room is a code term for submitting
yourself into a different world—one in which your neither know the landscape
nor the language. Though in fact I did, since I had worked for ten years as a
nurse. That, however, had been in serene Wisconsin, and then later in more
dicey Chicago. But in Puerto Rico? How would I fare here?
I arrived at noon, I sat for an hour in the waiting room,
until I was called into triage: this in itself was a bit alarming. Granted, I
wasn’t spewing blood all over the furniture, but how did they know I was having
a heart attack? Were they that good, that they could diagnose at mere
glance?
Finally I was called, and learned two things: by blood
pressure was seriously low—90 over 60—and my weight had dropped fifteen pounds
in the last two months. So then it was time to sit for another hour in the
hallway of the emergency room itself—all the better so that I could imagine
from the groans, and sighs of the patients lucky enough to have beds what was
happening behind their curtains. My companion in all of this was a woman
suffering what must have been pneumonia. I had once either read or imagined
that the velocity of a sneeze is around ninety miles an hour: my companion’s
cough was easily twice that. So it was clear: however effective the cure for my
guts might be, I’d still end up here in two weeks time, for a malady one system
north. The Walmart manager in me began to admire the business model: the
emergency room was clearly curing one disease even as it was incubating the
next one. And so after I was afflicted with and then cured of the pneumonia,
what would the next malady be? Strep throat? Migraine? And would it always
travel upward? If not, were ingrown toenails contagious?
Worse, I began to see what the daily rag had been saying all
these many months, since virtually everybody was over 80: I, in my late
fifties, was at last once again the spring chicken. So there was no lack of
patients—indeed, it was the Christmas story of no room at the inn—but where
were the doctors? Easy—three thousand miles northwest in the states, where they
can make a decent living.
Here, it’s time to say that Puerto Rican doctors are—in
general—much better than their gringo
counterparts. Why? I’ve no idea, but they are both better prepared academically
and spend more time more caringly than other doctors. That said, the doctor who
admitted me was the complete exception.
We started off well enough: I told her my symptoms, she
asked the right questions, and then prodded the four quadrants of my abdomen.
Since I didn’t scream and hit the ceiling, we both knew it wasn’t appendicitis.
So that left the other diagnosis: the rioting virus that would put me on the
path to peritonitis, which, untreated, would lead me straight to the
undertaker.
“Can we do this on an outpatient basis?” I asked, and it was
here that the relationship began to plummet. She outlined how precarious my
health was, suggested that I might not even make it to the pharmacy before the
grim reaper scythed me in my path, and then pointed at me, and told the
chilling words: “I own you.”
It was clear: she had major control issues. But by then it
was two or three in the afternoon, I had wasted the day, and why not get it
over with, if I could? I found myself—at last—on a bed. The blood was drawn,
the IV inserted, and then the drugs were given. All of this was done with the
least interaction possible. It was clear: I was less a person than a collection
of disorderly veins and guts. So I found out for myself what medicines were
dripping into me, and remembered them from nursing days long past: Cipro and
Flagyl. In fact, they were utterly the right medicines to give me.
They also proved nearly fatal….
