Montpelier
Quite a few years ago now — the two older kids were quite small — Mother and I worked summers on an island off the coast of Maine. On a rare day off, I borrowed a school boat, a lovely, if delicate Norwegian launch, and took my little family cruising through the islands to the eastward. About midafternoon, we were suddenly socked in solid with a thick fog, and within minutes I wasn’t sure where we were. All I could see was something I didn’t want to see: bottom. There was the faint island to the west of me. As I puzzled over the chart, a lobster boat came roaring out of the murk as if it were bright daylight, and started circling, hauling traps.
I motored over and asked what I now know to be a really stupid question. “Is that Bar Island?” I asked, pointing to the vague shape in the mist.
“Nope,” he shouted back, and roared away.
The next couple of minutes aboard our vessel were not harmonious. But the fisherman had seen the kids. Having taught me my lesson, he came roaring back and, as he passed, called out, “Stinker!” I pored over the chart again and learned where we were: just east of Tinker Island. It was point-to-point by compass from there, and we got home in time for dinner.
Now, you’d think that after a humiliating (and indelible) lesson like that — pretending, when talking to a Yankee, to know anything when you know nothing — I would have been a little more humble in doping out a problem I had last week. But no. I went right back into smartypants mode.
For a couple of days I’d been feeling a little off: lethargic, weak, short-winded, even dizzy when I stood up. Oh, boy! I thought. I wonder what this is. The day was Thursday. In the manner far too typical of tightwad old guys, I figured I’d give it a couple of days to sort itself out.
It hadn’t improved by Friday. Quite the opposite, in fact. And there was now another symptom that, in the words of 19th-century explorers, “was better imagined than described.” It had to be Lyme disease, or some other tick-borne plague. So naturally I went straight to Dr. Google and asked for the symptoms of those pestilences.
You can see right away what I was doing. Almost clueless, I was making the solution fit my suspicions. And Doc Google did come up with a couple of my symptoms under “Lyme Disease.” But hardly all. So in a sudden burst of inspiration, possibly prodded by that long-ago encounter in the Maine islands, I just typed in my most distinctive symptom and asked what it indicated.
It indicated that it was high time to call my personal care provider. By now it was Saturday, but I tried, anyway. The clinic was open. They told me to get up to the emergency room of the hospital and said they’d call ahead. Off I went, expecting to be home in an hour or two.
But I was into something I hadn’t prepared for. They showed me into one of the curtained rooms, and told me to change into a johnny and climb onto a hospital bed. Were they serious? Who was going to get the mail, take care of the puppy, visit Mother and write next week’s column?
I knew the emergency doc from past encounters. It took him roughly six seconds and a little Vaseline to confirm that, yep, I was bleeding inside somewhere. A brief wait while they got a room ready somewhere upstairs, and off I went, my bed wheeled by a lively young lady from Transport who clearly loved, and said she loved, her job.
Somebody has figured out that the more a patient knows about what’s going on around him and how he’s doing, the better he’ll feel and the quicker he’ll recover. A whiteboard on the wall beyond the foot of my bed already had my name on it, whom to call for a ride home when the time came, the names of the doctor, nurses and aides, and all vital signs. A touch-screen TV set, on a long arm, hung inches from my face. An IV tube replenished lost liquids. The only fly in the ointment was a note that I was to have only clear liquids for the duration. I considered that another incentive to rapid healing.
After a very restless night (all that liquid flowing into you has got to come out somewhere, and I was shackled by compression cuffs on my legs and the needle in my arm), I discovered that they’d do the endoscopic procedure on Sunday morning. Which they did. Anesthesia has leapt forward millennia, it seems, since my first ether enema in 1949. Literally before I knew it, the surgeon was telling me what he’d done, what had caused the ulcer — over-the-counter pain pills, which are now gone from my life — and that I could probably go home once they replaced the blood I’d lost. Still another day, though, on broth, tea, gelatin and cranberry juice.
Everybody who came into the room to do anything to me — phlebotomist, nurse, vital signs LNA; even the “environmental technicians,” who used to be called cleaning persons — everybody invariably asked, “Is there anything you need? Anything I can get you?” Anything, it seemed, but a Philly steak sandwich with fries. Until this morning, when an egg-and-Canadian bacon muffin came up on my tray. I allowed, as I munched and watched the last bag of blood drip into me, that this was going to be my new experience for the week, one that, in spite of its grim portents, turned out to be educational and healing, all because of a crowd of really wonderful people.
Willem Lange can be reached at willem.lange@comcast.net.
