POST-OPS TEN
I didn't think I'd be back to this, but - I'm beginning to feel like a yo-yo, and after yet another trip today back to Scranton - I'll file a report from the front. Today was a rainy day - with thick fog - along all those intertwining roads that branch out from Rt. 6, once you get to the Scranton environs. It was pretty cool, visually. I'm still 'not allowed' to drive for another, say, three weeks, so as a passenger now I glimpse many things from other angles I'd usually not see. The light is always weak (I haven't taken a photo in 5 weeks), and the pale glimpse that passes for sunshine never does much. By 3:30 pm, the day is fairly much over. The hills drip fog and not much else until the snow or ice rages. I've made this trip now, under all sorts of situations, way too many times to any longer make it have any sequential meaning. It's all become an abstract journey. How I ever got mixed up with Medicine - a subject-matter I've always hated and avoided - is beyond me. I get to taking or seeking pleasure now in Wintry car-drive scapes.
I got to the hospital today, without any elation. I was tired already, and dreary with January thoughts. I've always hated January - a too-long, cold, and offensive month for me other than its fact of having to let the angled sling-shot of Earth get its boost past the innards of space so as to start the whole stupid process again. Lights. Action. Camera. In deepest, profound space? I felt dragging, even as I walked the dampness from parking garage to 3rd floor elevator pedestrian walkway, 3 floors up. I put on, yet again, that same damn mask I always use, which is the equivalent for me of someone clasping their hand over my mouth to cease my easy breathing. Within a minute, yes, it comes down, first to uncover my nose, and then to all intents and purposes down past my mouth and no one balks. The heart-patient coronary guys get all the breaks. Except for this endless check-up after check-up after follow-up after medicine dosage adjustment, all these 'taking blood' trips have made me feel lethargic and pokey. All that work and toil, for something that takes about 30 seconds. The talking about it all afterwards takes twenty times as long, and I get all sorts of weird nurse/specialists - the 'phlebotomist'; the Coumadin Maiden (as I call her), and the jovially-wired blood-taker herself, who always likes my big veins, and calls them great pipes. I want to say 'They wouldn't be so swollen if you'd just leave them alone awhile.'
Getting into the lobby, I noticed right off that - since I last left there on the 23rd or whatever it was, the 'Holiday' schema of the place had changed - more decorations, Menora stuff, fake trees, candelabras and angels blowing on horns. It was thrilling, but to a negative degree. Crippled and bloated, wheelchaired and lame, all these folks silently did their trespass past Christmas and Holiday cheer. Nothing made much sense. The two cafes were closed already for the day, and the nearby pharmacy seemed, as well, vacant and forlorn. T'weren't much happening in Happyland.
I couldn't help but feeling deflated. I'd thought I'd be done with this place, but it just kept creeping back on me, with more and more upcoming dates of re-visitation. Friday, for instance, 3-days off! That was a new one, added today. The reason for all this crap (my wife had to meet her cancer-doctor as well, so at least we've managed to conjoin a few visits : The luck of the time-saver, I bet), is because of this medicine they keep pouring into me and changing dosages of. Coumadin - a blood-thinner that can go good, or become really bad on one too. I hate the stuff and really did NOT want to get involved with it, but they said I'd need 25-30 days of it, so as not to 'clot' around the new valve at one extreme, and, at the other extreme, not 'bleed out, God forbid' as she phrased it. They can't get the dosage right, so they keep calling me back for adjustments - three pills a day, now (for the next 4 days), instead of one and a half. I said I was really annoyed, and feared side effects and repercussions - bruising, rectal bleeding, etc., (these are each of some of the 'side effects' possible proposed on the funhouse guide to freaks and ghouls they supplied me with). She said she was sorry, and understood, but the drug takes a delayed reaction, and as I've regained appetite, movement, and vitality, my energy levels and such have also altered absorption of the drug. I nodded like I understood, but this was all Greek-Medical Bullshit to me, even though I didn't want to tell Mrs. Dracula here. I told her I'd follow her instructions but wasn't happy about it and I felt she was running interference for the 'other' side, not mine. The best she was able to come up with was that they had 'others' who were taking 7 times my dosage. Well, GOOD for them then!!
Then, a real clincher! I told the doctor that, after 30+ years of taking Coumadin, rigorously, and 2 heart operations later, my mother had died of Coumadin. Her brain aneurism, when it occurred, had allowed so much thinned-out blood to rush into her brain, fueled by all that Coumadin, that the onrush of blood had been enough to dislodge her brain from her brain-stem (or something like that, I forget the exact process and that was 20 years ago). We were given like 12 hours, as survivors, to decide whether to unplug her from the respirator/life support, or have a vegetable Ma for however long it would be. The doctor flatly denied that was true; 'It could not have happened that way; there had to be other underlying factors; what you're presenting is preposterous.'
I'm not about to be arguing with a Class A heart surgeon, especially one who'd just been a team member of the gang that had done mine! So I rolled over, figuring, well, yeah, OK, I guess I got the story wrong. But that's surely the way I remember it. 'Accentuate the positive. Eliminate the negative. Don't mess with Mr. In-Between!!' So, wish me well, I guess, in my blood-fueled battle to the finish. How I ever got her, I'll never know. Fate? Destiny? The crummy crawlings of genetic bad luck? A huge joke played on me by God - years of funky frolic, allowed to run their course while I played stickball in the courtyard thinking all was great? Jeepers, looked at one way this life can surely seem to suck.
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