laid-up
Sunday night — Monday morning:
I was laid-up in bed 2 in ward C10, on the third floor of Hospital Pulau Pinang, not sleeping as I gazed at the white ceiling and a furiously-spinning ceiling fan — which dried my eyes.
I was there overnight because I felt too battered, pained and weak to go home. My upper back and lower neck hurt, where my neck joins my skull hurt, some ribs ached, I felt like my heart was being stabbed by a pencil, my shoulders were swollen and painful, the right knee hurt, my right hip and thigh were bruised and swollen, and I was rather immobile. I wasn’t breathing deeply, either. At home I wouldn’t have a health aide, so I thought that a hospital loaded with health care professionals which has strong pain medicines was the place to lay low for now.
And I wondered if I were seriously injured. No one had reviewed the X-ray films with me in the emergency department or in bed in this ward. A doc told me that I’d be held overnight for observation to see if I developed bleeding or blood clots in my cranium. Ten years ago blood clots or fat embolisms after a motor vehicle accident blocked blood flow in my legs and caused extreme pain. So I thought that if the right side of my body had been bashed that I might develop compartment syndrome or have blood clots travel through my body and threaten my health. Therefore I wanted to be surrounded by docs and nurses if I had an overnight problem like the extreme pain from compartment syndrome!
I could budge my body on the bed to try to get comfortable after I got a pain-relieving injection around 3 a.m. I could move my right arm, but I couldn’t reach the ceiling fan’s speed switch. Hours earlier I pulled the pillow that was behind my head and neck, which I had thought exacerbated my discomfort. So I pulled the pillowcase from it so that I could drape it over my eyes to block the overhead light and the breeze from the fan. I realized that I likely wouldn’t drift off to sleep, but I really wanted to relax totally and nearly slumber, which I did until someone would cough explosively or shout or drop a metal cup or pot or a nurse dropped a glass in the break room or the supply closet door slammed or the gentleman on my left snored … I closed my eyes beneath the rolled pillowcase, opened my mouth for more breath intake and relaxed, waiting for morning …
No nurse or doctor visited me or the patients around me to check pulse, blood pressure, respiration rate, pulse-oxygen level or ask of pain or any needs since a nurse had come by at 11:30 with a sphygmomanometer to measure our blood pressures.
Although I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for several hours, because water and saline had been dripping into an arm vein for hours, I needed to void my bladder repeatedly. I did it by twisting/rolling a bit onto my bruised right hip and holding with my right hand an empty, plastic intravenous drip bottle that been cut open. But after it was full, I had no way to gain the attention of a nurse so that I could ask her to empty it. So when I needed to urinate again, I had to hold it and wait, listening for footsteps of someone walk somewhere nearby so that I might beckon for attention.
After an hour of ‘holding,’ I wondered what I could do to relieve myself. I thought of urinating on the pillowcase and drooping it onto the floor beside my bed. I could see that the gentleman on my left had a partially-empty 1.5 liter drinking water bottle. My saline solution drip bottle was empty, so with my right arm I tipped the stand onto my bed so that I could ‘unhook’ the empty bottle. I pulled the silicone drain line from the bottle mouth, but I couldn’t remove the bottle stopper/plug. It couldn’t be unscrewed. I didn’t have a knife or scissors with which to cut the top off the plastic bottle. My neighbor was snoring, so I knew that he was asleep and that I couldn’t ask if he had a knife or scissors.
I couldn’t be seen by nurses behind the half-pulled curtain. As they conversed and enjoyed pop music, they couldn’t hear me quietly call, “nurse … nurse …” So I tossed the empty plastic bottle into the aisle, which clattered momentarily against the wall. No one came to see the cause of the noise, though. I assumed that someone would see it on the way to the break room or a supply room, so I covered my eyes with the pillowcase and tried to relax.
Someone walked to and from the vicinity of the employee lounge without seeming to notice the uncolored plastic bottle on the floor. As I lay flat on a horizontal bed, I couldn’t see, all night long, people who weren’t beside my bed. If a person passing by were tall enough, I could see the top of a head if I strained to see down past my nose. I waved at whoever walked by on squeaky shoes, yet no one stopped to ask why I was waving or to pick up trash on the floor. What the heck? I listened to someone forcefully rubber-stamping for most of an hour, a pulse monitor beeping every minute because it had been disconnected from a patient, 1980s American pop and R&B music, chatter and giggling, patients; barking coughs, the grinding sound of wood chair legs scraping the ward’s floor…
After a while, when the patient on my left had awakened, I decided to tip the ancient, rusty, six-times-repainted IV stand to the floor to make a little noise and garner attention. Well, it made a little noise, and it probably lay a few inches past the end of my bed, in the aisle, but no one noticed it for more than half an hour. As an employee walked the aisle, toward the locker room, she noticed the top of the stand – and the empty bottle, I guess. She tipped the stand upright and asked if Id fallen. I replied that I couldn’t arise and asked her to empty my urine bottle. She didn’t take it away, but shortly thereafter she returned with the IV bottle that I’d tossed. She’d cut off the top. So I leaned right, peed into it, set it on the bedside table, beside the full one, then tried to relax. I was hungry and thirsty and my mouth was dry and my lips were dry. Although it’d likely cause me to need to pee again, I really wanted to drink water. I dimly recalled that someone had told me that I couldn’t eat or drink, but I didn’t know why.
After another hour, the patient on my left arose and slowly walked past my bed. I waved to him and asked him to ask a nurse if I could drink water or have another IV drip. Someone came to hang another saline water drip bottle. I just prayed and listened to all the sounds around me until the sky, seen through southern windows to my left began to lighten. At some time, the staff flipped on all the lights again and began to scurry to and fro. I surmised that an employees shift change was imminent. Janitors came through the ward, emptying wastebaskets. Foodservice employees wheeled in hot cabinets carrying breakfast. I couldn’t smell it, perhaps because I had a nasal cannula delivering wisps of oxygen, but I was very hungry.
I wondered what’s next. I wondered who will give me attention and when. After seeing hospital TV shows I expected that physicians would ‘make rounds.’ I thought that I could learn what the x-ray films showed, whether my left humerus, clavicle or scapula were cracked, whether I’ll get CT or MRI scans of my head … I wasn’t permitted breakfast because I was told that I’d “have tests.” By the time that a physician and interns visited me, I had either extreme hunger pangs, which wasn’t likely without starving, or abdominal pain from hitting my motorbike’s steering yoke or the other motorcycle. So I told of my pain, the doc listened with a stethoscope to “normal bowel sounds,” felt my abdomen here and there and questioned me. He discussed my symptoms, including, headache, dizziness, etc. with the student doctors. He said that a CT scan of the abdomen would reveal more than ultrasound would. Then the doc ordered CT scans of my abdomen, thorax and head.
So I just lay there for hours, horizontal, staring at the ceiling, wishing that the bed could articulate, getting another intravenous drip, peeing more and waiting to be taken to the radiology department. When I rolled/leaned right to urinate into a bottle, I knew the pain medicine that I had received several hours earlier had worn off. So as soon as I could, I asked a nurse for more pain relief before I’d have the trouble of shifting from the bed to the CT scanner’s bed. Thankfully the abdominal aches that had begun around sunrise had been subsiding.
After a while, orthopedic docs came through the ward, read my record , talked to me, felt my back, asking me where it hurt (C7,C8 and T1 mostly) and looked through my x-ray films. I complained that my left shoulder hurt as it had when it was injured in 1999, and no good x-ray images of the humerus and scapula had been made the previous night, a bone doc ordered X-ray images of my left shoulder and my spine to be made. One of them placed a light, plastic and foam collar around my neck. I really didn’t want it. It didn’t help me open my mouth to breathe, and I always felt short-of-breath.
Around 11:00 I was hauled to the frigid radiology department for imaging of my left shoulder and middle of my back, then I was returned to the medical/surgical ward, which, because it was lukewarm, felt so much warmer and comfortable that the radiology ward.
I wasn’t permitted lunch, but someone from the radiology department brought to me a “contrast medium” to drink before the CT scans. It was cool and tasted slightly like banana-flavored skim milk. I was very happy to have it. I drank it rapidly through a curved straw, as I had been thirsty and hungry. That was far more welcome than the nasty, chalky contrast media that I had ingested years ago.
~ to be continued ~
