My two eldest were both off from school that week, a confluence of calendars that rarely occurs. My son Jacob’s school usually has spring break the last two weeks of March; my daughter, Sasha, has one week in February and one week in April—that’s four solid weeks of uncovered time each spring, for all you parents keeping track—but because Good Friday, Easter, and Passover were all early that year, we caught a break: a week of overlap.
My friend Maria graciously offered to take Jacob to see a movie with her kids, and Jacob had stunned us all by offering to have his little sister tag along. Baby Leo was not invited. Our regular sitter, Bonnel, was off caring for her elderly brother in the Philippines for three weeks, so I’d arranged for our friends’ sitter, Shanta, to watch Leo in our apartment, as these friends had taken Shanta’s usual charge away with them on vacation.
I sat down to try to eat breakfast, but the food, due to the pain where food needed to go, would not go down. Never mind, I thought. I’ll grab something at my office when I feel better. I packed up my laptop, put on my shoes and coat, and pushed open the front door to leave, but as I did, a fresh surge of pain made me pause in the doorjamb, half in, half out. Breathe through it, I thought. Just breathe through it. All those hours of Lamaze lessons had to be worth something.
I did not consider staying in bed. Arranging to have a proper workday that day, never mind the deadline, had taken so much extra time, effort, and money that not going to my office was inconceivable.
But when I couldn’t stand up straight while waiting for the elevator—granted, this is not unusual, as the elevator in our building is so old and decrepit, whole chunks of my perpendicular life have been challenged by either being stuck inside it or waiting for it—I decided to turn around and head back inside. This, like the confluence of my children’s vacation calendars, was unusual. Unless my fever spikes above 102, I force myself to go to the office and write. My freelance income depends on this level of discipline: if I don’t work, I don’t get paid.
I foraged through the medicine cabinet in my bathroom. Found some Tums. These ought to work, I thought, then I crouched in a fetal position on the floor of my bedroom to wait for them to do so.
Which was when Shanta walked in. My bedroom doubled as the nursery. Leo needed a new diaper.
“Don’t worry about it, Shanta,” I said. “I’ll change him.” Though I know my working life would be impossible without childcare, I’ve never grown accustomed to the upstairs/downstairs aspects of the arrangement. Meaning, I know it’s my sitter’s responsibility to change my child’s diaper, but if I happen to be present when the deed needs doing, I’m unable to stand by watching her do it. This is not so much a martyr complex as it is the latent socialist or humanist or whatever you want to call the ist in me that makes it impossible for me to walk by the window of one of the many nail salons that have popped up like mushrooms in my neighborhood without contemplating the nature of servitude. Add to my discomfort the fact that Shanta was barely into her second day on the job, and let’s just say only force majeure would have kept me from wiping my own child’s ass. Like say, not being able to stand up. Which, I was shocked to realize, was suddenly the case.
“Are you okay?” said Shanta, watching me struggle to rise before crumpling back down on the floor.
“I’m fine,” I said, doubled over my knees with my butt in the air. This position offered some relief, but not as much as one might have thought.
“You don’t look fine,” she said.
“I’m sure it’s just gas,” I said. I explained I’d taken some Tums and would be on my way just as soon as I could stand up. I apologized for not being able to change Leo’s diaper.
When an hour passed, and the pain got worse, I called my doctor, thinking maybe she could prescribe a slightly stronger antacid. She was away, I was told, but her partner could see me. Since I’d only actually met my doctor once, for an annual checkup the previous year, I felt no real allegiance to her over her partner. In fact, because our family’s health plan has changed so often—in a ten-year span, I’d had five different primary care physicians—I felt no real allegiance to any of them.
I forced myself out the door, still doubled over in pain, and took the bus to the doctor’s office. We don’t own a car, and taxis are reserved for emergencies, and a gassy stomach didn’t quite seem to qualify as an emergency. “Are you okay?” said the bus driver.
Hadn’t he seen a woman doubled over before? “I’m fine,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Do you want me to call an ambulance?” This was my first indication that perhaps I was less than fine.
“No, that’s okay,” I said. “I’m on my way to the doctor right now.”
The doctor’s office was only half a block from the bus stop, but even so, I found traversing this distance nearly impossible. I kept wanting to collapse on the pavement. I pictured—way too vividly—taking a knife to my stomach to slice out the pain. By the time I arrived at the office, I was both worried that something might actually be wrong and angry that whatever it was was screwing up my workday.
“It’s probably just gas,” said the doctor, palpitating my stomach with his hands.
“That’s what I thought,” I said, trying to remember where, in the neighborhood, I could fill the prescription fast, take the drugs, and hop on the subway to my office. But then a new wave of pain hit, and I realized that unless the drugs worked extremely well, my ability to concentrate would be in serious jeopardy. “Are you sure it’s just gas?” I said. “It’s pretty bad.”
The doctor gazed at my nearly empty chart, hoping perhaps to ascertain whether I was a hypochondriac. Of course he had no way of ascertaining this, or of knowing that I only visited doctors as an option of last resort, as the only notes marked therein were from my first and only annual physical with his partner a year earlier. In fact, ironically, I had my next annual physical scheduled for the following day. “Gas can be pretty painful,” he said. Then he handed me two Nexium and a glass of water and told me to take it easy until the pain subsided.
But as I was handing over my credit card to the receptionist, I collapsed on the floor and began writhing in pain, and not just over the $250 bill. The doctor, who was writing me a prescription for more Nexium when this happened, stood over me with an expression hovering somewhere between quizzical and annoyed. “Is it really that bad?” he said. He asked me to give my pain a number between one and ten.
I wanted to say nine or ten, but then, seeing the doctor’s expression, I began questioning the level, mentally adjusting it so as not to rile him further. “Six? Maybe seven? Possibly eight?” He thought it was gas, so it must be gas. Get a grip, I chided myself. It’s no big deal! Or was it? I couldn’t believe gas could feel this bad.
The doctor stood there, clearly weighing his various options. “Look,” he said, “I don’t know, maybe it’s worth a trip to the emergency room for a CT scan. You could have some sort of blockage.” The words sounded more like a challenge than a suggestion: Do you feel bad enough to face the circus of an emergency room?
Yes! I suddenly realized, I actually do feel that bad. “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe it is worth a trip.”
The doctor seemed as surprised by this decision as I, but he told me his hospital affiliation, handed me my prescription, and sent me on my way.
The hunched-over, block-long walk to the main avenue, where I’d have access to transportation, was, bar none, the most difficult journey I’ve undertaken. Wars and the Jersey Turnpike on Labor Day included. I actually wasn’t sure I’d make it.
When I did, I decided that the kind of pain I was feeling finally qualified as an emergency and hailed a taxi.
“Get up off of that floor!” the emergency-room guard was yelling at me, even as I kept trying to explain that I couldn’t. I’d been waiting to be seen for over an hour, and the pain was getting worse. I’d attempted to sit in the waiting-room chairs, but the only position in which I found any kind of relief was curled up in a fetal ball o
n the floor.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’m sure there must be some mistake. Didn’t my doctor call ahead?”
“How should I know?” snapped the guard. “Get up!” Policemen kept escorting bloodied people in handcuffs through the front door and straight into triage, bypassing the guard. He was busy, damn it. The hospital was busy. I kept wishing my pain were half as visible.
I looked at my watch: 11:15 A.M. Shit! I thought. I was late for a phone call with Daniel, my editor. So I called him. From the waiting-room floor. In fact, it was Daniel who suggested that it might have been a good idea to call my husband first to get him involved as an advocate, if I ever actually wanted to be examined.
“No cell phones in the hospital!” barked the guard. “If you want to use your cell phone, you’ll have to step outside.”
But I couldn’t step outside. I couldn’t even sit. With my back to the guard, I sneaked in one more call, which I conducted in a whisper. “I’m sorry to drop this on you right now,” I said to my husband, knowing he was supposed to leave for Washington, D.C., later that day for a conference, “but I think you have to come help me.” Paul knows I only cry fire when there’s an actual fire. Like the time when we were living in Paris, and it was 3:00 A.M., and our stairwell was in flames.
When he arrived, I was sitting in a chair with my head hanging over my knees. This wasn’t as comfortable as the floor, but it kept me from being yelled at.
“What the fuck, Deb? How long have you been here? Why haven’t you been admitted?”
Time was becoming slippery, marked only by pain. I was starting to get confused. How long had I been waiting? I had no idea. “Ask Cerberus over there,” I said, pointing to the guard. “He should know.”
Paul took the situation in hand, and before long I was lying on, well, not a stretcher—they were all taken—but on a gynecological examining table, which though tilted at an angle was still better than the floor. In the hallway outside the examining room where I lay, several old people were dying, some of them loudly. Three people were attached by handcuffs to their blood-soaked stretchers. Men in police uniforms were trying to piece together a crime. (“I’m sorry, but how did you get to be in possession of the weapon?” I heard. “Magic?”) And in the center of it all, an older nurse, who’d presumably seen it all, was hunched over her desk, weeping.
And so we waited. And we waited. Some of the relatives of the bloody people in handcuffs had now arrived, adding their protests and shouts to the cacophony. Several hours into this I became unglued. “Help!” I cried, to no one in particular, as Paul was out in the chaos, trying to lasso some aid.
He returned, furious. “They keep telling me they’ll be bringing a stretcher to wheel you up for the CT scan any minute now,” he said, “but I can’t seem to get an actual person to commit themselves to the task. Didn’t your doctor call ahead?”
Sentences were at this point beyond my brain’s capabilities. I shrugged my shoulders, shook my head. “Drugs,” I moaned. “Please.”
“This is ridiculous!” Paul left again to go find someone, even, he said, if he had to physically drag the person to my bedside himself.
It was now late in the afternoon, around 4:00 P.M. I’d been in pain for sixteen hours, in triage on a gynecological exam table for more than five. Shanta was scheduled to watch Leo until 6:00 P.M. Jacob and Sasha needed to be picked up by 7:00 P.M. Our medical insurance kept calling to ask my husband for clarification: what, exactly, was my diagnosis? “I don’t know!” apparently was not an acceptable code for reimbursement.
Paul returned to my bedside with the nurse who’d earlier been crying. “Morphine! Now!” he was shouting, loud enough for me to hear it amidst the clamor of cops and robbers, and something about his tone produced the opiate, well, not immediately, but fast enough.
The next thing I remember, I was lying on the bed of the CT scan, perfectly still, as I’d been told to do. But the morphine was wearing off, and I was finding it increasingly difficult to suppress the urge to curl back into my fetal ball. “Hello?” I said. “I think I need some more morphine.”
No response.
“Hello?” I was confused. I’d been told the technician could hear me. That if I started to panic I should just say so, out loud, and someone would come get me. I wasn’t panicking—yet—but why wasn’t anyone answering? Was I allowed to move? “Is anyone there?” I kept lying perfectly still, but the pain had returned with a vengeance. “Hello?”
No response.
Minutes passed. Then a whole hour. “Can I move?” I said out loud again, only to be answered, once again, by a wall of silence. There’s a reason I was the Simon Says birthday party champion of the third grade: if Simon didn’t say it, I didn’t do it.
Screaming, when you think about it—and I was definitely starting to think about it—is a perfectly logical response for a colicky infant stuck in a crib or for a grown woman stuck in a giant doughnut. I thought about my own baby. Who was feeding him dinner, giving him a bath? What arrangements had my husband jerry-rigged? Where were the big kids? Would our insurance cover the hospital bill? When was I going to edit my piece? What the hell was going on? “Hello? Can anyone hear me?”
Finally, a few minutes later, a voice crackled over the speaker on the wall: “Please lie still.”
“I have been,” I said. “For over an hour! Where were you?” I sounded like a jilted girlfriend stood up on a date.
“Nobody told you?”
“Told me what?”
“I got called into a different room for an emergency. We’re short a technician.”
I was starting to wonder what, exactly, about my situation did not qualify as an emergency. How could the most expensive medical care in the world be so…bad? “You mean you haven’t finished my CT scan yet?”
“We haven’t started.”
“What?” I thought about this for a moment. The pain, at this point, was no longer tenable. I would not be able to lie still for another forty minutes. “Can I get another shot of morphine first?”
“Yes, but you’ll lose your place in line.”
This I didn’t have to think about. “Forget it,” I said. “I’ll make it.”
“Are you sure? If you move, we’ll have to start the whole thing all over again. Maybe we should get you out and give you some more morphine.”
“No,” I said. “Let’s do this.”
It took all the superpowers I had not to move a muscle during that CT scan, which finally confirmed what my mother, who’s not a doctor, had diagnosed over the phone from Maryland several hours earlier: appendicitis. Both she and my father, whose appendicitis she’d also diagnosed, by making him raise his right leg off the floor where he’d collapsed in the nude—an image from my childhood that remains one of my more vivid—had had theirs removed, but immediately, she recalled, within a couple of hours after the first pangs of pain. You had to treat an infected appendix right away, she said. Otherwise it could burst and you could die. Now, granted, in my mother’s world you can also die from touching the toilet seat at a gas station, but I could hear the fear in her voice about the number of hours that had already passed, and it gave me pause.
In 1975, when they wheeled my mother down the hospital corridor for her appendectomy, my father ran next to the gurney, clutching a pen and a yellow legal pad, scribbling frantic notes on everything from how to operate the washing machine to which of us four girls came home from school when. My parents laughed when they told this story, but I remembered thinking at the time that it wasn’t funny. At all. Never mind that my father knew nothing about washing our clothes or waiting for the school bus. Or packing our lunches or purchasing shoes or taking us to the doctor or driving our carpools. He could have learned those things if he’d had to. But what if he’d actually had to? I kept wondering. What if Mom had gone into that operating room and never come out?
“Where are the kids?” I asked my husband when I was wheeled back into triage to await my operation. I
was parked in the hallway behind an octogenarian who was choking on his own phlegm.
Maria had kept the big kids at her place, Paul told me. She’d fed them dinner after the movie and offered to let them sleep over and stay for as long as we needed. As for Leo, our friend Abigail, who lives a few floors below us, had gone upstairs with her daughter to relieve Shanta, the substitute babysitter, wheeling a sleeping Leo in his crib out of our apartment and down the elevator to her place, where she would feed her own kids and await further instructions. She had all the formula and diapers she could ever need, he assured me. Everything would be fine.
I started to cry. Not only because my husband had glued the pieces of our Humpty-Dumpty lives back together again on his own, with nary a yellow pad or pen, not only because I have friends like Maria and Abigail, who are living proof that hell is not all other parents, but also because I was fed up.
When my husband and I lived in Paris, yes our stairwell caught on fire, but I also had a doctor who knew me. I didn’t need private insurance to pay him. My birth control pills were essentially free. My friends and colleagues who’d stopped taking their pills all sent their offspring to excellent government-subsidized day care centers, called crèches, which cost them from little to almost nothing, depending on their income. Their children’s vacations were always synchronized according to region, not school. Their school days and years ran longer. Their progeny’s ears, eyes, and noses were checked every week for infections and treated immediately, if need be, with free antibiotics. No one I knew worried about being bankrupted by childcare costs or medical bills. Mothers did not debate not going back to work because their families couldn’t afford it. Even our stairwell fire, which had trapped us in a fifth-floor walk-up, was put out seemingly effortlessly by efficient pompiers in chic uniforms who barely broke a sweat.
Here in the United States, however, where our social safety net seems limited to the guarantee of a Starbucks on every corner, family life can often feel as if it’s stacked like a house of cards, with one small gust of air—an absent babysitter, another day off from school, a medical emergency—knocking the whole structure to the ground. One can plan theoretical contingencies in the event of each occurrence, but life doesn’t always offer a single gust at a time. Sometimes the perfect storm blows into town, and then you’re left, in triage limbo, with a bum appendix, a dying man at your feet, three kids scattered to the four winds, your sitter in Manila, and only your wits and whatever karma you’ve accumulated back on earth to save you.
Hell Is Other Parents Page 6