It’s been said that the terminally ill can hear music just before slipping away. I’ve always imagined these souls listening to angels strumming their harps. I never thought it might be “Hey Jealousy” by the Gin Blossoms. But that’s what I heard as I lay in my hospital bed last month while battling a serious strep infection.
Not that some of the lyrics weren’t fitting:
Tell me do you think it’d be all right
If I could just crash here tonight
You can see I’m in no shape for driving
And anyway I’ve got no place to go…
I was indeed crashing—at least in the medical sense. I had a temperature of 103 degrees, my heart rate was tachycardic (130 beats per minute as opposed to a normal 60-100), and my white blood cell count was through the roof. Doctors feared I might succumb to toxic shock. My room became an isolation unit, in which medical staff and visitors all had to don hazmat gowns and gloves before entering (my isolation ended when I tested negative for the lethal bacteria Clostridium difficile).
But the Gin Blossoms? It was unclear to me if hearing the strains of this ’90s rock song meant I was heading to heaven or hell.
Then came the knock on the door. No, it was not the Angel of Death but rather Ryan Leo, a guitarist and vocalist affiliated with Musicians On Call, a volunteer group whose mission, according to its website, is “bringing music to those who need it most.” Ryan decided to keep his ’90s theme going and performed “Slide” by the Goo Goo Dolls. It’s a catchy tune despite the lyrics dealing with a teenager who becomes pregnant and is weighing her options (I sure hope he doesn’t play this song in the maternity ward). It reminded me of the ’90s, a time when I felt physically unstoppable. But here I was today, stopped in my tracks, wondering how it came to this.
On a warm Saturday afternoon, our family had gone to see a professor friend at Georgetown University. We were sitting on a patio, where it had become particularly buggy. I waved off a few insects but noticed a moment later I’d been bitten on my inner right bicep. The bite swelled and a few hours later my temperature shot up. I had chills and aches—even my scalp and teeth hurt. The next day I finally checked into the emergency room.
The doctors decided to keep me overnight for observation—the first time I’d ever been hospitalized. Twelve hours later it became apparent the bite had aggravated a strep infection, causing cellulitis. An attending physician, making her morning rounds, noticed the arm swelling up and asked, “So, no one has prescribed for you antibiotics?” No one had. The E.R. doctors were not convinced the bite would lead to a larger infection and were not inclined to treat me with an antibiotic, lest it do more harm than good or I develop a resistance to the medication. The infectious diseases doctor who dropped by later was not pleased. He shook his head, saying, “I don’t like it.” So he prescribed more antibiotics and scheduled my arm for a CT-scan. Despite being scheduled in the morning, it did not take place until 8:30 p.m. (one of the machines was apparently broken).
Surgeons came to visit (after I requested a surgical consult). They were much more hands-on and struck me as supremely confident. They all reassured me I did not need surgery. But I was advised to keep my arm elevated—the first time anyone offered this advice since my arrival 24 hours ago.
And so began my humbling week in the hospital, an experience that reminded me of both a prison and hotel. On the one hand, you rarely get a chance to shower or shave—you’re stuck recovering in bed. Your room becomes a cell. The television has a limited number of channels, one of which played Law and Order on a loop, so every time I channel-surfed, I’d keep coming across rapper-actor Ice-T. Predictably, the food was bland as, well, hospital food. On the tray I found a packet of the salt substitute Dash. They still make Dash? And you obviously can’t leave the floor since that would trigger a manhunt. (To be honest, I wasn’t nearly mobile enough to make a break for it. As it turns out, the reason patients move so slow is not because they are weak, but rather because they’re attached to IVs and chest telemetries. My own telemetry sensors kept falling off—this resulted in calls alerting my nurse that I was flatlining.)
On the other hand, the nurses were better than butlers at a St. Regis hotel. They were unfailingly kind, knowledgeable, and accommodating, providing me around the clock with pitchers of icewater and much-needed ice packs for my arm, not to mention switching out my meds, injecting my abdomen with heparin to prevent clotting, and stopping my IV machine from beeping. (The reason for the latter? “These damn air bubbles,” complained one nurse. The remark was alarming, although I was relieved to learn the IV drip has a mechanism to eliminate those “damn air bubbles” from entering my veins.) As for the bland food, at the very least I had no dietary restrictions and could order whatever I wanted, in whatever quantity, throughout the day. Sometimes the kitchen would actually call to ask what I wanted for dinner.
What I didn’t realize was that my doctor is not always my doctor. In other words, the internist I see every six months in her office for checkups is not going to see me in the hospital, even if I am battling a severe bacterial infection. Because she sees multiple patients during the day, she does not have time to see me during regular hours. If I needed her to sign off on some procedure, the explanation goes, I’d be waiting until the evening.
Enter the hospitalists. These are doctors who work for the hospital in shifts. During my stay, a physician visited me in the morning, followed by the infectious disease doctor, followed by the attending surgeon. But once their shifts are done, they are technically unreachable. Mind you, there’s always a doctor on call—just not the one who examined me in the morning.
My father, a retired general surgeon, found this puzzling. When he visited me, he asked to speak with the doctor who prescribed a certain antibiotic medication. The contact information he was provided referred to another doctor I had never met—it just happened to be that person’s shift. During his career, my father made his hospital rounds in the early morning or late afternoon and met with patients at the office in-between. In other words, your doctor was your doctor. “That’s very old school,” said my morning physician, whom I very much liked. “It’s just not the way things are done anymore.”
Not that there haven’t been improvements and innovations over time. These days, each patient gets the help of a caseworker. My advocate sat with me and discussed the checkout procedure and offered advice, such as, “Do not pay anything unless it shows you how much your insurance paid.” My room had its own drug cabinet and a pharmacist came in each morning to make sure it was carefully stocked and locked with the proper medicine (sort of like a hotel minibar but with narcotics). Each time medical personnel prepared to administer some drug, despite becoming familiar with me after a few visits, they would scan my bracelet and ask me for my first and last name followed by my date of birth—this happened several times a day throughout the week.
A colleague mentioned how fortunate I am to be living in the age of antibiotics, whereas poor Rupert Brooke did not. The poet was serving with the British Navy in the Mediterranean in 1915 when he was bitten by a mosquito. Sepsis ensued. He died two months later at the age of 27. And as annoying as it was to have every single person in my room wear a hazmat gown and gloves, it’s good to be alive at a time of such awareness about the need for sterility and hygiene. In 1843, the poet-doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. suggested his fellow physicians ought to wash hands prior to surgery. A Viennese obsteterician named Ignaz Semmelweis later concurred. But other doctors scoffed. One critic, Dr. Charles Meigs, responded that doctors are gentlemen and “a gentleman’s hands are clean.”
In short, if I were alive in an earlier time, I wouldn’t be alive. Instead, I got to lay in bed, eat whatever I wanted, have nurses care for me around the clock, and listen to Ryan play the Goo Goo Dolls. Things could’ve been so much worse. For one thing, he could’ve played Nickelback.
