It struck very suddenly. One minute, Mrs. Jensen was shopping in a grocery store with Mr. Jensen, and the next minute, she was feverish, weak, complaining of chest pains and back pains, and moaning. You NAME a pain, and Mrs. Jensen had it. She'd been in great spirits all day; as always, she'd been wandering around the kitchen, whistling dixie and calling the dog a "dat-gum yahoo." Suddenly, she had a fever of almost 102, and looked like someone had just shot her.
We all figured it was SARS.
Now, if anybody's going to get SARS, it's going to be my friend Aaron, who claims to have had mononucleosis four times, and may have once had West Nile Virus after being bitten by a large mosquito outside of my apartment. Aaron has contracted some of the weirdest ailments known to man. Things that doctors said he could not have had. Things for which he has been subjected to hideous tests and treatments. I said, when SARS made its appearance, a short prayer that the Higher Powers would spare Aaron.
...Now, it was Mrs. Jensen who had it.
You ever notice that sometimes when you say a prayer, like, "God, it kinda looks like somebody I know is going to die; could ya maybe help me out and let them live a little longer?" -- then somebody ELSE ends up dead? I figured that, of course, Mrs. Jensen had SARS, and it was probably the fault of my prayer.
Now, a fever is no big deal, even a relatively high one, like 102. Aches and pains and stuff are pretty standard too, if you've got a cold or a flu... But from 98.6 to 102 in half an hour? Mrs. Jensen insisted she'd be fine; all she needed was some rest. But her fever wouldn't go down. So, at 9.30 PM, Jake and I took his mom to the Emergency Room at Fort Lewis.
That's where the fun started.
Mrs. Jensen looked like crap. Oh, did she look like crap! This was NOT the same woman who whistles dixie in the kitchen. She was sort of slumped over, shaking from chills. Jake had procured a wheelchair for her, and we brought her up to the check-in desk. "What seems to be the problem today, ma'am?" asked the receptionist.
"Um, my mom has SARS!!!" I half-expected Jake to yelp that, but he maintained his composure, even though his mother was clearly gazing into the next realm, due to her unfortunate case of Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome. I was proud. Jake was so calm. Well, sort of.
The trick to being seen in an emergency room in a timely fashion is to complain of something fairly frightening. Profuse bleeding is a good one. But they don't really care about bleeding until you say you're light-headed. Say you're light-headed, even if you're not. If you've got a fever, say it's 105, even if it's only 102. If you've got pain, say it's someplace important, like your chest. Numbness is a good one. So is paralysis. So, if you ever sprain your ankle or something, and you're screaming in agony, say you've got chest pain. Trust me; they'll see you first.
But the Jensens are a sweet, wholesome family. They don't even hang up on telemarketers. A typical Jensen-Telemarketer phone call (overheard from the living room):
"Hello?"
"Well, no, he sure isn't. May I take a message for him?"
"Oh, okay... about a completely useless, non-functioning piece of plastic that he'll never use? Oh, yes, let me get a paper and I'll just write that down..."
"Okay..... Okay... Yes sir, Mr. Jones, I sure will have him call you. Actually, he'll probably be back in about twenty minutes, if you'd like to call back then."
"Yes sir, thank you sir, it's been a pleasure talking with you too... Have a good night."
They never say, "no, I don't want one." Their kindness and generosity to people who get paid to annoy them astounds my Northeasterner sensibilities.
Anyway, by the time we got to the hospital, Mrs. Jensen was no longer having chest pains, so she said she wanted to get seen for "feeling bad." She said it was a bad headache and chills. I tried to jump in and give the receptionist some SARS symptoms, but she wasn't really listening all that well anyway.
We waited. We watched an ABC special about the Dixie Chicks. Jake harassed me about liking the Dixie Chicks. I swore up and down that I don't like the Dixie Chicks. He harassed me anyway. The Dixie Chicks thing seemed fucking endless. And Mrs. Jensen looked as though she might go into a coma any minute. This is why it's good to lie to receptionists in emergency rooms about exactly WHERE you're feeling bad.
Four little black kids were sitting with their mother next to us. All of the kids looked miserable. One of them was asleep with his finger in his mouth. Another, looking as though he had the "waitin'-for-a-Greyhound" blues, had "PIMP written in magic marker on his shoes. They were cute kids. A few minutes later, one of the kids could be seen walking out of the bathroom in a hospital gown. The gown was not tied correctly in the back, and his butt was sticking out. I giggled at the kid's cute little-kid butt. Jake said I was a pedophile. I told him he was a poopie-head. Mrs. Jensen, meanwhile, sort of sniffled in her wheelchair, and both of us panicked.
Approximately five hours later...
Jake and I meet a girl with a broken finger. It's not taped up or anything, and it sort of looks like a bone will poke out of it if she jiggles it at all. The broken-finger girl asks if we have any change for a five, and I provide her with five dollars in quarters. (Yes, I really had five dollars in quarters.) She looked ecstatic. If, in an emergency room, you look ecstatic, they don't treat you. The broken-finger girl was still there at 5:00 AM.
While Mrs. Jensen changed into a hospital gown, Jake and I sat forlornly outside. I thought: it would be terrible if she dies of SARS tonight. I thought perhaps Jake and I should throw together a makeshift wedding in the lobby, so she'd be able to attend. I thought that her color was pretty bad. And if it wasn't SARS, it must be some sort of heart attack. I thought: I wonder if a person can be a hypochondriac for another person, and then I turned my attention to Jake. Jake, who was playing a game on his Palm Pilot, did not want to partake of my pessimism. Nor did he want to partake of anything I had to offer. By this point, I'd consumed enough caffeinated soda to ensure a very high annoyance factor for the rest of the night.
A call came through somebody's beeper (or something): full cardiac arrest, five minutes out. Jake paused his game. We both perked up a little bit. I said, (in possibly one of the stupidest moments I've had in months, "Wow... it's like watching "E.R.", only it's real."
Jake and I quickly notified Mrs. Jensen of the situation: "There's a dude coming in with a heart attack, so we're going to go watch him. We'll be back in a couple of minutes to give you the details." Mrs. Jensen heartily agreed. I felt sort of bad, leaving my future mother-in-law to cope, all alone, with her deadly case of SARS, for the purpose of watching a guy having a heart attack, and I truly have no justification for my rubber-necking tendencies, but I really did want to see what it looks like when they wheel a heart attack victim into an emergency room.
Jake said: "I might be an EMT eventually. I HAVE to watch the guy get rolled in. This is what I'm going to be doing everyday for a living!"
I informed Jake that I had no excuse. I just wanted to look. Jake rolled his eyes at me.
They rolled the guy in, but he was surrounded by EMTs, doctors, nurses, and the McChord Fire Department. All we saw was a knee and part of the guy's torso. Still, it was sort of interesting. Like watching "E.R.," only real.
An old lady walked to the bathroom in her hospital gown. She looked miserable. Her husband looked miserable too. A young girl with a large red scratch-mark on her shoulder stepped briefly out into the hallway. She looked pretty fucked-up. She also had an IV pole to drag around. A seven-year-old boy with his arm in a cast scurried by, weeping. His mother accompanied him, looking depressed.
"Hey Jake, you know how that kid broke his arm?"
"No."
"He was at a skating rink, and skated into a wall trying to impress a girl."
Jake, who had done exactly that at a much younger age, sort of punched at me. I punched him back. We called each other poopie-heads.
I overheard someone saying that the E.R. was pretty busy that night with some pretty bad stuff. Three M.I.'s and an overdose, all at the same time. "M.I." means "heart attack." Jake and I surmised that Mrs. Jensen would probably suffer from her SARS symptoms for quite some time before they decided to check her out. We were pretty depressed. We went out to have a cigarette.
Apparently, the heart attack fellow we had seen had died. This according to a merry gentleman in a grey Army shirt, who informed us of the misfortune. Ths gentleman also discussed with us some of the more intriguing cases he'd seen, including a fat man who'd come in complaining of abdominal pain. They'd poked his stomach, and he'd winced. Then, they'd cut his clothes off, only to find an enormous dildo stuck in the man's ass. "And after we got that motherfucker out, he had the nerve to tell us his stomach didn't hurt anymore." Jake laughed so hard I thought he'd cough up a lung. I thought: it's a good thing we're at the emergency room.
Around one in the morning, the doctors got around to Mrs. Jensen. They took her blood. She called them "dat-gum yahoos," because they couldn't find a good vein.
One of the nurses told her it looked pretty bad; she'd have to have several of her organs removed. We all sort of chuckled. By this time, Mrs. Jensen was looking much better than she'd been before. I wondered if this was one of the unpublicized symptoms of SARS. The nurse with the sense of humor had been born in Arkansas, raised in Hawaii, and had a Vietnamese last name. When, after Mrs. Jensen's IV ran dry, I went looking for him, I asked at the desk for, "the Arkansas-Hawaii-Vietnamese guy." The desk people knew who I was talking about immediately. I probably could have said, "that funny guy," and they would have known.
I went for a cigarette. A woman asked to borrow my lighter, then complained about the service of "military hospitals." I looked at her blankly. She told me that she'd waited several hours for pain medication. I may have raised an eyebrow at her; she didn't look like anything at all was wrong with her, although I noticed a few minutes later that she was sort of walking funny. This woman said she worked in a hospital in Tacoma. She expounded on her experiences with drug-crazed weirdos. We giggled. It's funny; medical workers ALL sort of seem like they've got a deep sense of black humor, at least when they're taking smoke breaks.
A lady was weeping in the lobby outside. Not just weeping, but sort of wailing. Jake said he thought she might be in labor. I insisted that women do not go into labor after the age of sixty, but Jake would have none of it. He swore up and down the woman was in labor. We found out later that she was the wife of the heart attack guy who had died. I insisted that Jake wouldn't ever die, at least not before me. He sort of nodded a promise.
It was sort of funny; we weren't all THAT bothered by having seen a guy who was dying, or perhaps already dead. But I think both of us were much more bothered by that poor wife...
Mrs. Jensen had a chest X-ray, to rule out heart problems or, presumably, SARS. They gave her an EKG. They asked her about her medical history about forty times. Mrs. Jensen's medical history reads like a particularly long Stephen King novel, so she'd written it down.
By four-thirty in the morning, the doctors were about ready to discharge her. She was sitting up in her bed, looking sort of pissed off that she wasn't at home, in bed with the chihuahua. By this point, we figured that perhaps it hadn't been SARS after all...
By five, as we waited for the doctor to return, Mrs. Jensen, Jake, and I, were all singing the Oscar Meyer weiner song in exhaustion.
The doctors finally let Mrs. Jensen go. They said it was probably just a nasty flu virus. They told her to see a doctor the next day for another blood test, just to be sure. She still wasn't whistling dixie, but she WAS singing the Oscar Meyer weiner song, so I figured she'd be fine.
Jake and I tumbled into bed around six. We were too tired even to get it on.
11.00 this morning: we were no longer all THAT tired...
Around noon, Jake and I noticed that Mr. Jensen was acting sort of funny. Apparently, he'd been to the dentist that morning, and had been given some novocaine. By his own admission, Mr. Jensen was feeling "goofy." I don't think I've ever seen Mr. Jensen with such a big grin on his face. He walked over to a tree in the yard, and began, very deliberately, and with obvious joy, to carass a leaf.
"Dude! Jake! Your dad is SO stoned!"
You have NO idea how funny that was.
Especially when he appeared to get the munchies.
Around 3.40 this afternoon, I started feeling like crap. It was a combination of a caffeine crash, eating too much junk food, fatigue from being up all night, and a mini-migraine. I get mini-migraines sometimes when storm fronts pass through.
Of course, I was sure, for about an hour, that it was SARS...
Jake made me some tea and closed the door to the bedroom. No WAY was he going back to hospital, his eyes said. After some tea and some Tylenol, I started feeling a little bit better.
I want somebody to give me some novocaine and sing me the Oscar Meyer weiner song as a lullaby.
Goodnight...
~Helena*