Year: 2011

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The Heart Wasn’t What the Heart Wasn’t

I had an appointment with a cardiologist on Tuesday, to follow up on my symptoms from September. Looking over my EKG and checking my vitals, he seemed a little incredulous about my ER experience. I wondered if he suspected me of being an insurance investigator or something. He said that I was perfectly healthy, and supported my theory that the symptoms were a result of the stress-caffeine-anxiety axis. I’ve subsequently finished my two big stress-related activities, cut my daily caffeine consumption by around 45%, and am trying not to give a shit about little things.

(About the coffee: For the last few months, I was drinking 7 cups a day, and have cut that back to 4. I was drinking a 3-cup mug around 5:00 a.m., when Amy & I get up in the morning, a 2-cup mug of French press around 9:30 or 10 a.m., then another 2-cup French press at 2:00 p.m. The mid-morning once was the stress-related / stress-inducing one; I used to just drink the early morning and early afternoon ones, but found myself in the mid-morning routine as a result of “picking up something” on the way to the office. Starting the Monday after my ER experience, I cut the 5:00 a.m. mug to 2 cups, eliminated mid-morning, and retained the 2-cup 2:00 p.m. one. It’s my drug of choice, and I’m sure other people are just as exacting about their booze, cocaine, etc.)

Hearing about my family history of atherosclerosis (Dad and his far less obese brother both needed quintuple bypasses in their mid-60’s), the doctor wanted to perform a multifunction cardiogram (MCG). He left the exam room to check on my coverage, then came back to say, “It looks like your insurance doesn’t cover the test. I think you should have it, but it DOES cost $175 . . .”

“. . . And?” I said, reaching for my wallet.

“Well, you don’t have to pay for it all at once.”

“. . . No, that’s okay. I don’t mind,” taking out a credit card. A nurse took that and rang me up for it. I just spent $180 to get some Joost Swarte pictures framed, so I’d feel like a dolt if I complained that it cost too much to find out if I have early signs of arterial blockage.

The test went fine. It consists of a single electrode on the chest, plus 4 jumper-cable-style clamps on the wrists and ankles. The nurse reassured me that I wouldn’t get a shock from them. I had to lie still for 3 or 4 minutes, during which time I nearly fell asleep. That test, too, came back just fine.

The cardiologist and I made vague plans about a second date 6 months from now, and I drove home.

On the way, I noticed a bookstore. In suburban NJ (Hawthorne, in this instance), those stand out. Well Read was “New & Used,” which I feared meant a lending library of romance and James Patterson books, but I pulled over to check it out.

I was pleasantly surprised by the selection. Sure, no Anthony Powell or Richard Flanagan, but it had a non-pandering array of fiction, and some interesting selection on its comics shelf. Tthe YA section looked to be dominated by vampires, but hey.

I decided, “If they’re willing to keep a bookstore open in the suburbs in this day and age, they deserve my money.” I opened up the Amazon app on my phone and looked over my wish list to find something that I could buy. I was hoping they had Lucky Bruce, the new memoir by Bruce Jay Friedman, but no luck. And the new Neal Stephenson book is too huge for me to buy in hard copy; that’s a Kindle read for next summer.

Eventually, I settled on The Finkler Question, by Harold Jacobson. I hadn’t read it, but thought, “It won the Man Booker, and it’s about Jews in England, so that’ll make a nice gift for Mom.” I picked that up, thanked the clerk for fighting the good fight, and left him to the two old ladies who were trying to find “that book. No, I don’t know the title, but it’s about a detective . . .”

Now that I know I’m “perfectly healthy,” how do I keep from falling back into time-wasting routines? How do I stay up after the wake-up call?

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I Don’t Know How She Does It . . .

“She,” in this case, being Joyce Carol Oates, who has lived with a diagnosis of tachycardia for the past 40+ years. I recall reading an interview with her a bazillion years ago in which she mentioned that the heart condition could kill her at any time, and that the knowledge of that potential sudden death helped her get over any anxiety she had about writing.

But maybe I’m misremembering that last part. Since getting out of the ER last Friday, I’ve been on a rollercoaster. The heart/lung symptoms that prompted the ER visit changed by the beginning of the week; the “weird fluttering” is gone, but I found myself having episodes where I was yawning repeatedly, almost compulsively, never quite able to get enough air. I’ve got a cardiologist appt. early next week, and I’m hoping to get confirmation that whatever-this-is is stress- and/or allergy-driven, and that my heart and lungs are fine.

It’s been a very difficult stretch for me, especially because I spend so much time alone. If I’m not talking to other people (or the dogs), I talk to myself. I’ve spent much of the past week with two voices in my head: one yelling, “You’re a hypochondriac!” and the other yelling, “You’re going to have a heart attack and die tonight!”

(There’s a third voice, actually: my dad’s. He’s been calling every day to see how I’m doing, which is kinda astonishing. At first, I was short with him, because I didn’t want to compare our respective conditions, or because I’m too cool, or because I didn’t want to let him in to see the dread that I’m experiencing. It took me a few days to really get the notion of, “This is your father, man. And, sure, his behavior in your childhood was a big part of the reason that you developed all that guardedness and anxiety, but he’s calling you because he loves you and can’t bear the thought of losing you, even if he can’t say that.” Tomorrow, we’ll go to the Chabad service so he can pray for his parents’ souls. I shouldn’t be writing on Kol Nidre, but I want to get this out because I haven’t really addressed how I’ve been feeling.)

All that anxiety magnified the severity of my symptoms, making it feel like I’ve got a time-bomb in my chest, making it more difficult for me to draw a solid breath and feel at ease, making me believe that the end is nigh. Is my right hand going numb because of an aneurysm or because I haven’t eaten for 8 hours? That crick in my neck from sleeping badly or is it an artery about to go? That stabbing sensation in my chest? Oh, wait, that’s just the itchiness from the hair growing back where they had to shave it for the stress test.

But when I could just talk to people about quotidian stuff, it would take me out of myself and I’d feel just fine. Either the symptoms would abate or I just become less aware of them.

As long as I don’t think about it, I think I’ll be okay.

So one part of me has been trying to maintain my routines and act as though nothing serious is happening, while another part is trying to total up all the things I should’ve done in my life and what I’ll still have time to do. I mean, what am I supposed to do? Quit work and go to an ashram? Be calm and carry on? I’ve got people out the wazoo telling me to relax, not to stress so much, but none of them offer to do my work for me. (And it was a lot of work, with a 150-page issue that had to go out by Wednesday in order to print and ship in time for a big show in Germany that I’m supposed to attend in a few weeks.)

On Tuesday night, things got so bad that I was afraid that I wouldn’t make it through to morning. I found myself regretting, of all things, that I wouldn’t get to read the newest issue of Love & Rockets. I’d heard that Jaime Hernandez had a monumental story in it, and it saddened me that I wouldn’t see it.

There weren’t a lot of other regrets that occurred to me on Tuesday night. I regretted being sharp with Amy during the drive home from the train station that night, but I knew she understood how shaken and scared I was. Once home I decided that, if this was to be my last night alive, then I’d go out with a little joy: having a fine gin & tonic and watching some baseball.

And if it turned out that I was being a hypochondriac, then I figured the G&T would relax me a bit. And I’m a long way past getting worked up about a Yankees game.

I felt fine on Wednesday morning, and pushed on with a positive outlook most of the day. When I got home from the office (and that work-stress from the first three days of this week didn’t help me any), the annual issue of L&R was waiting for me at the door. I took the dogs for a walk around the block, then fed them and lay on the sofa with the new book. I cried like a baby at the final pages. It was that good and I’m that emotionally raw.

Now (Friday night, just about one week from when I left the ER) I’m feeling a million times better. I still get short of breath/yawny on occasion, but I’m almost certain it’s due to anxiety. Among the lessons I learned this past week, the big one is that my anxiety is so much more vast and subtle than I ever imagined. It’s one thing to actively think, “I’m going to die,” and trigger a fear-reaction. But no: I found myself falling into those thoughts only after these episodes began. I got a real taste of how dread works behind the scenes, the chimera obscura. The longer I went without talking to someone or opening myself up to something like music (even when the iPod in my car thought it would be funny to shuffle up Breathe or Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?) or a good podcast or some silliness with the dogs, the more this dread gathered.

Walking the dogs around the neighborhood last night, I wondered what it would be like if I could get those two voices in my head in harmony. What if I could be reconciled that I’d been worrying over nothing, but also retain that immanence unto death? Would there be some way to use it, like Ms. Oates did, to let that specter pervade me, guide me past my dissipated routines, let me face the fear of the end and shatter all this anxiety?

Can I write like there’s no tomorrow?

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How I Misspent My Summer Vacation, 2011 Edition: Day 5

Monday, Aug. 15: Stanley Park Death March

Sorry it’s been so long without an update! I help throw a big conference every September, and the preparation & anxiety involved tends to preoccupy me. But it wrapped up on Sept. 23 and was a huge success. I wrote most of this before Rosh Hashana and my ER visit, and just remembered that I hadn’t cleaned it up and posted it. So now you get another installment of my summer vacation! And it’s already autumn! I suck!

The other reason I put off this post for so long is that I needed time to post my pix from that day onto Flickr. It was helpful to go over all those shots, since they brought back some of the less distinct events from the day. Here’s the photoset! (It includes the previous day’s meanderings, too.)

About that conference: one of the attendees was the guy from Spokane who died earlier in the year. We had a great time shooting the breeze after the conference closed, and he asked me how the rest of the vacation went. Which was his veiled way of saying, “Why haven’t you written up days 5 and 6 yet, jerk?”

Who am I to disappoint a guy who came back from the dead?

So, back by zombie-riffic demand: Monday was our last full day in Vancouver. We’d been advised by several parties not to miss Stanley Park, and figured we could meander through it for a few hours. Amy already had plans for our dinner, a can’t-miss Indian restaurant a short distance away from where we ate the night before.

As I’ve written, I did no research before this trip. In fact, the map we got from the front desk of the hotel didn’t include the entirety of Stanley Park. It cut off somewhere near the northern tip, but we had no idea how far. Amy & I are heavy-duty walkers, so we figured it couldn’t be too far.

We started our meander around 9 a.m. The previous day, I noticed a Sydney Opera House-looking set of white scalloped sails a few blocks down the street from our hotel, on the harbor. We walked down to it and discovered that they were part of the World Trade Office, which wasn’t nearly as exciting as discovering a shrunken version of Sydney’s architectural treasure. Boooo:

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We got some brunch at an Italian place called Scoozis, a Greek diner-y sort of place with a sprawling wall of fame. I can’t recall any of the celebrities the gregarious owner was standing with, but it seems he was a New York Giants fan, so that was something. It’s nice to have something to remind me of NJ.

Then we started walking along the riverfront to the park. My phone’s GPS was working just fine, so I had a good idea of where we were going, but it only occurred to me after the first mile-plus to turn on the GPS-X app, so we could track the whole shebang. We were still in the marina before the park when I did that, having passed the Vancouver Convention Centre, outside of which was a wacky sculpture and a giant Orca made of Lego:

Lego My Orca!

The day was beatiful and sun-drenched. You can get an impression of that from the pictures in my photoset. We weren’t taken in by the vague predictions of clouds and occasional rain, and dressed much more appropriately than we had on Sunday. Neither of us had optimal shoes for long walks, but we weren’t wearing blister machines, either.

In addition, I’d left my sunglasses in the car the night before. Rather than ask the valet to get the car so I could snag them, I wore my baseball cap. This turned out for the best, since I would have otherwise scorched my scalp from all that sun. Also, it was a Blue Jays cap, so I thought it might serve as protective coloration.

I decided that we could walk along the seawall path, and then head back up the trails into the park proper if we got bored or tired. Amy thought that sounded like a good idea, or didn’t tell me it was a bad idea, and so we leisurely ambled along, passed by roller-bladers and tourists on rented bikes. They were clunky, with chopper-like yokes. I thought about all the people I saw bicycling along in Copenhagen in ’04, and couldn’t remember the last time I rode a bicycle. Not sure when I last wore a baseball mitt, either; it can’t possibly have been when I was in grad school.

Our first stop in the park was the totem poles. I was disappointed to find out that they weren’t all old, but was heartened that one of the new ones appeared to be inspired by The Human Centipede:

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We decided to cut out the eastern loop of the seawall, missing a small lighthouse in the process. I checked it out on Google Maps Streetview; we didn’t miss much.

And we walked. I’m writing from more than month away, after an interminable amount of work has demolished my finer thoughts, so I can’t offer up too many details. They don’t seem to cohere into much of a narrative. That’s why I’m glad there are pictures for this segment.

What did we see? Those totem poles; a woman playing with her dog, throwing a ball into the harbor for him to fetch; a tree that had come down a few months before and had 117 rings; Girl in a Wetsuit; kids playing in a little park with water-rifles; the Lions Gate Bridge; Siwash Rock;

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tourists from everywhere; the harbor giving way to the big water of the Salish Sea; the beautifully stark rock walls that only revealed their faces when I took their pictures; a seagull doing a Zoidberg impression; the great open sky.

There was the smell of the sea and the wind and it was all so relaxing and wonderful that we tried to ignore the fact that we were walking an awfully long way.

I thought the GPS app had switched to kilometers, but no; we’d gone miles and miles on foot, and the map looked like we had quite a ways before we were back out of the park and in the city. (The park borders the West End, which border downtown, where our hotel was.)

We wanted to get off of the seawall path and cut back through the park to start our way home, but the rock walls precluded that. We considered tackling some tourists and stealing their bikes, but Canada’s politeness had taken hold of us.

SPEAKING OF WHICH! The evening after the first day of our conference, one of my advertiser pals texted me to say that one of the session speakers was a “rabid right-winger.” I’d seen the two of them talking during our post-show cocktail reception, along with two more advertiser-pals from Toronto. Pal 1, who’s from Texas, told me that the conversation among the four of them got heated, and the speaker declared, “You [Pal 1] are a liberal! And you and you [Canadian Pals 2 and 3] are socialists!”

I saw Pal 1 at dinner that night, and he repeated the story, adding all sorts of details about how the conversation moved from healthcare (it’s a pharmaceutical conference) into labeling all the participants. He said the speaker had grown so frustrated that he threw his hands in the air and left the conversation.

I told Pal 1, “That’s why I don’t talk to anybody about anything. You’re too likely to find out awful shit about people and who they are.”

But the next morning, I saw the two Canadian pals waiting for their ride to Newark Airport. I hurried out to say hello and find out if I’d have to do damage control. I didn’t want them boycotting the conference because of a bad experience like that, even though they’d been coming for years.

I said, “[Pal 1] told me you had an . . . interesting conversation with [the speaker] at the reception.”

They both looked at me a little puzzled. One said, “Yeah, we talked for a bit.”

“All good? Because [Pal 1] told me it got a little heated.”

“Really? I thought it was a pretty constructive conversation. [The speaker] is coming from a really different direction than we are, since we have socialized medicine back home. I don’t think it was a bad talk at all.”

I thanked them, wished ’em a safe trip home, and remembered the Foreign Office minister’s first line from In The Loop: “You needn’t worry about the Canadians. They’re just happy to be there. (Pause) Yes, well, they always look surprised when they’re invited.”

So we decided we just couldn’t mug people in Vancouver, and continued our Bataan Death March of Pleasantness. When we reached Third Beach, we found a road leading back into the park, and headed up to follow the interior trails back to the city. We grabbed some water and snack food at a concession stand, then got back to walking.

The trail, it turned out, shadowed the seawall path, but at least we were under tree cover and out of the sun. And it brought us by . . . The Lost Lagoon! (it wasn’t interesting, but had an awesome name)

We celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary last March, so maybe this will change later on, but we’re still in the “As long as we’re together, we can (generally) laugh about weird circumstances.” Like a walk that would ultimately hit nearly 10 miles over the course of a single vacation day.

I’m lucky that I found a soulmate who’ll see the adventure in experiences like this. Or at least one who doesn’t bitch and complain that I’m an awful husband for leading her on walks that neither of us are prepared for.

When we got out of the park, I tried to find a route back through the city that would put us near a cab. But my city of reference is New York, where it’s impossible not to find a cab if you’re, um, of a certain pigmentation. I have no idea how to find a cab in a normal city.

(About that pigmentation thing: I once stumbled out of a Halloween party in the west Village in a drunken, recently-passed-out-and-vomiting haze. It was 2 a.m. and I was covered in fake blood, having gone to the party as Roy (as in “Siegfried &”) and carrying a duffel bag with my regular clothes, so I could change the next morning. Within 10 erratic steps, a cab pulled up to see if I was a fare. Please keep a straight face when telling me that the same thing would’ve happened if I was black.)

We walked along some condo-lined streets, closing in on Howe and the Metropolitan. We didn’t come across any cabs and decided we could make the last mile-plus just fine.

Amy zonked out when we got to the hotel. I went out to get some Tim Horton’s (and stop in the at Harry Rosen, where I was assaulted by that Cuccinelli blazer I mentioned on Day 4). We both rested, cleaned up, and then got dressed for early dinner.

Amy’s food-blogger pals had recommended Vij’s as the must-go restaurant for any Vancouver trip. The place took no reservations and opened for dinner at 5:30, “so show up before 5:00 and wait,” she was told.

We did. There were already a dozen people waiting when we arrived. I let her stay in line while I walked around the neighborhood, clearly not having walked enough that day. I stopped in at a used bookstore and comic shop, but didn’t buy anything. I reminded myself about my shopping ban, and how I have more than enough to read for a while. As in, 40 years.

I rejoined Amy outside the restaurant, where customers were bantering away. Some had been to Vij’s before, and wanted to make sure they got the first seating. When the doors finally opened, I inadvertently cut off someone who had gotten there before me. I apologized profusely, because it was a clear breach of protocol to cut in the line. We hadn’t queued up outside; we just knew who had arrived when. It was vigilante seating.

It was a mind-blowingly awesome meal. For appetizers, we had

  • Pork belly (naturally raised) sauteed in tamarind, on paneer
  • Chickpeas in star anise and date masala on grilled kale

followed by

  • Rajasthani-style goat curry with lightly spiced vegetables
  • Beef shortribs braised in yogurt, tomato and cumin curry

On top of that, they served super-awesome chai. I’ve never been a chai drinker, but this was all that. They posted the recipe on their site

  • 4-5 orange pekoe teabags
  • 1″ cinnamon bark
  • 1 1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds
  • 4 green cardamom seeds
  • whole milk
  • 5-6 teaspoons sugar
  • 5 1/2 teacups water (the actual size of the cup in which you’ll serve tea)

The pork belly was fine, but served shredded instead of in squares, which kinda removes the character. The shortribs were fantastic, better than the ones at Cru the night before. All in all, the meal was a fine reward for completing our Stanley Park Death March.

We finished dinner before 8 p.m. and drove back over Granville Bridge. I made sure to grab my sunglasses before getting out of the car. We conked out right after getting back to the room. We had a long day ahead of us on Tuesday.

Not that we knew it at the time.

Coming next: Day 6: Maple Salmon, Border Crossing, and Black Bottom

(I have an idea: why don’t you check out the whole Vancouver photoset?)

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Look in Your Heart

I’m fine, but . . .

I spent nearly 21 hours in an emergency room from Thursday into Friday. For the past three or four weeks, I’ve been experiencing these symptoms occasionally: a fluttering in my heart, a feeling of pressure (not painful) in my chest, or pressing down in my diaphragm, an inability to get a really deep breath, like when you yawn but it’s not quite enough and you need to yawn again. The symptoms rarely occurred while I was out walking the dogs on their two-a-day 1-mile loops around our neighborhood; they were more likely to happen while I was sitting at my desk or driving.

Now, before I get into the wacky and rambling story, I will reiterate: I’m fine. the doctors and nurses did not find anything that could be causing my symptoms, and I plan on going to a cardiologist to get a more in-depth examination and see if it’s anything more than my neuroses run wild.

Now that that’s out of the way, here’s what happened.

I attributed all these symptoms to stress/anxiety from my conference and my magazine. But that ended a week ago, and they kept occurring. So, after shul yesterday (and right after I wrote The Birthday of the World post), I called my doctor to make an appointment and get it checked out. I did not have any severe episodes and there was no dramatic trigger that led me to make this decision. I was simply not feeling right and figured it was best to get this looked at since

  • I’m 40,
  • my dad required a quintuple bypass in his 60s,
  • my brother nearly died from a heart issue a few years ago,
  • one of my best pals dropped dead at 42 of a heart attack (he was a smoker and a diabetic, but still), and
  • one of my pals in Spokane died last March from heart failure (but got better).

Apparently, symptoms like that aren’t the things one goes to a doctor for. His receptionist wigged out and insisted I go to an emergency room right away. I kept telling her that I was not experiencing chest pains, nor the numbness in the arm or shoulder pain or lightheadedness or other symptoms of an impending heart attack. She wouldn’t have any of it, and kept telling me to get to a hospital immediately. She put my doctor on for a second, and he echoed that sentiment. To be fair, I understood where he was coming from; if I’d gone in to his office for an EKG, looked fine, and then dropped dead from a heart ailment a week later, he’d be facing some malpractice-y problems.

After calling my wife to tell her about my symptoms and my doctor call, I drove down to the hospital that treated my dad for his quintuple bypass in 2005. No, I hadn’t told Amy about any of this stuff previously. Mainly because I didn’t consider the symptoms to be very serious, but also for the same reason I didn’t tell anyone else about them: because, just like Shaun’s mum in Shaun of the Dead, “I didn’t want to be a bother.” She wasn’t happy to learn about things so late, but she knows it’s Not About Her and that I really am trying not to be this bad.

I parked in the daily garage and walked to the ER at 1:30 in my Rosh Hashana finery: summer-weight khaki chinos, blue sportcoat, white oxford. Once she heard “chest” in my symptoms, the triage nurse processed me quickly. Early in the process, someone wrote “chest pains” on my file, which may have facilitated my treatment, but was, I repeat, not accurate. I guess “existential void” or “vague unsettledness” weren’t categories in their system.

So I was given a bed, I gowned up, and the wait for treatment began in the carnival sideshow of the ER. I had multiple EKGs and blood-drawings to check out my enzyme levels over time. They set me up for a stress-test set the next morning, which was their way of telling me that I was not leaving the hospital that night.

I had the good fortune of having my laptop with me, since I’d planned on writing for a while after shul on Thursday. The hospital had great wifi service, allowing me to write to my family much more quickly and comprehensively than I would’ve done with my iPhone, and without any funny autocorrects. I hadn’t brought my charger, but the Air has great battery life, and Amy would come by with that stuff later in the evening, if she didn’t get lost trying to find the hospital.

Seeing that I was in for the relatively long haul, I convinced my doctor that a small coffee at 4:30 p.m. would be less deleterious to the results of the stress test than the monster who would be unleashed if I had to go 24 hours without caffeine. (I was smart enough not to have my afternoon coffee before checking in, but once I was in the gown, that kinda precluded my getting up and hitting the coffeeshop in the hospital lobby.) Plus, it was National Coffee Day, and I’d be damned if I didn’t have at least one afternoon dose of the stuff.

I took a picture of the lunch tray and posted it on Facebook, with the caption, “Hospital food: am I right? (#notnecessarilyhavingaheartattack)”. This led to dozens of messages from friends, checking to see what was going on and whether I really should have mentioned a heart attack when one wasn’t taking place. I was touched by the well-wishes and concern.

Left to my own devices, I briefly worried that the tests would find something that would require immediate surgery. And, of course, it would go wrong. I thought about the early morning before my dad’s bypass surgery, when we had a heart-to-heart conversation in his hospital room about how to reset the servers at his girlfriend’s offices. I also thought about Everyman, and how the last thing I wrote would be the post about haras olam and potential vs. being.

But I didn’t dwell on these thoughts too much, in large part because of the craziness of the ER. I was entertained by the old man (dislocated shoulder) to my left, who didn’t have his hearing aids in and was clearly trying to fake his way through any and all conversations.

The bed to my right was empty when I arrived, but was soon occupied by a 60-year-old woman who had cracked her face on a sidewalk. She had no recollection of the accident, had a blood alcohol content high enough that the nurse asked her how much she drinks every morning, wore no underwear and refused to put on a gown so they could take her out to have a CAT scan, declaring, “I’m one Puerto Rican who actually has pride!”, and peed her bed.

Also, after being told that she had multiple facial fractures and bleeding in her brain, she asked what time she’d be able to leave that night.

I give all the staff credit for not laughing, nor contradicting her severely enough to set her off. I’d be terrible at that.

For my part, I was pretty easy with the doctor, nurse and orderlies. I tried not to be very demanding or impatient, and prefaced any requests with, “I know you’ve got a ton to do, but if you have a minute . . .” I grew a little peeved when the wait for a space in the observation ward stretched on for hours, but I dealt with it and just read and wrote for a few hours.

My dad and Amy came around 9:00 p.m. She brought along all the items from the long list of overnight stuff I’d sent her:

  • Laptop charger
  • iPhone charger
  • Kindle
  • Contact lenses
  • Glasses
  • Toothbrush
  • Underwear
  • Socks
  • T-shirt
  • and my copy of The Leopard

and she even decided to pack toothpaste for me, because she’s the best. She took this picture, which got some funny comments on her Facebook page:

Gilward

They stayed for an hour or so, during which time Dad complained about Michael Jackson’s doctor. This wasn’t quite on the level of sending me plane-crash jokes before one of my flights, but still involved talking about medical incompetence while his son’s in the hospital. And you wonder why I make inappropriate jokes.

Once they left the ER, I asked my nurse again about the timeframe for getting me up to the observation ward. He admitted that it probably wasn’t going to happen, and that I’d be sleeping in the brightly lit, noisy ER overnight.

“If that’s the case, then I’ll need some Xanax or Ambien. And some gin.”

“We can get you the Xanax or Ambien. What’s your poison?”

The P(ee)R lady got moved out after a second CAT scan to determine if she had an aneurysm that led to the fall, as opposed to the fall causing the intracranial bleeding. They moved in an older black lady who had lost most of her eyesight pretty rapidly. The doctors were trying to discern whether it was a visual migraine or a variety of stroke that had an awesome name I’m forgetting now. I felt like it was an episode of House, except for when the lady’s husband asked, “So she has to stay overnight? That means we can leave her here?” and split.

I lay back on the bed that I’d spent 10 hours on (minus a couple of pee-breaks, for which I had to disconnect three separate sets of wires and tubes) and finished reading The Leopard, which remains fantastic and which I’m mad you haven’t read yet.

Around 11:30, a new nurse brought me a 0.5 dose of Xanax, and I tried to sleep. It turned out to be impossible, from the light, the noise, and the fact that my blood-pressure cuff was set to take a reading every 15 minutes. I asked them to reset it for hourly readings, but the nurse decided it needed to stay at 15. So the few times I started to drift off, I was woken by a loud pumping noise and a constriction on my arm. Joy.

Around 1:45 a.m., the nurse decided to move me to another room nearby, an expasion of the ER, “because it’s quieter.”

Except when you’re put next to an 86-year old German woman who’s losing her mind and keeps insisting to the hospital aide that they call her husband right away. I covered my eyes and ears with the T-shirt Amy brought and tried to ignore her, but the aide decided that engaging her in conversation would help mellow her out. It didn’t, but I noticed that the aide only spoke to her in very limited questions that probably would have gotten him nailed as a chatbot if someone had transcribed the conversation and submitted it to a Turing panel. Which is kinda sad, considering the other person in the conversation likely had Alzheimer’s.

Anyway, I managed about half an hour of sleep, which I felt might wreak havoc on the stress-test, but I figured they account for that.

With the morning, I had a really great nurse, who turned out to live in my town. She told me that, due to HIPAA regs, she’d pretend not to know me if we bumped into each other at the farmer’s market or Stop & Shop. I told her that, because of lack of sleep and caffeine, I might not remember anything from this whole experience.

She was good and straightforward about the potential delays with getting me upstairs for a stress-test, but contended that if it went well, they’d be able to discharge me right away. A slot opened up for the exam pretty quickly, so I was shuttled upstairs with all my stuff. On the ride through the ER, I had to remind myself, “Never look to the sides.” I’m very visually inquisitive, even if that doesn’t come out in my descriptions of settings, but looking into someone’s room/space is real no-no. All those faces: pain, puzzlement, anger, impatience, pleading, dying. You can’t intrude on them like that, in those moments. Or maybe I’m just too sensitive to other people’s suffering.

Anyway, up in the room for the stress test, a tech who looked like a skanky, young Marisa Tomei shaved part of my chest, hooked up some electrodes, and told me about a Hasidic father of two who was hitting on her a few weeks ago.

Soon after, another tech and the doctor arrived. Tech #2 performed a sonogram of my heart (they keep the gel cold for guys, too), and then I got on the treadmill. I found the pace and incline ridiculously easy, and the doctor noticed that I was barely increasing my heart rate.

I told her, “I walk my dogs on 1-mile loops up and down hills twice a day, so this is pretty mild.”

She asked what sort of dogs I had, and when I told her about Ru & Otis, she was happy to find out that they were rescues. She went on to (slightly tearfully) tell me about the pregnant dog she rescued from Jamaica after a trip there in 2007. It involved all manner of machinations, and the dog gave birth to a litter of seven a mere 2 hours after landing in the U.S., but she got five of the pups adopted out and has kept two and their mom ever since. After the exam, we got our phones out and showed off doggie pictures.

The exam itself went fine. They got me to break a slight sweat eventually, then had me lie down for another sonogram. Neither that tech nor the doctor noticed anything awry. In a worst-case scenario, they’d have had to send me for an angiogram immediately. I thought back to Dad’s experience with that, when a doctor walked out of the examination to tell me and Dad’s girlfriend, “He has 100% occlusion in three major arteries, so he’s going to need bypass surgery immediately. Have a good day!”

All I got was, “You’re all good! We’ll send you downstairs and get your discharge papers going,” from Marisa. My symptoms were still coming and going, but the tests I’d undergone — multiple EKGs, blood work and a stress test — showed no signs of danger. I waited back in the ER for an hour to get processed and go.

During that time, an orderly brought me my breakfast tray. It had a small cup of oatmeal so hot that it threatened to combust, a cup of decent coffee, some juice and milk (“I only drink three things: water, black coffee and gin”), a piece of bread, and a big plate with a thermal dome over it. I figured there’d be some good breakfast under the lid; I took it off to discover . . . one scrambled egg. I ate it in three bites, drank the coffee, and left the rest.

And then I was done. My cool nurse reiterated that I need to find a cardiologist (she’s barred from making recommendations) and might be told that I have to cut out coffee. I mean, I think she said that. I was too busy covering my ears and going, “LALALAICAN’THEARYOU.”

Outside the building, walking back to my car, I realized how disoriented I was from the lack of sleep and the overall strain of the past 21 hours. It didn’t stop me from driving a 3,000-lb. car along busy NJ highways, but at least I was aware of my impairment.

So now I’m home with a glass of red wine, my laptop, my doggies, a rained-out Yankees game, and a wife who deserves to know more about the little things that I keep inside. Even though I don’t want to be a bother.

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The Birthday of the World

It’s Rosh Hashana, so I went out to the Chabad ceremony this morning for the blowing of the shofar. (No jokes, please.) Before they got the horn out, Rabbi Zvi gave a sermon.

He talked about the notion of “haras olam.” It’s a phrase that shows up in a prayer that’s recited multiple times during the day’s prayers, as “ha-yom haras olam,” which means “today is the birthday of the world.” Rabbi Zvi explained that the phrase also comes up in the Bible, although not in the Torah.

In Prophets, Jeremiah has been imprisoned for telling the Jews that they’ve become so debased they’re going to get conquered]. While in prison, he says that his sorrows are so great that he wishes he’d never been born, that his mother had stayed pregnant forever with him. The phrase for “pregnant forever”? It’s also “haras olam.”

So he talked about the difference between those two meanings of the same phrase. Are we born, or are we in a state of eternal pregnancy? Do we stick with possibilities, or become real? You may or may not recall That Damned Hegel Quote that I’ve gone on about over the years, the notion that we need to make decisions to become real, that preserving ourselves in a potential state is lifeless.

Rabbi Zvi illustrated the concept by telling a story about a rabbi who wrote commentaries on the Torah, the Talmud, the Haggadah and others. The story goes that, when the rabbi was a young student, he half-assed it and his parents got pissed. (Note: this is my vernacular, not Rabbi Zvi’s.) He overheard his parents discussing whether they should keep wasting money for him to attend yeshiva, since he could just get to work on their farm and contribute to the household. The youg man panicked, ran in, and begged for one more chance. Which he made the most of.

Years later, at a ceremony for one of his new commentaries, he told the audience this story, and said, “What would happen if I’d become a carpenter? I’m sure I’d have been very good at it. But when I die, the angels would ask, ‘What about your commentary on the Torah? What about your commentary on the Talmud? What about all the books of commentaries you could have written?’

Rabbi Zvi said, “There’s nothing wrong with being a carpenter. But if you have the mind to write on Torah, it’s wrong for you to deprive the world of that!”

Coincidentally, I made a Writing Vow this morning, because it’s a new year, and maybe I can finally discipline myself into regular, unfrivolous writing. I’m not going to tell you about the criteria I’ve set, because I don’t need to disappoint anyone else. But really: I need to be remembered for editing Contract Pharma?

To wrap up, Rabbi Zvi told a story about the Rebbe Schneerson’s father and the need to express one’s Judaism, but before that, he offered up a joke. I’d rather tell the joke.

Two old Jewish ladies haven’t seen each other for years, so they meet for lunch. The first one asks, “How’s your lovely daughter doing?”

“Well,” says the second. “She married a doctor.”

“How wonderful!”

“. . . But they got divorced.”

“Oh, no!”

“But then she married a lawyer!”

“Great!”

“. . . But they got divorced, too.”

“That’s terrible!”

“But then she married a very successful CPA!”

“Ah! So much nachas from one child!”

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Borders Raid

I finally made a foray to the local Borders store. I checked it out during the first week of bankruptcy, when prices were an amazing 20% off list. I felt bad that they were charging more in liquidation than Amazon was charging in regular operations.

But I was next door, picking up some measuring spoons at Bed, Bath & Beyond, so I walked in. “ONLY 7 DAYS LEFT!” the posters warned. Inside, prices were 80% off, with an additional 15% if you bought 20 or more books. Of course, there was scarcely more than 20 books in the joint.

I looked through the remaining comics — sorry, Graphic Novels — but that had been pretty well pillaged. I considered picking up Sophie Crumb’s book, but eh.

The fiction section was pretty sparse; the offerings were mainly contemporary fiction, which I have no use for. I meandered over to the biographies, and it was there that I made my score. There were at least 8 copies of Jules Feiffer’s memoir, Backing Into Forward, on a shelf, so I grabbed a copy of that. I remember wanting to buy it for the Kindle when it was first released, but it was listing (and still is) at $15.99, and there’s no way on earth I’d pay that much for an e-book, unless it had the answers in the back.

Then I noticed a copy of Pierre Assouline’s Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin. It was a hardcover, as was the Feiffer book. I know nothing about it, but at this price (80% off $24.95), I couldn’t go wrong.

I also came across paperbacks of two of Mary Karr’s memoirs, Liar’s Club and Cherry. I’ve never read her, but I enjoyed her recent Paris Review interview, so I thought I’d give her a chance.

On the way to the register, I noticed a “new books” shelf with a copy of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes. I gave up on The Black Swan pretty early, on account of authorial arrogance, but one of my magazine’s readers recommended I pick up this book of aphorisms. I bought it for my Kindle this summer, but found that the aphoristic style didn’t work for an e-book; I found myself reading too quickly. I thought it would be better in printed format, so I could scribble notes in the margins and otherwise just look at a line on a page. So I grabbed that, too.

I have far too many books

The damage for all five books, including three hardcovers? Twenty-two dollars. Poor, doomed bookstores.

I did have a laugh on the way out, when I noticed that one of the employees set up the shelf by the entry so that customers would see the following:

Do the No Future

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Last Responder

I was going to write some depressing remembrance about 9/11 for the 10th anniversary, but here’s the best thing I wrote about 9/11, a post from 2009’s anniversary. I don’t think I can improve on it, so much as riff. (Here’s something else I wrote about the towers, from 2005.)

I’ve been thinking of getting my “9.11.01 Never Forget” tattoo removed or covered over. I think I’m ready to forget.

I read today’s installment of Cul de Sac and laughed for a while. Thanks, Mr. Thompson:

Cul de Sac

Do something good today.