The Spirituality of Illness

No posts for over a month... because I spent the first week of October in Pascack Valley Hospital (PVH). And so did my husband, Stuart!

Here's how it happened. The excruciating lower back pain I experienced last April and May, which finally drove me into the hospital then, returned in September — on the other side of my body. In both cases, I had developed an abscess in the psoas (pronounced "so, as") muscle, which runs horizontally on each side of the spine, four to six inches below the waist. None of the many Medicals I encountered last spring could find a source for the infection. I had had no superficial injury that could have caused an abscess, and no incipient infection could be found elsewhere in my body. I spent a week of May hospitalized and two weeks after that on intravenous antibiotics at home...and the rest of the summer trying to get my stamina back and replenish my digestive system with friendly bacteria. Then it happened again — and again the infection and pain were inexplicable.

After a visit to my family doctor and a night of severe pain, fever and chills, Stuart drove me early the next morning to the infectious diseases specialist who was to give me a scrip for tests at the hospital. If my psoas cyst was larger than tiny, I would be admitted and the abscess drained by the interactive radiologist using the CT scanner to position the drain(s).

Coincidentally, Stuart had come home sick the night before, too. He was dizzy and weak and had crippling sciatica pain shooting down one leg. While I was in the doctor's examination room, Stuart virtually collapsed in the waiting area. When I came out, the doctor invited him to come in. She saw that he was dehydrated and his blood pressure was very low, so she told him to go straight to the Emergency Room.

This was the pitiful picture: me, the "preeminent" patient in pain, pushing Stuart, the "interloper" sicko, out to the parking lot in the doctor's wheelchair. He was dopey, and I didn't know how to find the hospital from the medical office — northern New Jersey roads being impossibly confusing to New Yorkers. Then, too, my mind was whirling: neither of us had packed an overnight bag; I was going to have to postpone my tests while I admitted Stuart then drove home for toothbrushes, fed our cats, returned to visit him in Emergency, then hied myself over to the Radiology department hours later than I was expected. And, I was going to have to take enough Vicodin to be able to take charge of the day — when I should have been the center of everyone else's solicitous attentions! — but not so much painkiller that I couldn't drive and find my way back to the hospital without Stuart helping me navigate. Poor me!

It was a very long day. Stuart waited hours in Emergency for a bed upstairs. I waited hours in Radiology to get my CT scan — drinking the imitation-banana-flavored-barium "shake" for "contrast," developing diarrhea from same, waiting while three dead-at-the-scene patients came through Emergency to be brought back to life by the miracle-working PVH staff, including "my" radiologist who, necessarily, had to delay reading my scan and pronouncing my fate. Poor me, indeed!

By 8:00 p.m., with nothing on my stomach all day but the pseudo-banana "shake," I had progressed backward and was propped in a wheelchair in the Emergency waiting room — in pain, having chills despite being wrapped in a white cotton blanket I'd grabbed in Radiology — also waiting for a bed. If I could have gotten out of the chair, I would have laid down on the waiting room couch. Oh poor, poor me!

Stuart was, by this time, ensconced in a real bed on the third floor. On the plus side, I knew exactly what I was in for — getting a hole bored in my side on the morrow — but neither of us knew what lay in store for Stuart. We talked a little by cell phone, but our conversations were terse, desultory: we were both in pretty bad shape.

Around 9:00 p.m. I was finally wheeled to a room on the fourth floor. The staff had done their best to get me onto the third floor, near Stuart, but PVH was doing a lot of business that particular Tuesday, and space was at a premium. Unfortunately, neither of us was in any shape to walk to the other, and even if we had been, patients are not allowed to leave their floors except when an attendant rolls them somewhere for a test.

So at this point, the first week of October, neither of us was earning a paycheck, as we are both freelancers. No one was paying bills or answering phones or watering plants or mowing grass or paying us visits in the hospital. For reasons completely coincidental, we were miles away from our home (and friends) in the lower Hudson valley — those who would certainly have visited us at our local hospital — feeling very isolated and very helpless. And not without reason.

I didn't even bother calling the Ungrateful Child who lives a three-hour drive away. I knew she would have something more compelling to do than spend time helping us. The best I could do was cope with my own tests and procedures, sleep and rest as much as possible, and visualize getting out of the Sick House by Friday, as nothing is worse than waiting out a weekend in a hospital. (I helped the visualizations along by also verbalizing this wish to all the Medicals I encountered: doctors, nurses, aides, roommate, Stuart and so on.)

Stuart, meanwhile, was being inundated with IV fluids. He, too, spent a lot of time sleeping. Whenever he tried to get up, his sciatica prevented him from walking. Having successfully gotten each other admitted to the same hospital on the same day, we now began to wonder how we would manage to get each other home, and who would take care of whom when we got there.

Theoretically, I was the original sickee and needed two weeks post-hospitalization recovery (and coddling) time. However, in the reality we insist on perceiving, Stuart was extremely depressed and stressed about the crash of his freelance business (related to the subprime mortgage crisis). Besides talking the EMT guys into stopping by my room for a visit on the way back from his MRI, there wasn't much Stuart could do for me or for us. I felt tremendous pressure to recover quickly and begin working again, but I also knew that I could only generate about half the money we would need to pay our bills each month.

And then the real crisis hit, the message Stuart's body was trying to send came through. My visualization/verbalization had worked, and we were both to be released on Friday. But before we left, a urology specialist was sent to Stuart's room at the same time my admitting infectious diseases specialist came to mine, both on a mission to inform us that something had shown up on Stuart's CT and MRI — kidney cancer.

(to be continued)