Walking with My Butt to the Wind

Posted on April 22, 2010 in Body Language Coronary Neurology

All the unfamiliar if friendly faces made me glad to see my cardiologist — even though he was about to shove a camera down my throat and fish it back up. I’d gone in when I noticed my left arm had gone dead while chatting with some friends online. A tweet made me think of the possibility of a [[stroke]]: following the link, I had my wife check all my vital signs. I passed, then sat down. Idly, I began to count my fingers off the thumb of my right hand ((This is a habit that many people with OCD and bipolar disorder do to calm themselves. It is usually benign, but can become obsessive when you enumerate over and over again for hours at a time, for no other reason than to perform the count.)) . One two three four. One two three four. Then I switched to my left hand.

My fingers and my thumb couldn’t find each other. They missed. Or when they found their contact, immediately began to slip off place. My hand had turned into a school of minnows flopping out of water.

I told Lynn that this was serious. I grabbed my coat, the book I was reading and the latest issue of Skeptical Inquirer. Lynn drove me to Mission Hospital. I breathed a sigh of relief when the emergency room lobby was empty. A triage nurse took down my history and showed me to a room in the farthest corner of the E.R. More nurses and a couple of doctors appeared and the questions began: What happened? Can you show us? Did you lean or sit on the arm? Did you fall on it? What is your name and date of birth? Do you have a headache? Lift your arms in front of you. Lift against my hand. Now do it with your feet. Follow my finger. How many fingers am I holding up? Let me look into your eyes. Close your eyes and touch your nose with your right forefinger. Now do it with the left. Do you have a headache? Who is the president? What is your name?

At one point, I was shunted away for a [[CT Scan]]. The nurse took a series of my head in the raw, then injected me with a contrast solution that warmed my testicles and toes. I lay inside the magic donut for what must have been half an hour to forty five minutes while the computer composited its circle of x-rays into an image of my brain without and with the iodine mixture.

When the results came back clean, I leaped to the hope that I would get to go home. The nurses and the questions disappeared. When the results came back, I learned of the doctor’s distrust of the instrument. In carefully chosen words, I was left to infer that I would be held for more tests because the hospital did not want to be sued. This is what my five-a.m.-in-the-morning mind said to me. They wanted to keep me a prisoner. They were out to collect the largest possible insurance checks. All the talk about the need to check my heart for leaks and my brain and neck for clots fell on deaf ears. I wouldn’t be sleeping in my own bed for 24 to 48 hours, maybe more.

The doctors feared that I had experienced a [[mini-stroke]] which required other tools to detect. Following the visit of the very tired-looking neurologist and the admitting doctor, a retinue of technicians appeared. I was handed paperwork which asked me the type and position of any implants or piercings in my body and if I was prone to anxiety or claustrophobia. An agent of the hospital appeared with a bag into which I dropped my wedding ring and MedicAlert bracelet. An other technician came to warn me about the most invasive of the procedures, the stuffing of a device down my throatthat would allow doctors to create a [[sonogram]] of my heart.

Before they shipped me off for the tests, technicians removed every patch they’d slapped on me for listening to my heart. I was wheeled off to a waiting room, where they stripped me of the hospital gown they’d given me in E.R. and dressed me in another one of a different shade and pattern of blue. The time had come to shove me into the [[MRI]].

This consisted of laying me down on a lightly padded slab, then placing a mask that allowed me to see the operators through a combination of mirrors and a chest plate over me. I feared that I would suddenly discover that I was claustrophobic as they slid me inside. My eyes followed an inch and a half wide gray line that led to nowhere. They’d given me earplugs and classical music, but neither of these shielded me from the onslaught of sound that the MRI belched forth. “Oh great!” I thought as the first beeps and screams pummeled me. “It’s the eighties again! [[Pong]]! [[Space invaders]]!” The machine had an extensive repetoire of video game sounds. As each new combination sounded in the missile-silo-like tunnel, I closed my eyes and imagined waves of UFOs descending on me to be shot at by my defenses. They treated me to forty five minutes of these effects, pronouncing me a perfect patient in the end.

The next stop was the days most gruesome torture. They had me gargle and eat a gelatin mixed with local anesthetic before injecting me with a sedative. I was made to lay on my side with my chin pressed to my chest, and swallow a cable. My cardiologist — who had been summoned especially on my behalf — moved it around inside my esophagus and took pictures of my heart. He was swift and merciful in his exploration. My heart, he declared, was in excellent condition. I was sent up to my room where they put new heart-monitoring patches on me and offered me yet another hospital gown.

I had not eaten for ten hours prior to this last [[Grand Guignol]]. I had to give my throat an hour before I could eat due to its numbing for the bizarre ingesting of the sonogram camera. The chicken was delicious even though the green beans were boiled to as point beyond which even the most fragrant sea weed would have no flavor ((I never understood why my mother — who was a registered nurse — insisted on boiling vegetables to death. I now believe it was because she is one of the few people living who actually likes hospital food)) . The entrance to my throat felt as if I was coming down with a cold. I wasn’t tired, which made me worry that the events of the day had ramped me into a mania. As I closed my eyes, attempting to shut out afternoon’s silver light, another technician — an Asian woman — came in to administer one more test: the classic [[EEG]], a test for epilepsy.

Singing a folk song whose words I couldn’t understand or identify the language of, she attached electrodes to my scalp and ears one at a time. I napped as she worked — my first slumber in over twenty four hours. When she was finished, she sat down behind her console and started tapping at keys. Fields of white stars drawing circles inside of blue rectangles appeared in my eyes-shut-night. “Mister Sax, open your eyes,” she commanded. “Mister Sax, close your eyes.” A few more taps and her work was done.

After she pulled the mass of wires from my scalp, she said “Good news. No seizure.” “Thanks for the light show,” I replied. I couldn’t sleep after all the excitement, so I remained awake, watching the original version of [[The_Thomas_Crown_Affair_(1968_film)|The Thomas Crown Affair]] on TCM. Lynn came in the evening and fell promptly to sleep.

I hated the waiting. I hated the bed that automatically realigned itself every time I shifted my body. I hated the flat hospital food. The fact that I had to drag an [[Intravenous_therapy|IV]] tree along every time I went to the bathroom irritated me. The medicine they gave me to clear the contrast solution out of my kidneys tasted vile. My balls stank. And in the end I found it was easier to get discharged from a psychiatric ward than a neurology one. But my heart was strong, my blood numbers were good, only an artifact created by the machine clouded my MRI results, and all I had to face was the mystery of a numb fingertip indicating [[peripheral neuropathy]]. I would not be walking with my butt to the wind for another day.