dear macy’s, fuck you.

Getting a shot in the stomach is a terribly uncomfortable situation no matter how it is gone about.  It is an even more uncomfortable as a 6:30 am wake-up call. The arm I understand, you stick a needle down into some muscle and shoot in whatever is necessary to get you through, but the stomach?  What if you miss?  What if you go too far and poke a hole in something that isn’t supposed to have a hole in it? What if you miss everything and just spray all of the medicine out into a hollow portion of my chest cavity and sits there dormant in a puddle forever?  Perhaps this is why after my first morning in the hospital I started plotting my escape.  I decided my best shot would be to pretend that I was dead during the morning round of medications.  This was in hopes that my nurse would simply pass me by because I was dead, leaving me alone until someone from the morgue came in and wheeled me down into the basement and gave me the perfect chance to escape.

Sadly, the nurse always managed to know that I was alive.  This is probably because no matter what I did, I couldn’t get my heart rate monitor to flat-line for more then a few seconds.  I tried different breathing exercises, I unplugged myself, I got rid of the pin on the end of my finger which seemed to be an integral piece of the equation, but somehow without fail there I was in my bed with wires coming out of my arms just blipping my way across the monitor in a little orange line for the world to see, and hence for the nurse to stab in the stomach with a syringe at 6:30 am.

I’d ended up in the hospital a few days earlier because of severe abdominal pain and a high fever which was accompanied by a little bit of blood in my stool, which was really the breaking point for me.  When I’d arrived it was very early in the morning and there were few patients waiting.  I couldn’t walk upright because of the constant feeling that my insides were about to explode from my torso like a balloon that had been gradually over filled with air, except when I popped it was going to be much less pleasant.

I was brought to the back of the emergency room almost immediately because the triage nurse felt that I was at a high risk for appendicitis after an initial diagnosis of my symptoms, and apparently the hospital had missed these signs in two cases recently so the ER was taking extra precautions.  My confidence was not being built. 

After a few hours and drinking almost a gallon of some sort of imaging solution that was followed with an injection of radioactive dye, a cat scan would reveal that my appendix was fine but my smaller intestines and colon however; were inflamed and facing some sort of infection.  “Had I had any bad food recently?  Maybe I had eaten in a shady place?” The doctors would ask, and I would say “No, I’d been in New York for a day or so a few days before the incident for a job interview, and the only place I’d eaten had been the Macy’s Café which was in the store on 34th.”  I had actually eaten their twice and always felt that places such as this would be relatively high-brow, especially considering that the chicken Caesar salad that I had eaten there (both times) was almost 18 dollars all said and done.  I could honestly say I figured it wasn’t that, but the doctors weren’t so certain, and so began to run a series of cultures and I was admitted to the hospital for the first time in my life.

I’ve never been much for hospitals in the first place and these morning rounds of medications weren’t helping the situation.  My nurse tried to tell me that the shot was a blood thinner and that it would keep me from getting clots that could possibly kill me while I was confined to a bed, but I didn’t really care because as I saw it, I was much less likely to form a clot in a few days then she was to miss with that huge syringe and accidentally puncture one of my lungs.  She did not see it this way and insisted on giving me the blood thinner each morning anyway, as well as a new IV bag full of saline, a new IV bag full of antibiotics, two Tylenol, and finally a half a syringe full of Diloted, (the sort of pain killer that makes morphine look like a bitch) which turned out to be the only ray of sunshine in my morning.

In case you have never been subjected to a high dose of Diloted, let me run through for you what it is like.  All your other medication is given and then the nurse will clean the connections on your IV line that are closest to the entrance in your body.  She will then connect a syringe (minus the needle) to the IV port that runs directly into your blood stream and use her thumb to push about a half of a shot worth of clear liquid (this is the Diloted) into your arm.  The nurse will then disconnect the syringe and then connect another one full of a saline solution to flush whatever medication might be left in the tubes down into your arm. Up until this time you have been antsy and probably a little bit cranky from being woken up and then stabbed in the stomach however; within .6 seconds of your IV being flushed and the Diloted being forced into your veins your body will become warmer and your head will tilt slightly to the side while trying to focus on why it can no longer sense it’s extremities. Immediately after this you will begin to contemplate why Andy Warhol never used different fibers or a heavier canvas while he was making pop art out of Marylyn Monroe.  From this point on pain in your body will cease and you will be a “Happy fucking camper” as they say.

Another side effect of this drug is that whatever escape attempt you were previously planning because of your blood thinner medication and a general hate for hospitals to begin with, will become a non-entity, because you will no longer have the ability to stand for at least an hour after the dose is given.  After this you may start to make foolish attempts at leaving your bed (be they for escape or for the rest room) but you will only end up walking around the room like a fifteen-year-old girl that broke into daddy’s liquor cabinet.  If you do manage to make it all the way to the bathroom, you will then immediately forget how to make your way back through the bagel colored hallways that all look identical and so you will just sit there holding on to your IV pole (which you must take everywhere with you because you are wired to it like a marionette to a handle), and contemplating again how Mr. Warhol couldn’t see things the way you now do.

These effects won’t last all day.  In all reality it is only fun for the first little bit and then if you are anything like me, you will become senselessly dizzy which the nurse will then give another shot for and you will simply fall asleep hoping that you make it through the next hour or so without wetting your pants.

After a few days I gave up on escape, but still wanted to leave. I began to have my pain meds spaced out more and more as a sort of mental stab at “good behavior” in hopes that they doctors would look at it as some sort of sign of health and then release me.  What I did not know was that this was completely futile, because at this point my release was entirely controlled by my ability to keep myself hydrated (in other words, keeping more fluid in then was rapidly exiting) which would only come with time and the extensive use of IV antibiotics.

Another side effect of trying to wean myself off of a pain meds schedule was the random and sudden onset of severe abdominal pain that could rear it’s ugly head at almost any moment after the Diloted started to leave my system.  To battle such an episode I would ring for the nurse from the fetal position and upon her arrival ask for drugs with a sense of urgency.  I imagined sometimes that I would ask for drugs much in the same tone that a homeless man might ask for some spare change, with an air of serious necessity, but a quiver of shame that I had managed to let my situation get this far. 

If when the nurse came she was not persuaded that I was in pain by the lack of blood in my face, the perfuse sweating, and the awkward rocking I was doing she would ask how bad the pain was and force me to ask for what I sought by name. When I had to tell her that I needed drugs it made me feel like a junky trying to get their fix and I would instantly hate her for making me feel such a way.  But then after she delivered the goods Andy and I would think of all the splendid ways we could let her know how much we loved her as we drifted off to sleep.

I had visitors, it was nice to know that people cared enough to come see me while I was in such a state, and they helped the days go by tremendously.  Although I don’t like people to see me when I am sick.  To me this is sort of like the first time you puke or something in front of a hot girlfriend, it is just embarrassing.  I mean, you just don’t want them to know that you are capable of such an abomination.   Yes, they helped me pass the time and realize that I was pretty well off in life as far as family and friends are concerned.  Even my mother whom I seldom see came by the room.  My mother has been a trauma nurse in another ER for years and upon her arrival demanded a review of my charts and after a short read began insisting to me how lucky I was that I hadn’t died because of dehydration and Renal Failure, which apparently has something to do with your kidneys.  I like to think she was exaggerating, I mean the only time I really felt like I was going to die was when I thought my stomach was going to explode, and that was only a few times a day after I got into the hospital and had been tended to in a variety of fashions.  Besides, she tended to blow things a big out of proportion anyway and I didn’t really want to have to think about the long term repercussions that dying might have on your life at age twenty-six.

On the last day of my hospital stay my resident physician came into my room for one final visit and just before he left and gave the orders for the nurses to pull the wires from my arms and let me walk free with the rest of the real boys and girls, he stuck his head back in and said “Oh and Bryan, we got the results back from your cultures.”  “Turns out you were suffering from a case of Salmonella, and you would have gotten it a few days before you came in so it looks like your 18 dollar Caesar salad in NYC is the culprit. You should let them know and see if there were any other cases.  Feel better.”  With that he was gone, and I was furious.  What a fucking show, big brands are supposed to mean safety and ease of use, not poop and hospitals.  In an hour or two I would be free to go and so in my last hours in the hospital I lay in my bed and thought about the nights of sever pain, the cold sweats, the bloody shits and the panic, missing work, my visitors missing work, my mother telling me I almost died and having to contemplate it, and of course the regular shots in the stomach. Eventually I began composing a letter, the first line of which read- 

“Dearest Macy’s,

Fuck you.”