Although I was no longer in the hospital,
where I was provided with 'round the clock care, I continued to have a small
tether to professional health care. On November 18, 2011, it had only
been a month since my liver shut down due to my destructive love affair with
vodka. A home health nurse was assigned to me, and when she first
arrived, I wasn't sure what to expect. Meeting someone new
was embarrassing, unlike when I was in a hospital setting, and had given
up all humility.
On the previous day, the first at my
mother's house, I caught a real look at myself in the mirror for the first time
since I fell into the coma. There was a mirror in my hospital room, but I
made sure I only caught glimpses of myself. I knew that I did not want to
know how frightening my deteriorated reflection was. It was my belief
that the least I knew about how dire my condition was, the better.
Otherwise, I feared I would begin to dwell on the negativity of my
situation, and become more prone to accepting death.
Like most bathrooms, the one at my
mother's house has a mirror over the sink. It encompasses most of the
wall running sideways along the right wall, directly across from the shower on
the left. I had to struggle to hold myself up on the sink counter to make
my way to the toilet. During that endeavor, and pausing to suck the
oxygen out of the room, I was standing in front of the looking glass.
I gathered a prolonged stare into my own
eyes. Before my final reckoning with the vodka, I had begun to gaze into
my pupils nearly every morning, after getting home from work at the bar.
It was never a look of vanity, but a chastising of myself for the utter
disappointment I had set myself up for in the long term. Sometimes, I
would speak to myself. "What are you doing?" I would
interrogate myself. "You continue to live in the moment. For
what?" I would ask myself.
In November, it was different. The
person staring back at me was almost unrecognizable. My greasy, unwashed
hair had not been trimmed in at least three months. My face looked like
one of the people in Tim Burton's film Beetlejuice, not Alec Baldwin, but one
of the deceased in the waiting room. My skin was incredibly jaundiced,
and could have readily passed for a spray tan gone horribly wrong. My
cheeks and mouth appeared as if I had never smiled in my 38 years on Earth.
In that moment, the questions were
similar, but more condescending and disciplinary. "What have
you done?" I asked myself. "You knew you were fucking up, but
you just had to keep going, didn't you?" I continued. "No woman
will ever look at you, again. And, your penis is busted and shriveled.
Are you happy now, funny man?" I was completely disgusted with
myself.
With that, I knew what others were
catching a glimpse of when they met me for the first time. My home health
nurse, and all of the staff in the hospital, only knew the man who looked like
he was in his sixties. When the nurse arrived at my mother's house, I was
lying on the sofa. Aside from the enormous water balloon encased in my
abdomen, I was skin and bones. Still, the couch was barely wide enough
for my thin frame.
When the nurse approached me on my
apparent death bed, she had a radiant smile with shiny, jet-black curls grazing
her amber cheeks. I guessed her to be younger than I was, and contrary to
myself, she had her shit together. She was dressed appropriately sharp,
with a snug fitting business skirt, and jacket. Her untouched, white
running shoes were the tell-tale sign that she was someone in medicine.
She told me her name was "Keisha".
First, Keisha needed me to sit up, and be
a less cumbersome patient. I still couldn't lift myself up without
assistance, and my response to such a request was always to reach my hands out
like a child asking for help. After a considerable effort from both of
us, I was prone enough for my check up.
"Hold this under your tongue,
sweetie," Keisha said as she placed the digital thermometer in my mouth.
She asked for my arm, and I immediately began to scan my arms for
a serviceable vein.
"No, no," she said.
"I only need to check your blood pressure."
"Oh. I have grown used to being
poked, and prodded," I reported.
"I understand," Keisha
expressed. "I won't be doing any of that."
Instead she slipped a blood pressure cuff
up my puny arm, and tightened the Velcro to its smallest diameter. The
blood pressure instrument was of the hand pump variety. Keisha had to
squeeze the balloon at the end of the hose to achieve the correct amount of
inflation. She placed the stainless steel stethoscope on my arm, and
pressed it on my vein with her thumb.
Meanwhile, she attached a sensor to my
middle finger to calculate how much oxygen I was absorbing, or lack there of.
When the thermometer beeped, it read 96.3 F, and it was no wonder that I
felt as if I were in a ice bath for over a month. The red L.E.D. on the oxygen sensor reported a 94% absorption rate. That was also no surprise
as I consistently felt out of breath, and was dangerously ill.
My blood pressure was at 98 systolic, and
61 diastolic. I thought reading was low, but I was unaware that the
physicians had been struggling to maintain my blood pressure at a normal
level. When the emergency technicians found me unconscious in my
bedroom, they reported my pressure at 82 over 35. Therefore, I had
improved in that respect.
Finished with those measurements, Keisha
checked my respiration rate, and it was 20 breaths per minute. Before my
liver failed, my normal was approximately 14 per minute. She inquired if
I had been urinating, and also when I had my last bowel movement. After that,
I told her my pain level, which I guessed at a 7 out of 10, and she began to pack
her things.
I was perplexed, and instantly concerned
about the amount of care I would not be receiving. I had not set any
expectations about it, and it was more of a wakeup call. That was when I
knew that things were going to be much different than they were at the hospital.
That was the first moment I began to think
that I may have left MUSC Hospital too soon.
The unwieldy guilt began to sink its teeth into me, again.
I was absolutely helpless, and it was self
inflicted.
I wasn't invincible after all.
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