Hospital Chronicles, Part 2 - Big C

On a cloudy Tuesday, a couple days after being back home in Los Angeles, it was time for me to go to a doctor for my post-pneumonia checkup. I was feeling better at this point and imagined that the checkup would be no big deal. Sparky and I decided to go to Silverlake Medical where we could pay out of pocket. After dropping Bee at preschool we headed over there. With my paperwork and the CD of my lung x-rays from the emergency room doctor clutched tightly in my hand, I was pretty confident that I would be in and out of there in no time. I was just looking for confirmation that I had licked the pneumonia and could continue with normal life. 

The first thing the nurses did was take my blood pressure and heart rate and declare them both too high. Duh. I always get nervous in these situations. I was then given a bed in a large room that contained other beds. I didn't have to put on the dreaded hospital gown, but rather laid on top of the sheets while they closed the curtains around me. There were other people in the room and none of them seemed to be in very great shape. One lady was wearing an hospital gown and slippers, and was pacing up and down the floor and around her bed, moaning and groaning about how much pain she was in. I'll call her "Junky". Nobody paid any attention to Junky as she complained for over an hour. She finally took off her gown and replaced it with her street clothes and disappeared out the exit door. She was still wearing her slippers. I guess Junky figured the nurses were on to her and decided to hit the streets and score on her own. The guy next to me I thought of as both "Hungry" and then "Poopie". He kept repeating over and over again: "Nurse, I'm hungry." He must have said it at least a hundred times. Finally a nurse told him that he couldn't eat anything because of his ailment - stomach problems. Poor guy. And then he started repeating this over and over again: "Nurse, I shit my pants." Poor, poor guy, I really did feel badly for him. A nurse finally came over and helped him to the bathroom where I assumed they cleaned him up and outfitted him with adult diapers. The other two people in the room were unconscious so I've no idea what was wrong with them. (This whole situation did not freak me out as much as I thought it would. I just chalked it up to healthcare in America, the anti-socialist country where only the lucky workers with job benefits have decent insurance.)

While all of this was going on around me, I was being attended to by Dr. Nelson, who looked at my records and decided to give me another chest x-ray and draw some blood. She also thought that I was too skinny and asked me if I had lost a bunch of weight lately. Of course I had because I had been so nauseous while I was sick, and prior to that I had been on a Vegan diet for the purpose of trying to lose some weight. (My mother, by the way, blamed my bout with pneumonia on my Vegan diet, and made me promise that I would go back to being just a Vegetarian.) Alarm bells started going off in the good doctor's head, and when she looked at the new x-ray she decided that she did not like the "spot" on my lung. So another chest x-ray was done to see if they could get a better shot of it. Dr. Nelson then told me that my red blood platelets were way too high. They are supposed to number in the thousands and mine measured in the millions. She thought that maybe there was a mistake so she ordered another blood test drawn. She also asked me if I ever smoked, and when I said yes but I had long since quit, she made me give her details: for how long, how much, when, etc. I was starting to get nervous at this point and called Sparky to come back. He had left to pickup Bee from preschool and had told me to call him when I was ready to come home. 

Dr. Nelson brought me a Vegetarian lunch which she procured herself from the employee cafeteria. I forced myself to eat most of it even though I was too nervous to be hungry just to prove to her that yes, I did have an appetite again. This made her very happy, and she rewarded me by letting me sit out in the waiting room with Sparky and Bee once they arrived back at the clinic. Sparky and I sat side by side with a wall mounted TV blaring CNN nonsense, as poor Bee watched a cartoon on the iPad. We didn't talk much, but quietly held hands while time slowed. Everyone who's been in this situation knows the fact of "hospital trouble" warping time. Nothing can make it move correctly, and each passing moment feels more anxious than the next. Something was definitely wrong, really wrong, and waiting for Dr. Nelson's diagnosis was our only option. 

We were finally called back inside where I sat on my little bed with Sparky next to me. One of the nurses kept an eye on Bee while the doctor spoke to us. Dr. Nelson said that her colleagues had all seen the x-rays and agreed that they looked very suspicious. The second blood test came back with the same high platelet number, millions instead of thousands. And I had had a rapid weight lost. She told me that it looked like I may have lung cancer. Lung cancer? WTF? Did she really just say lung cancer? Fear welled up in the pit of my stomach and washed over me; I felt both cold and hot at the same time. I had to remind myself to breathe. But it could be something else, right? What about the pneumonia? She told us that she wasn't there at the emergency room so she did not know if I'd even actually had pneumonia. This did nothing to quell the grip my fear had on me. I was holding Sparky's hand so tightly, as though I needed it to bind myself to the earth. Sparky asked her some questions but I suddenly couldn't hear what they were saying.

She then looked at me intently and told me that I had to go to either USC or UCLA immediately. There was fear on her face - a very troubling thing to see in your physician. Go right now, today, which one? I asked where she'd gone to school and she replied "UCLA - USC is our rival!" This made us laugh nervously - nothing is funny at this point. Dr. Nelson then said that they were both good teaching hospitals and either one of them would take great care of me. Our laughter actually helped and I immediately decided on USC because it was far closer to our home in Echo Park. She made us promise again that we would go as soon as possible. We agreed. She gave me all of my records and the CDs of my x-rays so that I would be checked in right away. (Dr. Nelson, knowing we were without insurance, whispered to us that we wouldn't be charged for the extra round of tests, just the basics. She could see that we were headed down a dark expensive road illuminated by nightmares and personally wanted to make it as bearable as possible.)

After a brief stop at home, Sparky, Bee and I piled into the car for the trip to County-USC. I felt oddly calm and decided to call my sister Kiki (who is my most favorite person in the world) because I had to tell someone. I could not tell my mother, who had called me multiple times already to see how the appointment was going. I answered my mother's first call before anything was determined and promised to call her later with news, but I never did. How could I? What parent wants to hear that their child may be gravely ill? So she left messages for me which I had to ignore. My sister answered her cell and I told her what the doctor had told me. I matter-of-factly talked about the suspicious x-rays and my abnormal platelet count, my weight loss, etc. She freaked out a little bit, but I stayed calm and told her not to tell mom yet. I wanted to wait and see what happened. She agreed, cried a little bit and told me she loved me.

And then we were there, in the parking lot of that monstrously huge facility of modern medicine that is County-USC. We'd seen it from the freeway for years and years, always hoping against hope that we would never draw a turn there as it was a place where the uninsured went to die. But there it was, and it was our turn, and there was nothing else we could do about it.

(to be continued...)