Journal of a Living Lady #48
Nancy White Kelly
My first trip to the hospital this millennium is now history. I survived the monthly round of chemotherapy in my oncologist’s office with minimal difficulties. After three days, I felt invincible again. Like a normal woman, I was washing clothes and off to the grocery store. Like a foolish woman, I kept going. Pneumonia and flu took advantage of my vulnerability. In the middle of the night, a rasping cough and a raging fever put Buddy in a frenzy. He had me in the warmed up car before daybreak.
Buddy and my doctor have a mutual understanding to ignore my wishes. You need to understand I don’t “volunteer” to go to a hospital.
The emergency room was full of cases like mine. Continual streams of coughing, wheezing, germ-laden patients were led into curtained cubicles. An old man, unshaven and shivering, was sitting in a wheel chair wrapped only in an afghan over boxer shorts. The whole emergency area had overtones of a plague.
When the emergency physician noted my complicated history, he told me I was in the worst place I could possibly be. He commented, with a twinkle in his eye, that he had sent his own mother home “to keep from killing her.”
Six hours later, I was in a room. Six days later I wish I had stayed home. The weather had turned icy. It was the week-end and the hospital was noticeably understaffed.
Each day my fever returned. Dehydration became a problem. I vomited for what seemed like eternity. All my medications had to be changed to IV because I couldn’t keep anything down. Patches were substituted for the morphine pills. However, there wasn’t an intravenous substitute for one particular drug I routinely take, so a substitute medicine was ordered.
A weary nurse who had been on duty much too long appeared beside my bed with two horse-size syringes. She said the( medicine was to be pushed slowly into my porta-cath near my heart. That seemed like a huge dose to replace one aspirin size pill. Before I could express my concern, the respiration therapist pulled a mask over my mouth for a breathing treatment and left the room. Talk about bad timing.
As the nurse began emptying the first syringe into my port, I tasted the drug and felt a fiery sensation of heat coursing through my body. I yelled at the nurse to stop. My chest was tightening. She look puzzled, but continued to push the syringe.
I flung the mask off my face and told her in no uncertain terms to stop NOW. She reluctantly did, but not before most of the first syringe had been emptied. My heart raced and I could have sworn that I felt the breath of angels.
To my disbelief, the nurse disappeared from the room. I was alone. My gut feeling was that I was experiencing a drug over-dose. In a panic, I ripped the narcotic patches off both arms and hurled them at the wastebasket in a desperate effort to stop the effects.
I then laid motionless, taking deep slow breaths in hopes that my heart would return to a normal rhythm. In a few minutes the nurse returned, flipping casually through a drug reaction book. She scolded me for removing the patches. “We are supposed to return them to the dispensary.” That nurse will never know how close she came to being plaster on the wall at that moment.
I have lived to fight cancer another day. But if I had died there in the hospital room, I am convinced nobody would have ever known the difference. Everyone would have always believed that I died from “complications of cancer.”
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