Running for Your Life: The Hospital Story

If I could sit up I would rip out the IV. My parents are coming, but they have yet to arrive. It’s the middle of the night and except for my hospital bedmate Sam, I am alone. I’ve only myself to blame. In phone conversations with my parents, I’ve been less than forthright about the killer, the blood clot that has lodged in my lung. Why Sam is standing guard, because the next clot could shoot to the heart or the brain and kill me.

I’ve always been a slender man, but this night I am down fifty pounds from my regular weight. Barely one hundred. Despite blood as thin as water, the clots keep coming. First there were two big ones in my groin that is tender beyond belief and then the pulmonary embolism. Since the first blood clot more than a month ago, my left leg is useless to me, incapable of bearing any weight without mind-blanking pain. It is elevated before me swathed in lard-like goop and tensor bandage that is supposed to keep the swelling down to the girth of a twenty-year oak. There is no one I want to see me like this. Certainly not my parents. Maybe my dead grandfather, who I’d be joining soon.

Where are they? Shouldn’t they have come anyway, despite what I, their misguided college boy son, might tell them. My father certainly was at work, at home, hundreds of miles from Ottawa. Probably on the road, where he plied his trade, sales in every conceivable digestible, inedible and combustible, from Bic pens to Double Bubble to my personal favorite in fireworks season, the burning schoolhouse, what if I were capable in my delirium of having a dream to remember would take me back to the acrid smell and the red and orange and yellow licking flames of a schoolhouse in culture-consented arson. Burn, baby, burn. What, if I knew what I know now, would have made a point to bring to mind every detail of the schoolhouse rent to ashes.

“I want my parents to be here. Now! Someone should tell them the truth. I should tell them the truth.”

I want my mother. She is never comfortable outside Owen Sound. She will come into the room and not know where to sit. Will someone bring up a chair for my mother? She will not stay long unless I ask her to, but I wasn’t raised to ask for things. Instead, I can tell in a flash what it is that people want, and then I ask if I can bring them that: a glass of water, a hug, an overcoat, which I promptly do. But me? I want of nothing – and I will sense that a minute after my mother sits on the chair at my bedside that she will want to leave.

To confront death is to be outside yourself. When I was little, only two years old, I ate candy aspirin after candy aspirin. Rushed to the hospital, I barely survived. Struck by the illusion of being conscious outside my body, gagging on whatever is being inserted down my throat and into my stomach to pump out the poison that an hour before was the sweet candy in my sister’s hand. I told this to my father, whose face immediately paled. “You don’t remember that, do you?” he said. “You can’t have.” Later, he would tell me it was the worst day of his life. Me, the jury's out.

Sam presses the buzzer and the nurse comes. She clucks, taking my pulse. Soon there are others around the bed. In the weeks I have been in the hospital, I’ve grown used to this. But usually the groups come during the day, not in the middle of the night. The place is a teaching hospital and many times students in white coats have gathered around me like budding auctioneers before a prize found in a barn. Once, I watched through slitted eyes to hear what the teacher might say, if he thought I were unconscious. There are reasons we are called “patients.” Always the last to know.

“An extremely rare case: deep-vein thrombosis in a young man. Twenty-one in October. An athlete, a hockey player, very active, in robust health. We usually see this in the elderly, of course. When the veins are compromised by age, the stresses of living. He first contracted mononucleosis, very high temperatures, bed-ridden in a college infirmary. Diagnosed next with pneumonia, which is not uncommon. Then . . .”

“Blood clot in the leg, brought on by the sudden inactivity. Perhaps an undiagnosed predisposition?” said a female voice.

“Very good. Yes. None of that surprises. But the patient has since not responded to treatment. The initial clot in the left leg groin area is massive now. Note the irregular swelling of that area,” he said, pulling back the bedding. “And the leg itself. Uncommonly large. Last week, another clot, possibly splitting off from the groin, lodged in a lung. Same side of the body, so likely a “family” member. Breathing compromised, body weakened. We’ve …”

“Adjusted the IV meds, increased blood thinners?” a male voice.

“Yes. If there is some improvement it doesn’t show in the data.” There is a pause and I imagine he nods to indicate not in the patient either. No wonder he had to tell them that I was an athlete. To look at me: hollow cheeks, straggly beard, eyes black like piss holes in the snow, you’d never know. Also in silence he points to the heart and the brain. The next likely destinations for these clots that are killing me. “Puzzling, no? Think about it.”

Yes, think hard, I imagine, as I open my eyes. One student is lingering. I can’t see his face for the clipboard. He will ask me a question. Want to know something about me, about my story. But no, he doesn’t. He takes a notation from the IV, the one that is inserted in my breastplate, scribbles something and then leaves with the research he is collecting for the article I imagine he is writing about my strange case.

But these aren’t doctors gathered around me. They are nurses, four of them. Reading dials, finger-flicking the IV drip. I wonder as I feel the touch of the slender fingers of the nurse taking my pulse if I will ever stir to love again.

“It’s not fair, is it, Sam?”

“You’ll get through it,” I imagine Sam saying.

I can see through the tears, as I think, “Yeah, I’ll get through it.”

Next: Staying Motivated: Part One