(Note: This is an excerpt from the personal newsletter about 2021 that I mailed out in February 2022.)
On Saturday, September 4th, the day I was on my way back to Sacramento from Oregon, I became ill. By the time my Amtrak coach arrived in Portland and my younger sister and her husband picked me up, I had indigestion too bad to eat much at the restaurant. When they dropped me off at my friend Sally’s house, I just wanted an Alka-Seltzer. But that didn’t help, and I threw up—something I rarely do. I was supposed to fly home that very evening, but I was in such poor shape that Sally insisted I cancel my reservation and stay with her that night. The next day, I still felt lousy. Finally, on Monday, she took me to an Urgent Care Center (I threw up in the parking lot). Expecting to be given a prescription for some high-powered antacid, I was taken aback when the doctor there said that I had to go the E.R. In fact, she was so worried about me, she walked me back to Sally’s car.
To my amazement, the large Emergency Room at Providence Hospital was almost empty. Either Monday afternoon is Quiet Time at E.R.’s, of the folks in Portland are really healthy!
The information that accompanied me from Urgent Care had, as far as I could see, nothing notable on it except the negative results of the CoVid test they’d given me. But very soon I was lying on a gurney and being examined, questioned, and tested in various ways. I had a chest x-ray from a portable machine—something new since I was last in a hospital, forty years ago. Then I was wheeled to another room for a CT scan of my abdomen. Eventually, Sally was sent home and I was elevated to an actual hospital room. Again, I was surprised.
Of course, it helped that I had good insurance via my Medicare Advantage plan, unlike the last time I had to be hospitalized. That was forty years ago, also in Portland, and as a part-time grad student and part-time Adult Education ESL instructor, I had never given any thought to health insurance. A diagnosis of cervical cancer, verified by biopsy, woke me from my state of innocence. No hospital would operate on me! It was only when my teaching contract ended (a few weeks after my diagnosis) and I became unemployed and thus able to enroll in Welfare, that I could get the surgery required to save my life.
So I was admitted to Providence Hospital for what turned out to be a three-day enforced rest. Nurses took repeated blood pressure readings, blood from my fingers, and who knows what was being injected into my inside elbows?
On Tuesday morning, a doctor came in and informed me that my “indigestion” was due to a kidney infection, and that was caused by diabetes. What??? Since when did I have diabetes? Well, I should not have been surprised. The primary care physician I saw for several years always warned me that I was pre-diabetic and needed to lose weight (yes, me, the girl who was always so thin!) and lower my cholesterol. I ignored her. In fact, for the past few years, I had delighted in eating whatever I wanted—Halloween candy, Christmas candy, Valentine’s candy, Easter candy…Well, it appears that now I am paying the piper.
From my notes: My hospital room has a big window with a view of a tree, and a television set with somewhat peculiar channels. However, I am a prisoner. If I so much as swing my legs over the edge of the bed, an alarm goes off. Eventually, but not soon enough for me, the doc gives permission for me to walk the four steps to the bathroom, if nurses support me. I figure out that what hospitals obsess about is patients falling. There’s a sign in my room advising patients to “Call, Don’t Fall.” So if I need to pee, I have to press the Call button so that a nurse can assist me to the bathroom.
The other hospital obsession is bowel movements. The doc won’t approve my release until I have one. Meanwhile, I am trying to figure out what to eat. Having never used “room service” in a hotel, I feel pampered by the thrice-a-day visits from the kitchen liaison asking what I want for my meals. There’s a detailed menu listing the set meals as well as the a la carte options. I think it’s odd, considering my diagnosis of diabetes, that I am not admonished to skip the sweeter choices. The service may be admirable but the food turns out to be as unappetizing as hospital food is reputed to be. The gelatin is inedible. The cream of wheat is inedible. The “rice krispies” are a poor imitation. The first afternoon, I throw up. Later, I am given a cocktail of simethicone, aluminum hydroxide, and something else. In the morning, I get potassium, Maalox, among other things.
There’s a white board where the staff write their names. I try to remember: Raquel, Ashley, Linda, another Ashley. They are invariably kind and helpful, in spite of their twelve-hour shifts, but still, you get used to one and then she is gone.
It’s fortunate that while in Eugene I had bought a new cell phone. I only use one when traveling, and my old one had, through lack of use, not only lost its assigned number, but had become so outdated that AT&T advised getting a new one, seeing as how 5G was about to take over the world (my words). So I was able to call Sally and ask her to bring my “overnight bag,” especially my jar of cold cream to remove the smeared eye make-up that had given me that raccoon look. I also called my apartment manager to let him know that I’d be back several days later than anticipated, and both my sisters, just to let them know.
More vitals, more Maalox mixed with potassium and water, and an injection of a time-release insulin called Lantus. My blood sugar was still above 200.
An occupational therapist and a physical therapist came together and woke me from my nap in order to give me a political science quiz (Who is the president? Who was the prior president?) Did I know where I was? “Sure. I’m in Providence Hospital in Portland, Oregon, in a room on—judging by the tree outside my window—the third floor.” Well, it was the fourth floor, but I was close enough. They let me put on my compression stocking and one helped to take a walk down the hallway—harder than I had expected.
Sally had kindly sent cherry Jell-o, but as I was sure it was not sugar-free, I didn’t think I ought to eat as much of it as I would have liked. I subsisted mostly on small portions of yogurt and greasy-but-edible potato soup, along with the afore-mentioned cocktail of potassium and antacids, injections of blood thinner and insulin, etc.
The TV includes a channel called CARE: New Age type music accompanied by nature scenes. This was pleasant to watch and conducive to sleep—such as one gets in a hospital, that is, with the constant interruptions for vitals. The next morning my blood sugar was 160. Well, a bit better, at least. They’d been giving me laxatives, and that morning, after another walk down the hallway with a nurse, I was finally able to poop—hurrah!
Later, Dr. Batra came to tell me that I could go home. I was brought a big paper bag containing antibiotics (for the kidney infection), medicine (Metformin) for diabetes, and a kit for testing my blood sugar by pricking my finger.
I had a nice long chat with a student nurse named Maria, who’d come here with her family at age twelve, and was now studying at Linfield Nursing School: she practiced using her stethoscope to listen to my heart, lungs, and belly. A friendly dietician, Annah, came to bring me a booklet about diabetes and my supplies. I still felt that the information I was being given was rather vague, but evidently, I was expected to get more specific details from my own doctor. I’ve since found out that some people don’t even receive a booklet.
When I got to Sally’s that evening, I saw, by her bathroom scales, that I’d lost several pounds. Normally, I rarely weigh myself on my home scales, but now I do. By the end of September, I weighed 25 pounds less than I had in August. This was due to nothing more than eschewing candy and cake, etc., plus the jump start of a week of skimpy eating before and in the hospital. My weight has stayed the same ever since. But gosh, do I miss the cake and candy!
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