So I’m sitting here in bed exhausted out of my fucking mind and apparently going through valium withdrawal….(gee- I was supposed to taper off that shit instead of going cold turkey? Oh well. Too late now….) and I decided I’m just going to vent about my wonderful experiences of the past few days. My husband won’t remember a goddamn thing when he finally comes to so he can read the written record when it’s all done. He already knows his wife is nuts anyway. When the deacon in Vegas rattled on about “in sickness and in health” he sure wasn’t fucking kidding. I guess since I’ve got a good job and a nice house and a healthy, smart kid and a few bucks in the bank and a decent credit score I owe some kind of cosmic payback.
Note to the administration at the Lahey Clinic: I could put on a burka, strap a bomb to my skinny ass, scream “la la la la la la la la……..Allah Akbah!” and get on a transcontinental flight with no identification easier than I can get my wifely ass into the ICU unit to see my fucking husband. First of all, here’s how you physically get to the ICU unit….you park your car in the behemoth parking garage, go down four flights of stairs with 50-mile-an-hour winds whipping across your frozen body, try not to get hit by an ambulance speeding past the front door because they don’t bother to stop for pedestrians, go into the East wing of this small city they call Lahey clinic, walk a mile down the hall, go down the elevator one floor, because the elevator doesn’t GO down two floors in that wing because that would make WAY too much sense, get off the elevator, walk another half-mile to the end of the hall to take the stairs down another floor, walk another half mile down another hallway, go OUTSIDE again to get whipped by the winds some more because there IS no way to get from one side of the second floor in the East wing to the other side of the second floor in the east wing without going OUTSIDE, walk around to the back of the building, go back INSIDE another door, make a right into the “family waiting room” (they sure as hell got the “waiting” part right), then pick up the phone on the wall and dial one of a myriad of extensions. There’s a sign posted by the phone that says something like this: “For patients in SICU rooms 1 through 6, dial 814678. For patients is SICU rooms 6 through 9 but excluding 7 on odd days, dial 913457800. For patients in SICU2146789 on even-numbered Tuesdays when the Pope is in town but he’s not wearing the purple robe but the black shoes with the gel inner soles, go fuck yourself and leave us alone.” You get the idea. When someone finally picks up the phone after 20 rings you have to play nice-nice and beg to see your loved one. After giving your name, social security number, bra size, mother’s maiden name and grandfather’s favorite flavor of ice cream, they transfer you somewhere else, where the phone rings another 20 times until someone answers and you repeat step one.
After all that you’ve got maybe a 20 percent shot at actually being granted permission to come inside. There’s always some kind of excuse. My favorite yesterday was, “They’re washing him up right now. Call back in about 20 minutes.” So I park my ass in one of the chairs and to play it safe I wait 30 minutes, because these people are on metric time, not American. So now I pick up the phone and repeat AGAIN. “Oh- they’re not done washing him up yet.” I told the woman, “You know…I AM his wife and I’ve seen his naked ass before. He really won’t mind if I see it again.” I actually got her to crack a slight laugh at that one, but still no go. So I wait another 15 minutes and they’re STILL washing him up. Well, where the hell did they take him? Elizabeth Arden? Did he go to the SPA to get his ass washed? And he has a LITTLE ass! How long does that take to wash, anyway? There just isn’t a lot of square footage there. They could have stuck a probe up there and cleaned out his entire colon in that amount of time.
Every now and then I’ll sit in that waiting room and a “newbie” family will show up. I ask them, “Is this your first time?” and they say “Yes”, and I just chuckle a sinister laugh like Vincent Price on crack. Talk to me tomorrow honey and we can swap some stories. Heh heh heh heh heh….
So the Queen of the ICU finally grants me access to the Elizabethan Court and now I’ve got to go BACK down the hallway another half mile to the double doors and hope that someone actually remembered to UNLOCK them, and if not I go BACK to the family waiting room and repeat the process.
When I finally get in, Jim looks like something out of “Trauma- Life in the ER” but thank God I’ve watched enough reality shows in my lifetime so I don’t pass out on the floor….not that they’d notice if that happened anyway….and his nurse, Little Miss Sunshine…tries her best to act like I’m annoying the piss out of her. Jim can’t talk and he’s pretty drugged up but he can manage to nod his head a little and roll his eyes and squeeze my hand, so I know he’s glad I’m there. He’s trying to tell me something and of course I can’t understand, so I give him a piece of paper and a pen. Little Miss Sunshine is not too happy with this because then maybe Jim will be able to write about what a cunt she really is and the jig will be up because he knows I’ll be happy top choke the bitch for him if he wants me to (I’ll be nice and sanitize my hands first) but I just ignore Little Miss Sunshine.
He writes, “Did they get the tumor out?” Now, I had told him this already the day before but the drugs are clouding his mind so he can’t remember, and I tell him, “Yes- they got the whole thing out, and they didn’t have to cut any vital nerves but they had to stretch the shit out of them so you’re in for a long healing process, but the neurologist thinks you’ll be o.k.” He rolls his eyes in great relief. So I sit with him a few more minutes and suddenly he starts violently banging his hand. “What? What?” I ask. And I give him the paper and pen again. “Can’t breathe!” he writes. I go get Little Miss Sunshine and I tell her that he says he can’t breathe. She’s putzing with the IV and all the other equipment but never touches his breathing tube. He writes again, “Can’t BREATHE!” and I tell Little Miss Sunshine and in the meantime I’m trying to calm him down. “Jim…you’re on a respirator. It’s breathing for you. Try not to panic…it will be o.k.” But he’s still pounding his fist and looking absolutely pitiful and panicked. Little Miss Sunshine finally comes over and says she’s going to try suctioning out the tube in his nose. I get the hell out of the way because that’s really gross to watch and I don’t need to be vomiting on the floor in the middle of all this. She tried this three times and he’s still not comfortable.
Now I’m worried as hell. My husband can’t breathe! Why isn’t she calling someone who knows their ass from their elbow? I don’t say anything to her because if I piss her off I’ll NEVER get in to see my husband again but now she gets nasty with me and says “You’ve exited him too much. You have to leave NOW Pam!” And in my mind I’m thinking, now you listen to ME bitch….number one, he wants me here, and number two, I don’t want to leave until I know he’s o.k. But I don’t have a choice in the matter and I pick up my shit and storm out.
So I go on another two mile trek to the cafeteria and get myself a coffee and vent to everyone I can on the cell phone. I wait for the shift to change and I go back. Again I get excuses why I can’t go back in….they’re clipping his toenails, he had a hair out of place, the game is on and we have to check the score, baby peas are on sale at Stop and Shop, yadda yadda yadda, but then they finally let me in.
So Jim looks more comfortable now and he’s sleeping, and there’s a new nurse on duty. I also noticed that Little Miss Sunshine took Jim’s pen and paper away. Now how is the man supposed to communicate? With some kind of Martian mind-meld? A minute or so later the resident who works with Jim’s surgeon comes in and introduces herself. I pulled the nurse and the resident aside and told them I needed to talk to them.
I was very pleasant and non-confrontational (because I’m at these bitches mercy) and I played like I was half-joking, but they got the point that I’m serious as a heart-attack. I gave them the Reader’s Digest version of what had just happened. I said, “Look….I know that the nurses’ job is to take care of the patient, and the patient comes first. But every patient comes with baggage, and that baggage is their family. And they want to see their family. And you people make it extremely difficult to do that. I’m sure there was a chapter in the nurses’ textbook about sensitivity….you know- the book you had to read before you got your nurses’ license? I think Little Miss Sunshine needs to crack that book open again and do a little review. The patient’s family has gone through trauma, too, and I am NOT going to be talked to and treated like that. If she wanted me out of the way I would have been very happy to hang back and sit and read my book…this is a big room so there’s plenty of space for me. Or she could have asked me to step outside in the hallway for a minute. Or if she was having a bad day she could have come back into the waiting room and had the decency to apologize to me. Now, I’m the only family my husband has up here, and the rest of his family has heard this story and they’re just ITCHIN’ to get in the car right now and come up here, and if you think I’m a problem, let me tell you right now….the rest of his family make Tony Soprano look like Mister Rodgers…so if you’d like them to stay out of your hair you’d better make nice-nice with ME. Got it? Now, who’s working tomorrow, because I’m not dealing with that bitch anymore.”
Well, the two of them were very sweet and apologetic. Needless to say, I came back this morning, and Jim got a new nurse.
So that’s my nurses’ story. There’s a doctor story, too, but I’ll save that one for another day because it’s 1:04 a.m. now and I’m beat. Plus I’m sure there’ll be lots more stories before this mess is done. In the meantime, it doesn't look like I'm getting out of Boston until at least mid next week. They finally took the respirator out and now they're just waiting to make sure his airway doesn’t swell up. If all goes well, he'll move into a step-down unit (kind of like ICU-lite) tomorrow.
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