Hospitalized

It was Friday around 8 p.m., and my husband had the worst headache of his life. Worst headache of your life means you go to the ED, I informed him snappily, all the while mulling over my suicide plan. That’s how my husband and I ended up on a Friday night date at the hospital.

Starting to see hospitalized patients saved my life.

I can’t count the number of times I thought about quitting during my preclinical years of medical school. But in India, quitting or switching careers felt like suicide. I hated dissecting dead people, pithing living frogs, peering into microscopes, dropping chemicals into a terrified bunny’s eyes. But I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to the medical world, so I slogged on, earned good grades, and eventually reached the clinical part of medical school.

I watch the ceiling lights pass by as I am wheeled to the operating theater. I have made such trips before: Over the 20-odd years I’ve worked here I’ve had an assortment of surgical procedures, ranging from a cholecystectomy to the repair of a half-torn shoulder tendon.

At 4 a.m. on post-op day one, I woke up in the living room recliner, my temporary recovery bed. My dog had his paw on my leg. That’s when I felt it: wetness. I reached down and found blood.

The surgical drains were overflowing. My incision was bleeding. I was beginning to feel lightheaded. As an emergency medicine physician, I knew that this was not normal.

It was a regular duty day at the neonatal ward when I received a frantic call from my intern colleague. “Come quickly,” she said, “We just received a critical case from the OBGY unit.”

I rushed over. She showed me a tiny, fragile newborn—barely alive.

“How far along was the pregnancy?” I asked.

“Twenty-two weeks,” she replied.

The year was 2008, and I was hospitalized for extensive pre-op testing. Awaiting me was a long and risky operation to try to save part of my left kidney. A well-meaning but errant interventional radiologist had ablated it with alcohol. Not just once, but twice!

Dad and I sit in the conference room at Hanover General Hospital when the surgeon knocks on the door and enters. “You must be Eugenia Miller’s husband,” he says to my father.

“Yes, I’m Harry,” my father murmurs while he stands and extends his hand in the direction of the doctor.

“And I’m her daughter, Kathy,” I say as I offer my hand.

“I wish I had better news to share with you,” the doctor states as he looks in the direction of the window at the end of the room.

As I approached retirement after 35 years of practicing head and neck surgical oncology, my new cardiologist suggested that the daily baby aspirin I had been taking for atrial fibrillation was no longer appropriate. “You should consider a convergent procedure,” he said. “A team of surgeons creates scars on the back of the heart near the left atrium and the pulmonary veins. Then they place a clip across your left atrial appendage, and I do an endocardial ablation a few weeks later. It should help.”

My husband was recently hospitalized for a long and arduous cancer surgery. A few days post-surgery, one of his nurses told us that she had to leave early, but that a blonde lady would be coming in momentarily to relieve her. Sure enough, this other nurse comes in, having overheard this comment, and says, “I’m the blonde lady.” My husband noticed that every woman in there was blonde: the aforesaid nurse, the respiratory therapist and the physical therapist. My husband said, “Every woman in here is blonde. I guess it’s not a good time for a (dumb) blonde joke.” Everyone laughed.

I have been hospitalized many times: for a tonsillectomy, the extraction of impacted wisdom teeth, a hysterectomy, foot surgery, and five jaw surgeries. Each experience focused on a different body part, but each shared a common factor: fear.

Everything about the hospital frightened me. I didn’t like the overwhelming smell of antiseptic or the moans of other patients emanating from the surrounding rooms. I shuddered whenever a nurse approached my bed, convinced they were about to communicate bad news to me. I was afraid to move my left arm, fearful that I’d dislodge the IV and need to once again endure the pain of having it inserted. I shivered with anxiety over every encounter with the phlebotomist’s tubes and needles.

Dear readers,

I was just a few months into my first year of medical school when I got sick–feeling crummy, drinking glass after glass of water or orange juice, and peeing a lot. I ignored these symptoms for as long as I could, but finally had to admit that something was wrong and made my way to our student health service, where, on a Friday afternoon, I was given the diagnosis of diabetes and sent home, unmedicated.

The following Monday I was seen by an internist who quickly realized that, despite my age–thirty–I had juvenile-onset (type 1) diabetes. My pancreas was no longer producing the insulin my body needed. That meant that I would need to inject insulin. Forever.