First Blood Part V.

Turns out the cysts were not done with me yet.

Went to my doctor yesterday with pretty excruciating abdominal pain and cramping, after my devil boss told me it was probably my appendix exploding. Doc sent me to the ER, where after 6-8 hours, they determined it was a cyst on my ovary that had ruptured, sending fluid, etc. into the abdomen and causing much duress and bloat. Gnarly. They say these things happen to the womens in they child-bearin years. After 12 hours of tests and waiting and more tests and waiting, I was sent home with some sweet sweet Percoset and some Advil. Pain's decreased some and when I took the Percoset I felt nothing but awwwwesome. Anyway, all is okay it seems. I'm just supposed to follow up with my gyn to keep monitoring my cyst-omania.

The official post-game highlights, however, have been authored here by Joseph, who left work early to meet me for a doctor's appointment, only to end up missing his final basketball game, spending the entire night sitting sentry at my stretcher, coming home at 7am, putting me to bed, and making turkey burgers for dinner. Bestest boyfriend of all time. Let us love and praise him. Here he is:

--

So B’s up all night, something’s wrong, but she goes to work, toughs it out, but things aren’t feeling good, working right, so she tells me midday she’s leaving early, going to the doctor, off to see what’s up. The doctor isn’t her regular guy, is some fill-in who has to go on WebMD or some bullshit just to give B an answer about what might be wrong and leaves her with the bedside-manner-unfriendly statement, “My guess is you’re spending the night in the hospital.”

We leave the doctor and take the L to 1st Ave, stop in to CVS for a soda (the cashier is rude, absent-minded, possibly drugged), then walk up to Beth Israel, left on 16th Street, then down the block and across from the Stuy High back steps and in through the ER entrance which is a combination of piss stink and leaking ambulance oil stains. B goes through some initial processing then finds a seat, but I stand. The place is that packed. Some Asian guy in a wheelchair has his foot up on a seat. Lots of mothers and infants in strollers, lots of women wearing sweatpants and showing asscrack. Finally some tandem of mom-kid leaves and B and I relocate to a seat TV-center, with Rambo First Blood: Part II starting in three minutes. Ten minutes later some dreary-eyed old black guy comes in looking gaunt, but then sees Stallone on the 36” flattie and perks up. “Oh shit yeah, Rambo in the ER!” B and I are thinking the same thing. The black guy’s friend rolls in and – with only a casual glance – goes “First Blood: Part II – that movie’s THE SHIT! Ain’t no Part 3, though. That one’s a FUCKING BLOODBATH.” On the screen, Rambo is wearing a red mesh muscle shirt and looking pissed. A few seconds later we’re called into the back, and both know in that moment that we’re going to miss all the bloodshed.

We follow some woman in navy scrubclothes to Bed 6, next to a woman in a corner whose lesbian nieces arrive holding hands and wearing sliced jeans and big white sneakers. The jeans are clearly sliced on purpose, not through wear. These gals have never worn clothes to the point of deconstruction. The timeline of what happens next is foggy through expectation, my thinking we’d be in-and-out in some way short of twelve hours, and thinking somebody would know what’s up, give us something, then let us go. How wrong. How stupidly wrong. A nurse arrives, then a PA, then blood is given, then tests are run, then tests come back, then people leave, then the woman next to us vomits, then the floor is cleaned, then B gets cold from the saline IV, then she drinks some radioactive tonic, then we laugh about tongue blades and nebs and chuxs and surgilube and then it is still early and still late and people are coming in looking tired and bloodied and we know nothing more than we knew six hours ago.

After three hours of nothing I leave to get a soda and tell B I’m not hungry, but when I leave I find pizza and eat it so hungrily that I burn my mouth. Sitting on the Stuy steps across the street, I don’t want to bring in the food because I know B has not eaten since the previous morning, and that the smell will torment her. Midway through my second slice she texts me, “Okay going to ultrasound. Not sure where – 2nd floor? She says its hard to find. Will call you when done. They say I’ll be coming back to ER. Maybe the nurse people there will tell you where. Sorry!”

I drop my pizza and run across the street through the ER entrance, hoping to get to B before they move her, but some 6’+ black woman running security is not having it. "My girlfriend has just been moved! I have to find her!" I tell her, out of breath and this woman, this gargantuan woman says to me "Nobody runs in my hospital!" like those words mean fucking anything to me at that point, so I tell her, anger now seconds from fists, "Look, I've been here for 8 hours. You need to find somebody else to fuck with" and she's definitely not having that, but then some other crazies start coming in, some real bloody, wild-eyed looking motherfuckers and I get by her, run up the kid wing, find an open elevator, and press 2.

On the second floor there is no one, not even a janitor, and I feel defeated. I find a bathroom and splash water on my face and call B but no one answers. But then B calls me! And she says she doesn’t know where she is, but is in the ultrasound wing and I tell her I am there too! That I’m close by and I’m running up and down these abandoned hallways and there is no sign of anyone but then I hear the echo of her voice outside of the phone and then I see her fat nurse and then I rush in and B is there, on some ultrasound table, looking tired.

The ultrasound technician comes in and the lights go off and the nurse and I sit together in the dark watching B get probed and it goes like that for twenty minutes until some Russian doctor comes in, says something garbled, then leaves. I watch B’s womb on the ultrasound, see the infrared muscles clenching in orange and blue, and see her freckled right arm slinging limply off the bed. The nurse next to me is playing some sort of game on her phone, but then it’s time to roll.

B gets “the Cadillac of wheelchairs” (says the nurse), some double-sized wheelchair for the obese, and we get going back to the ER, which, upon entry, has been more or less vacated. There is the old Asian woman and her family still, and also some tough-skinned Scandinavians which B and I could not decide were husband-wife or mother-son, but the mangled-foot hipster is gone, the gutterpunk gone, the Rambo-loving black guy gone, the lesbian niece vomiter gone, and also the entire staff: gone. Just some chest x-rays of someone named Alexandra Kelly still on the screen, and an errant brainscan of a man with the last name Brown.

Then the short of it: the ultrasound is inconclusive. B’s blood levels have dropped. A CT scan is needed. Long waits. Back to the ER bed. The Asian couple is gone. The Scandinavians are gone. We are the only ones left. Us, and some orthodox Jewish nurse. B gives more blood, falls asleep on her bed. I fall sleep upright in a plastic chair. Hours pass. The nurse comes back, something about another blood test. I get up to walk around, but only walk in circles. A doctor comes by, but he’s only looking for a free bed for some quick sleep. We point him through to Bed 7. We fall asleep again, but only minutes pass. Finally, a real doctor arrives and tells B that her blood levels have stabilized, and that she’s okay to go. Ovarian cysts, etc, etc, things will work out in time, etc, etc, here’s some paperwork, sign this, get this prescription filled, put your clothes back on, enjoy your morning.

We leave the hospital to daylight, 5:50AM, and B’s high school diner has yet to open. We go to the competition across the street, B gets sausage and eggs and homefries, while I only drink water. We look outside, watch people go to work, and B comments how she wishes she were one of those people. I’m too tired to say anything.

We settle the bill, find a taxi, then briskly make our way to Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge, where upon exiting in front of our building the cabdriver says, “You know I ain’t getting no fare in Brooklyn!” like we give a fuck. Then up the stairs, B to the shower then to bed, and when I finally get in the shower, finally get the soap on my body and in my eyes, the water cuts out. Just gone. Soap all over my body and no water. In disbelief, I laugh. I towel off the soap residue, then use what’s left in the Brita filter to get what’s out of my hair. I then call the landlord, tell her what’s up, return to B who is on painkillers and says something about “trippy dreams” and fall asleep for what seems like hours but is actually 17 minutes. The landlord is calling me, she is here, so I let her in and she’s got some plumber with her or something and they want to do all this work and I tell her, after the water is fixed, to leave, that I don’t have time for her gangbusters routine, that we have been at the hospital for the past 12 hours, and that we need to rest. “Thanks for the water” is what I say when I’m closing the door, and, after that, we sleep until mid-afternoon, until Tuesday begins to resemble a regular day.