“YOU PICKED ORANGE” by SSK
Chapter 18
or: I sincerely hope this was worth the wait!
When K and I got to Home (Hospital Physical Therapy Unit, let's call it just "Home". So much easier) we were greeted. Were were smiled at, kind, gentle smiles. We were ushered into a huge room that had enough space for a volleyball court. As I said previously, they didn't need to be told K was a 3 person lift; they looked and they did. He was gingerly lifted and tucked into the bed (and I think some EMT's were there, too, so if you were, I give you big "mmmmmmmmmwah!"
The room was bright, and had call buttons that the nurses responded to, and the PT's took him in to began that PT one hour (ONE HOUR) after Kimit had arrived. This unit had something called a “slider”: it was a long, tough piece of plastic with a round slide slotted in that ran the length of the plastic (I mean, really tough) from one side to the other. They attach one end of the slide to the wheelchair, rolled the patient (gently) onto his side, slip the slide under the patient's butt, returned the patient to his back, sitting up, and then they carefully slid him down the slider and plonk: into the wheelchair. (K made noise, sure, but not the screaming, shrieking, howling noises of pain he'd made on the “step-down” unit.)
They then trucked the boy to the evaluation room. They didn't let me come along, as they weren't sure yet that I wasn't the type to answer questions aimed at her husband, or frail myself, or just a kookoo nut job. They needed to evaluate. My being there could have become a big glaring 'Clever Hans' hoax (even though 'Clever Hans' was not an intentional hoax. Look it up.) That would be bad.
They needed to see, without the wife, how and where he was, mentally and physically.
(Ah, if only they had known, because of.. what should I call it... oh, right: exceeding wimpishosity.) See, I was born and raised in a state where, if someone is standing on your foot with a jackboot, you tell them to MOVE. If they don't move? You hit them very hard with a nice piece hickory. Indiana? The stander got to stand, and the standee was too timid to say, in that cartoon dog voice, "Excuse me, sir, could you please... Oh, all right, but only for another ten min... of course, just tell me when you're d... certainly I'll shut up, what was I thinking?": in other words, WIMPS, that baby don't play that game.
They were going to get to know the girl from “The Exorcist” real soon.
When K came back to his room, after the eval, his PT's told me he'd been put through his paces, and he was a large specimen, but they were confident that they could help him as his face was not drooping. He'd had a bilateral stroke (affecting the right side of his body), but not the face, chas v'chalilah. This situation gave them hope, and, they passed that on to me. They left, saying they'd send hit Occupational Therapist in at about 2 p.m. I did not know what an OT was, but I agreed anyway. Couldn't hurt to have more people whangin' physical and mental stresses at us, right?
Unfortunately, K began to make much louder, painful sounding noises, and used his left hand in a circular motion in the region of his lower abdomen. I called the nurse, she came, and said he was probably having stomach muscle pains from the evaluation, and it would pass very soon.
I VERY reluctantly left the hospital that night, worrying about this circular motion, and the noises getting louder. I was back at Home the next morning at 7 a.m.
And K had gone from loud, painful noises to :”MOTHERFUCKERS, HELP ME, I AM IN AGONY, IT HURTS, GOD YOU SHITHEADS HELP ME GOD FUCKING DAMMIT!!” and did not stop. None of the nurses seemed to be perturbed by either his words or his decibel level.
I was.
I went to his side and tried to get him to tell me what was hurting him, but all he could muster was that weird left-handed circular motion over his lower abdomen.
I called the nurse again. She told me again that the pain was probably from the eval the previous day, and then said, “Oh, look, here they are now to take him to PT. It's just muscle pain, Mrs. Muston, and we can only let it heal”, and off they scooted with K for his second round of PT.
Another hour later, he was back. Moaning even more loudly. The PT folks pulled me aside and told me that they didn't think it was muscular.
Blink. Blink blink. One more blink, and I had it: Kimit had a urinary tract infection. He'd been catheterized for 9 days now, and that just too long. The circular motion he'd been making was over his bladder area, he was indicating that the pain was in that area, and I should have known the day before.
Not to mention the night shift nurses.
I went out to the nursing station, and asked for his doctor to be paged. His nurse asked why.
Why? Did she not hear the constant “MOTHERFUCKERS GET ME SOMETHING FOR THE PAIN I CAN'T STAND IT, SOMEONE HELP ME, GODDAM SHITFUCK, HELP ME, FUCK, IT HURTS!” This is a sign of discomfort. A huge, massive, you could see it at midnight on a back country road written in black letters sing of discomfort.
So she paged the doc. And turned away from me.
I decided (oh, I forgot to say, I WAS FURIOUS AND CRYING) to go to a hospital phone (the ones on the walls) and have this doctor paged.
The operator told me that there was no doctor by that name working at that hospital.
Didja ever want to reach through a telephone and pull the other guy slowly, and painfully, through the cables, to your end? it? Yep, me too.
But none of that was helpful. I was weeping; one of the PT people who had worked with K saw me and tried to ask me what was going on but I ran out the double doors of the Unit, to do WHAT I do not know, and, chas v'chalilah, there was his doctor. He immediately grabbed me and asked what in the world was happening?
I told him. It was that old stand-by of sounding like a 3 year old telling a joke, but he spoke 3 year old, and agreed with me that K's intense pain was probably a UTI. So, he turned me around, back to the nursing station and asked for Kimit's chart. The nurse told him his chart wasn't at the desk, so he whipped out his prescription pad, and wrote an order for IV antibiotics, and gave it to the nurse.
She put the prescription down. And began to talk to another nurse.
The doc looked at me, and then (there's that tesseracting deal again) he was around the station and in that nurses' face. He said, “You will go to the pharmacy RIGHT NOW and get that prescription filled and the bag connected to his IV in LESS THAN TEN MINUTES because I will call the pharmacy and THEY WILL have the bag ready to go, and if I ever, EVER, hear that any one of you treated a spouse this way, or ignored a patients symptoms, I will make sure you are fired and never work in Indiana again. AM I CLEAR??”
Vamanooso went the nurse, with the script. I asked the doc if he could also get K some Pyridium. Anyone who has had ever a UTI knows that little red pill makes you pee orange for a few days, but it's MANNA from heaven. Pyridium is known as a UTI analgesic; in other words, it makes that kind of pain STOP.
Doc said, “There should be some around here, look in all of the cassettes" (:explanation: there is one, locked “cassette” of drugs assigned to each patient, and when that patient is released, there is always stuff left over, so the RN's [barring any opiates and other stuff-what-y'all-kin-get-hooked-on,] dump the leftovers (usually Ibuprofen, Tylenol, Milk of Magnesia [and what the hell IS a 'magnesia', and how do you milk it?) into a communal “Drug Box”.
The RN's, looked like an act from the Three Stooges, rushing and bumping and whamming into each other, looking in their patient's drawers, and the Charge Nurse even opened the 'needs a prescription' key-locked box', where they keep the Big Gun Drugs, like Fentanyl, Demerol, Vicodin, etc.
Alas...
...no pyridium was on this unit. Not one teeny litle red pill. Doc whipped out his prescription pad again, and wrote, well, you know what he wrote.
He gave this script to another nurse; and I saw something I have never seen before.
The doc gave the nurse the script, and she said, “Oh, he's not my patient.”
This, boys and girls, was the utterly, seriously, egregiously WRONG thing to say to this doctor. His eyes narrowed, and turned red, his fingernails grew into claws, his front teeth became 2 inch canines, and he began to drool.
Okay, okay, he didn't become Lon Chaney Jr., but it was damned close. And fast?! Hoo boy. He even scared me.
The nurse, brain trust that she was, snatched up the script, and ran out the back way to the secret elevator that take you sideways to the pharmacy.
My doc, who had instantly resorted to his pleasant, compassionate self, was on phone with pharmacy, and the conversation on his end was "Two nurses will be there in 45 seconds, you will fill those prescription IMMEDIATELY, no, I don't care if the King of the Gypsies is in the ER with a heart attack, that asshole has a heart attack every six months, fill my prescriptions or I will come down there. You don't want me to come down... See? Was that so hard?"
Pyridium Gal was back before the IV antibiotics nurse, but not by much. She gave Kimit one of the little red pills, which usually takes about 2 hours to work, and put the rest (in a bottle) into his cassette. Antibiotic nurse got there within one more minute.
Doc made sure Kimit had the “piggyback” of antibiotics (this is a smaller bag that is plugged into the larger IV bag) hung, and then he told them to give Kimit the pyridium twice daily until the pain go bye-bye.
And then Doc walked me out to the downstairs lobby, where he hugged me. He told me he wouldn't be working at this hospital for too much longer, two months, but if there was ANYTHING Kimit or I wanted (he really said that! Me, too! And boy, did I use that connection later) I need only but ask. And, he said with a very sly grin, if I got shit like that from any nurse again? He gave me his private pager number. AND his home phone. (Both of which I lost, but that's in another chapter. Remember: I AM AN IDIOT.)
I needed this break, this pause in the insanity. He sat me down,and we talked, for about 45 minutes. Just stuff. Our being writers, what brought us to Indiana, pets, etc. But then he had to go. He looked me right in the eye and said, “This is going to drastically change your life, you do know that?” I teared up again, and said, "All kinds of people tell me he'll never walk again. Do you think hewill?" He hugged me again, and whispered, "With you on his side, Lee would have won the Civil War." And he was gone.
I went back to K's room and sat by his left side, feeling calmer. We did NOT do the crossword puzzle because he was still in “Scream as Many Profanities As Possible” mode. I turned on the TV, tried some Antkick yoga (whatever it's called). And then...
.. THE PAYOFF! For you guys.
A woman dressed in Mufti came into the room if you can call a tailored suit, hair full of so much peroxide she could have dipped her head into one of those lakes polluted with non-indiginous fish that were pushing out the indiginous wildlife, and kill them. Her face looked like someone had merely pulled all the extra skin from the front and stapled it to the back of her skull.
And then she grimace... er, smiled: whoa, daddy. That plastic surgeon needed more lessons.
While Kimit was screaming and in pain and all I wanted to do was gather up all of his hurt and set it on fire, in came... this woman. She reached her hand across Kimit's cursing, screaming form and said “Hi, I'm Carol Ann Marie Judith Whatever, and I am the unit director here.”
She was one of those two-fingered wiggly hand shakers, but I wiggled anyway.
And then then she said this:
“Your husband is scaring the family members of other patients, and there are children here, so he really needs to tone it down, yuh huh? And it's not a very Christian way to behave, is it?"
Who would know better than she? Her halo was made of demon blood.
This is how the fantasy went: I leaped over Kimit's bed and grabbed Carol Ann Marie Judith Whatever by the throat, clawed out her eyeballs, and shoved her out the door. AI grabbed an empty IV pole, and jabbed her in her heartless chest. She fell back, onto the floor, and then I kicked her, yeah, I kicked her and said “You ignorant shithead, my husband is in agony, but his yelling is what you're upset about?”, and I slammed the door.
Well, it kinda went like that. I did leap over the bed, a searing ball of fury. I did get in her face, bellowing, “My husband is screaming in pain, and his swearing is your big problem? That's your priority? Fuck off, you ugly bitch, or I will personally train a platoon of gerbils to eat you from the feet up! Oh, and you could have just shut the door, you pathetic excuse for excrement." The door didn't slam because is was pneumatic. (Dammit.)
Hmmm... now that I read it, it was a pretty clever bit of speechifying for a woman who's brain was leaking out her ears. And true. The funniest part of the act in our little show was this: whenever this bitch from hell creature saw me, in the halls, or at the desk or in the cafeteria, she hoiked up her little rayon skirt and skedaddled far, far away from me.
Because, and I speak true, if ever I had the chance, one of us was going to be scarred for life, or possibly killed. For life.
And it wasn't going to be me.