A Day Outside the World

“It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.”
-- Mohandas Gandhi

Of all the days in my week, Wednesday is the greatest. I get up early (around 6:45 AM) to fulfill my salebook duties at Books A Million during a wonderfully brief four-hour shift, and then spend my afternoon at the cinema or in the pages of a good book. All of this whets my appetite for the back-to-back brilliance of J.J. Abrams night on ABC. From eight to ten I experience the rapture of serial television at its best – the best show on television, Lost, followed by another perennial favorite, Alias. To say I look forward to these shows is to say that solitary prisoners relish daylight. After taking in this visceral feast, I send my weekly ABC stream-of-consciousness to my fellow Alias devotee, Jasmyne, and we exchange quips on the revelations of the show as well as our very un-Alias daily lives. As the most enlightened and dazzlingly intelligent of my peers, I anticipate our weekly correspondence as passionately as I do that night’s entertainment.

So, it would no doubt be apropos that any serious disruption of my existence would come on Wednesday. I am not a believer in fate, especially that trivial type so many of us interpret as God’s sense of humor, but sometimes life needs to give us a chance to huff and grumble “Go figure.”

With Life’s tongue firmly planted in its cheek, I woke up with a peculiar pain in my chest. As an asthmatic, I thought very little of this; chest pains are not unusual. I figured a few deep breaths would stretch my chest and alleviate the discomfort. I took a few hits of Albuterol, holding them in my lungs longer than usual, and then went to brown my breakfast bagel. As I waited for the toaster to return my morning meal, the dull pain persisted. I took more deep breaths, did a few side twists, and tried to force a belch. Nothing worked. I wrapped up my breakfast and headed to the car, curious but not concerned.

That’s when my breakfast tried to kill me. I tore up my bagel (I consume my bagels in chunks) and began to eat. Nothing seemed out of hand until I swallowed. Halfway to my stomach, my bagel rebelled. A piercing pain erupted in the left side of my chest, shooting into my shoulder as if I had been impaled by a spear.

“Ow! Damn!” I cried. “That’s not right.”

The part of my brain that commonly deflects the myriad of health problems with which I live suggested I make more of an effort at chewing before swallowing. I’m a man on the move and often disregard mastication in favor of the next thing on my to-do list. I threw in another bite and ground it to a smooth paste before taking another shot at swallowing.

“God! Fuck! What the hell!” I chucked the rest of my bagel into the backseat.

After arriving at the store, I sat in the parking lot considering my options. The CentraCare clinic sat just three doors down from the bookstore. I recently obtained health insurance from my employers, though my policy card and other relevant materials had not arrived yet. I felt some trepidation over the maneuvers I would have to make to square things between the clinic and my new phantom health insurance providers. Also, with the possibility of Graduate School on the horizon, my finances remain a concern. Losing work hours and adding medical expenses does not represent the ideal fiscal situation. But after making one more attempt at swallowing (“God damnit!”), I gave my manager a heads up and walked over to CentraCare.

My first moments at the clinic forebode a great deal of inconvenience over an ailment that inspired more curiosity than concern. At eight in the morning (just minutes after opening), numerous patients already populated the lobby. I approached the window and detailed my dilemma. The receptionist returned a perplexed expression, as if to say “Then what are you doing at this bare bones clinic?” I informed her of my insurance situation (“I have it, but I haven’t got the card yet.”) and with conspicuous skepticism she informed me that consultation began at $120, emphasizing the began at. I acknowledged her warning and assured her my coverage would take care of that lofty bill.

I filled out my paperwork in an isolated corner of the waiting room then looked around for a magazine without a fish or a deer on the cover, a search akin to Arthur’s quest for the Holy Grail. Fortunately, the nurse called my name almost immediately. Who knew that coming into a waiting room with chest pains resembles going to an exclusive club with Paris Hilton on your arm? There’s absolutely no wait. Unfortunately, those buzz words, “chest pains,” also mean a dearth on inconvenience and paranoia.

The nurse escorted me to a small cubby and pulled the curtain closed. I ran through my symptoms as she took diligent notes. When she seemed satisfied with the general picture, she pulled another curtain, revealing a bulky device new to my life experience.

“Okay,” she said. “Take your shirt off.”

Whoa. Buy me dinner first. The progression of this visit seemed to have skipped a step. I can count on one hand the number of times doctors have required the removal of my clothing. So stripping within the first five minutes seemed slightly alarming (and a little torrid). But I relented and lay back as the nurse stuck a dozen electrodes to my chest and ribcage for an EKG.

The results printed out normal, but the doctors had nothing to say about my ailments. They offered me some sort of G.I. cocktail, inclined to believe it was more likely indigestion than heart problems. The other option was a transfer to the emergency room. With my medical history (and renowned intuition about my personal health), I knew their vague diagnosis would fester until my growing paranoia manifested symptoms of its own. So, I succumbed to an uncharacteristic streak of hypochondria and selected the peace of mind I could only get from the ER.

Before making my trip across town I headed into the bookstore to grab some reading material. I had finished a book the night before (Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer), and dismayed by CentraCare’s limited selection of magazines, I didn’t want to take the chance of being stuck in a waiting room for several hours without something to flip through. So after updating my manager, I checked out a book (Wolves of the Calla, Stephen King’s fifth Dark Tower Book), and headed to Central Florida Regional Hospital.

I scoured the parking lot for an unrestricted spot (tow-truck scandals are all the rage in Central Florida). When I found one to my liking I gathered up my paperwork from CentraCare, grabbed my book, and headed to the big glass doors at the back of the main building. On my walk to the hospital, I unwisely avoided the sidewalks and found a soggy spot of lawn to drop my feet into. Damp socks and muddy tracks accompanied me into the ER.

After another ream of paperwork, I was taken to my own room where they immediately requested the Full Monty of me. As a trade for my wrinkle-free Dockers and blue polo, they offered a lovely bedsheet that tied around the neck and behind. The nurses propped me up on a gurney and I pulled out my book, leafing through the prologue.

After a few moments alone with my book, a scruffy grump with an uncanny resemblance to Willie Nelson entered the room. He introduced himself as Randy, my ER nurse. He asked me a dozen or so questions (all of which would be repeated dozens of times in the following hours), and I answered him with a blasé temperament; I did not feel ill, so all the very official hubbub felt rather ridiculous. My blood pressure was taken (130/70), several vials of blood were drawn from the fashionable new IV tube adorning my arm (all the kids are wearing them), and a bag of saline went up on the coat rack behind me. They stuck a constellation of nodes around my chest and ribs, and strung an oxygen tube over my ears and up my nose. The oxygen was meant to ease the chest pains, but it only succeeded at sending a fleet of flaky, irretrievable boogers into my nasal cavity.

The next hour would see visits from an endless parade of healthcare workers requiring either personal information or bodily fluids. Sometime during these festivities I found it prudent to ask how long this process would keep me in the hospital.

“Oh, you’ll be here through the night, hon.”

What? Through the night? But it’s Wednesday. Lost. Alias. Jasmyne’s e-mail. These commitments cannot just be brushed aside for some “atypical chest pains.” Of course, those objections remained in my head. Everyone was taking my ailment much more seriously than I, and I didn’t want to degrade their efforts. Plus, I was certain that putting one’s favorite television program above personal well-being could come off as slightly mad -- and that might require more testing.

Though this new wrinkle in my predicament concerned me, the nadir of my hospital stay came in the small prescription bottle Randy brought me as we waited for a room to open upstairs. He stood at the side of my bed and shook a small pill into the bottle’s cap. I opened my mouth to graciously receive whatever remedy these mad scientists had devised.

“Let me tell you what you’re going to do with this,” he said. “This goes under your tongue, and then you’re going to let it dissolve.”

Easy enough, I thought. I caught sight of the pill; it was no larger than a peeled sunflower seed. I lifted my tongue and tilted my head back. Randy dropped it in, and as the pill dissolved he stared at me intensely, as if considering a particularly bewitching riddle. After a long moment, as I cleared out the remaining crumbs from under my tongue, Randy stepped forward.

“How do you feel?” he asked, maintaining his pensive stare.

“Fine,” I answered. “What was that?”

“That was nitro. How’s the pain?”

“It’s fine.”

“On a scale of one to ten?”

“A three?”

Randy began a nod, but I sensed some disappointment.

“Two, maybe?” I said, attempting to salvage my original answer. “Two or three? Mostly two.”

In truth, all the effort meant to assuage my pain was unwarranted. I wasn’t in constant agony, as seemed to be the understanding of the staff. No, it was only under the influence of particularly unruly bagels that pain became an issue. Still, Randy didn’t seem satisfied with my “two.” He told me to hang tight, and he left the room. Moments later he returned with a white patch covered with sticky slime.

“How’s your head?” he asked.

Immediately, I became concerned. Did Randy forget which room he was in? Did he perhaps get me confused with some other patient? Perhaps this jelly strip was meant for some other condition. Perhaps it could damage me!

BACK! BACK, YOU WOOLLY NURSE!

“There’s nothing wrong with my head,” I said.

“Sometimes the nitro gives people a headache,” Randy said as he pressed the sticky paper on my chest. My head felt fine. Mere mortals got headaches, I thought. My mind was of sterner stuff. But it would only hold up so long.

After three hours in the ER, a bed cleared and I was transferred to my room for the evening. Compounding the embarrassment of the wires and tubes wrapped around me like lights on a Christmas tree, they refused to let me walk to my room. Instead, this fully-capable, and I dare say strapping young man was wheeled up to the cardiac wing of the third floor on a gurney. I protested this damper on my manhood by keeping my eyes up at a pre-rolling angle so as to make my displeasure with the gratuitous aid apparent to anyone I passed.

“Look at that kid,” I wanted people to say. “You needn’t wheel him to his room. I dare say he could fly up there if you’d let him.”

But no, I remained grounded. And the worst kind of grounded – bedridden.

As I projected my blasé attitude about the hospital, my concerns again returned to my Wednesday night television. I figured unless I were horribly blessed (which my mere presence in the hospital put in doubt) I would not have my own room. I already felt ridiculous being treated with such concern over an unusual, but admittedly minor pain. The only thing that could possibly make that worse would be an impending pissing match with a senior citizen over the remote control.

We reached the third floor and immediately rendezvoused with my Uncle Joel who had maneuvered a formidable bureaucratic labyrinth to hunt me down. He laughed when he saw the expression on my face; he knew exactly what I was thinking.

This is such bullshit.

He asked me how I was feeling only because that is what you ask somebody who is put in the hospital; he had the same negligible concern that I did once he saw my nonchalant attitude toward all the drama. Still, I did find evidence that at some point during the day he had become concerned. He got only halfway through the morning crossword puzzle. For any Deines, that signifies serious emotional turmoil.

After missing my room on the first trip down the hall (you worry me, Randy), we finally swung into room 305. My gaze darted to the ceiling, hoping I might see a pair of TVs, but alas my room sported only one. Next, my eyes fell on a pair of blue socks with white no-slip strips squiggling across their bases. Into the socks ran a pair of brown, crinkled legs.

Clearly, there was no chance that my roommate and I might share some serendipitous common bond in our love for the worlds of J.J. Abrams. My only hope would be that Lost’s eight o’clock start would be well past his bedtime.

Randy and Co. pulled alongside my bed, and with a few scoots of the booty I made the transition from patient to part-time resident of Central Florida Regional Hospital. From there, everything went downhill.

When I left CentraCare for the emergency room, I had an absurd thought.

God, it would be really embarrassing if this pain just went away all of a sudden.

As I’ve said before, growing up with asthma familiarized me with all kinds of peculiar chestal phenomena. All morning, even as I discussed the pain with the doctors at CentraCare, I halfway expected the pain to instantaneously disappear. It is not uncommon for me to feel an uncomfortable catch in my chest, but usually I can assuage the pain with a deep breath. I worried that once I got to the emergency room, I might do just that. I imagined the embarrassing scenario of standing up and saying “Sorry. Everything’s cool now. Forget I even came in.”

Later in the evening, after committing to at least one night in the hospital, I cursed myself for employing such a ludicrous line of thinking. By the time the inevitable nitroglycerin headaches penetrated my skull, I wanted nothing more than to be at home eating the pint of Ben & Jerry’s Fossil Fuel I purchased for J.J. Abrams night and wondering every time I saw Evangelline Lilly or Jennifer Garner onscreen whether my belly really needed another pint of ice cream. But unfortunately, I was stuck in room 305, bed 1 of Central Florida Regional Hospital until the staff was satisfied with their tests, and allowed me to go home.

I got to my room around 1, after spending nearly three hours in the ER. After a few minutes, my nurse for the afternoon, Teresa, arrived to introduce herself and treat me to my inaugural third floor BP check. After finishing with me, she wheeled the blood pressure machine around the curtain to visit my neighbor.

“Mister Bennucci? Mister Bennucci?” she called, to no response. After a moment the man behind the curtain moaned, apparently nudged by the nurse. “Mister Bennucci, do you speak English?”

“Uh… uh… poquito,” he moaned. The nurse deftly switched their conversation to Spanish as she worked to take his blood pressure as well.

As she did this, I glanced at program airing on the television: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca. While a perfectly tasteful choice, I wondered whether it had been Mr. Bennucci’s. With my roommate distracted, I decided to take my first shot at establishing media dominance.

The television control was a bulky plastic panel connected to the back wall by a cord. The panel consisted of two buttons – the television control and the nurse alert button. This seemed to be asking for trouble. I imagined a scenario where the two get confused.

“Can I help you?” the nurse would ask.

“No. Sorry. I was trying to get back to Jeopardy.”

The television situation was good news/bad news, the good news being that the hospital carried expanded basic cable, over 70 channels. The bad news was the lone button on the remote panel moved the channel up – and only up. I tempered my rapid-fire clicking style, after a few missed channels required an entire lap around the dial.

My usual Wednesday television concerns had blinded me to the other major television event that began just as I was getting settled into my room. As I clicked blindly through the channels, chatting with my Uncle Joel and joking about my get-up, I heard the mild murmur of a crowd of people. This was a distinct din; its noticeable lack of echo signaled an outdoor setting. I knew what it was before I even turned my head. I smiled at my uncle.

“There’s baseball on the television,” I said.

The Washington Nationals were facing the New York Yankees in the first televised Spring Training contest of the year. Sure it was only Spring Training, completely meaningless. But it was baseball, nonetheless. It made me smile, though it would be the last smile to cross my lips for a considerable length of time.

At around dinner-time, my cousin Courtney and her boyfriend stopped by. It’s one thing to have your Uncle come to see you. He’s a grown man, a brother of my mother, so it is easier to accept his presence without a loss of pride or dignity. But the first thing I thought when I saw her come into the room was “Shit. I wanted to take this damn tube out of my nose before she showed up.” Courtney is a peer, a confidant, somebody who I wish to see me only at my best. I suffered from the same type of thinking when my cousin Brian showed up at the Moline v. Rock Island football game my senior year of high school and found me bawling like an infant on the sidelines. Even though my image had already been spoiled for the moment, I urgently removed the tubes as soon as she turned her head.

At about this time, I also suffered the first hints of nitro in my temples. I presented a consistently positive, even charming front to my family, but the day began to wear on me. Though writers aren’t known for their get-up and go lifestyle, if anything has contributed to the lackluster proliferation of my writing it’s my allergic reaction to sedentary living. My days are usually divided into a half-dozen interests each given their due attention for an hour or two at a time. On a normal day I will write a new story for two hours, stop and revise an old one for an hour, watch a movie, do some research, then finish the day with some extensive reading. While it’s all in the same arena of activity, each of these different tasks tease a different part of my brain, keeping me from getting bored with one thing or another. Sitting in a hospital bed barely allowed me to deal with one of these.

Though I didn’t feel ill when I came in to the hospital, the combination of the nitroglycerin and the tubes, nodes, and IVs keeping me bound in one position for hours on end worked its fiendish malaise on my body, my nerves, and my patience. When rolling onto my side became the epitome of freedom, I knew the night did not portend great joy. I did a good job projecting a positive attitude throughout the day, so much so that my medical records described me as a “very pleasant, white gentleman.” (I obtained them for my ever-curious Aunt Becky, a nurse practitioner) But by the time I said good-bye to my family, I knew it would be a challenge to keep up that pretense.

The nitro headache became increasingly intense, like a crown of metal rods twisting tighter and tighter around my skull. The discomfort in my head started to manifest in other areas of my body. I’m fairly certain the expansion of my illness was psychosomatic; a devastating headache can make your entire person feel unwell. Nevertheless, for the first time all day, I didn’t feel right.

My thoughts from earlier in the morning, hoping my symptoms would hold up for the doctors’ inspection, fell to the wayside as I came to believe that perhaps I was, in fact, seriously ill. No matter how good one feels, the endless tests and questions (compounded by the required night in the hospital) made me question my well-being. As the night wore on, minor jumps in my blood pressure became more and more alarming, though my nurses shrugged them off as completely normal.

After trying to sleep off my headache for an hour, I woke just in time for my first battle with the hospital food’s after-effects. This came just minutes before Lost began. So instead of watching Lost on the television, I sat in the bathroom with a People magazine that featured an article on Lost. When I felt significantly hollowed out, I crawled back into my bed and kept one eye on the television while I pressed my hands to the sides of my head, hoping to hold it together.

Halfway into Lost the night nurse came in to introduce herself and my true nightmare began.

I should say up front that I am a chronic xenoglossophobic. For those unfamiliar with this condition, let me give you the quick breakdown. It is fear of foreign languages. Now, my xenoglossophobia is of a specific subset; I get extremely nervous when I cannot understand someone with a particularly heavy accent. My nightmare is continuously asking somebody of foreign descent to repeat themselves because I can’t understand what they are trying to say. Living in Central Florida, the transplant capitol of the world, this has become a common obstacle for me to maneuver.

So when a frumpy Asian lady walked up to my bed with the blood pressure monitor in tow, my phobia kicked into high gear. She introduced herself in intensely staccato, broken English. I struggle to recall her name, but I cannot forget her eye. She had a glass eye. While she addressed me, her other eye kept careful watch over Mr. Bennucci in the next bed. Before she even got the sleeve around my arm, I knew my blood pressure would have climbed again. When she finished (my BP was by this time 160/90), she pulled out a wrinkled piece of paper folded into fourths, held it inches from her face, and scratched my reading down. As she rolled the monitor around to Mr. Bennucci she apparently asked my condition by saying “Ok” upwards of thirty times.

Once Alias and Lost concluded (I barely remember either of them), the tragic ache of intense loneliness settled on me. The questions and tests had ceased, so there were no more nurses or doctors to charm (I do take pride in being a likeable chum when I can). My family had all left for the evening, and the concerned phone calls from folks back home had come to an end. The oppressive quiet of the cardiac ward reminded me that the lone person responsible for my well-being seemed to have come straight off a Han dynasty pirate ship.

I looked at the clock. My tests would begin around 7:30 the next morning. On the docket were a stress test, an echocardiogram, and a CT scan of my abdomen. As the time got later and later, the possibility of a good night’s sleep got slimmer and slimmer. Slowly, I slipped into my habit of Catch-22 insomnia – I know I’m not getting enough sleep, so I worry about not getting enough sleep, which makes it harder to sleep, etc. Nothing in this world frustrates me more than insomnia, and each successive blood pressure check confirmed my irritation.

Finally, at 1:30, I hit rock bottom. Sitting up in my bed, unable to focus on my reading, all I could think about was the fact that I was alone in a hospital and the doctors had some concern. For a long stretch of time, rational thought eluded me.

What if I’m just sitting here waiting for a heart attack? I thought. I’m alone in this room. I totally blew off my family when they called, telling them this was no big deal. What if I suffer a heart attack and die in the middle of nowhere (right then Florida felt like the middle of nowhere) with nobody by my side except the shady lady with the glass eye and Mr. Bennucci. My God there’s so much more I have left to do…

Suddenly, the localized pain for which I was being treated began to spread. It was impossible to breathe. My whole chest burnt. My back. My shoulder. My arms. Each time I tried to get a grip on my thoughts, some little devil inside me threw out a “But…” that only made things worse. I hit the red button on the remote control and called for the pirate lady.

She came in spouting her “Ok” chant, and I told her of the pain enveloping my torso. In the most brilliant moment of bedside diagnosis I have ever heard, she responded:

“Oh no.”

My amazement nearly killed me right there. She hustled out of the room and brought back the BP monitor to check me again. Seeing the numbers flash up in bold red lights did not help my condition any.

179/100, they read.

I didn’t ask whether that was high. I knew that was high, but I gestured obviously at the monitor to make sure she saw it. She did, glancing at it in a flash, before turning back to me. She pulled a vial of nitro out of her pocket, and dropped another pill on my tongue. The relief came slowly.

And it left me with a headache to last until my tests began the next morning.

I barely slept on Wednesday night. Strictly adhering to the theme of complete discomfort, I teetered at the edge of unconsciousness but could never quite make it over the edge. When I did begin to freefall, the pirate lady would sweep into the room with her BP monitor and pull me back. As I found myself once again awake and fully aware of my situation, my eyes would sweep about the ceiling as I tried to coax my eyelids shut. Still, something always came to the fore to add just a few more minutes of insomnia.

I blame Mr. Bennucci for a great deal of it. Still nothing more than a shadow against the curtain, he began a somewhat musical chorus of beckons that I can only assume came from the depths of REM sleep because not once did he buzz the nurse.

“Hi. HI. HAI! hi. HAI!” he sang from his bed. The song paused for a shuffle in the bed and a burst of gas, then resumed: “HAI. hi. HI. HI. HI!”

At around 3:00 in the morning, I resigned my quest for sleep after finally meeting my roommate face to face. I lay on my bed, forcing myself to turn onto my side, and noticed a gangly, feeble man wheeling his IV across the room like a decrepit wizard carrying spare-parts magical staff. Mr. Bennucci was a balding man with a wreath of wild, oily hair around the back of his head. The television illuminated his egg-shaped head as he passed underneath it. A patchy beard of gray stubble spread over his chin. Though his musical greeting had gone silent, the melody still had not cleared itself from his system. His mouth bounced open repeatedly in a nervous twitch (hi HAI HI!). Each twitch revealed a space line of jagged teeth pinching his upper lip to his face. A crack of light from the hall highlighted each and every gruesome bit of his person, like a horror-movie reveal of the main villain.

Eventually, Mr. Bennucci made it to the restroom, where more audible unpleasantness followed. I rolled over to my other side and tried desperately to shake the images I had just seen. But they stayed with me until the sun came up, and a nurse nudged me awake. She had blessings to offer, but they came with the usual qualifications.

The first blessing was they had no indication of cardiac malfeasance. But just to be sure they wanted to run a stress test, an echocardiogram, and a CT scan. In order to get the proper readings on some of these tests, breakfast would have to wait. How long? They couldn’t say.

“I’m sure by the time lunch comes around…”

Of course. But before that, I had a stress test to deal with.

It should be said before proceeding, that I love my grandfather. There is no man on this Earth that I admire more. But I resented the hell out of him on Thursday morning.

The Deines clan (my mother’s side of the family) has a distinct pallet, one that I did not consistently adhere to in my younger years. It usually involved lots of grease, lots of salt, and spices that could eat through a battleship. I found most of these foods hard to handle as a lad, but every time I was presented with a particularly difficult plate, I found my grandfather at my elbow spouting his standard endorsement of Deines cuisine:

“Make sure you finish that. It’ll put hair on your chest.”

Based on his diet, you can conclude two things about my grandfather. 1) He does possess a wonderfully hairy chest, and 2) he has a history of heart problems. With his cardiac history, he would clearly not be a stranger to the adhesive requirements of heart monitors and EKGs. So, why in the world would he endorse the propagation of hair on any body part? I’m completely befuddled.

At around 9:30 the stress test beckoned. A nurse brought a wheelchair to take me down to the first floor. The first thing I saw was a treadmill. The irony did not escape me; I was far too weak to manage a moderate walk downstairs, yet the test would force me to walk. To walk after lying in bed for nearly 24 hours. To walk when every nurse in the hospital had a mission to convince me I had forgotten how. To physically exert myself when such acts heretofore had been forbidden. I lifted myself out of the wheelchair with considerable apprehension.

But before the physical challenge began, I needed to be prepped. I dropped my gown to my waist, per my nurse’s orders, and she examined my chest delicately, as if it were covered with boils and sores. She shot me a quick glance.

“I’m gonna have to take these off,” she said, speaking of the adhesive pads for my heart monitor. I took a look, counting them off. There were eight of them. I gave her a nod, and braced myself on the examiner’s bed.

She yanked at the first one, but it only came off halfway. I saw the majority of my chest hair come off with the pad. Her second jerk pulled it completely off. It continued in a similar vein for eight more pads. Occasionally she got them off in one try. Most of the time not. And in between each ripping flash of pain, I watched my flesh shake from her efforts.

“OW! I need to GAH! do some AH! AH! freakin’ DAMN! sit-ups.”

When the nodes were gone, the extensive prep work for the stress test began. Since the removal of the nodes failed to completely excavate my chest, my nurse employed a razor to rub out two more asymmetric patches. When the hair was gone, apparently my skin also proved a nuisance. She poured a cool liquid over my chest then rubbed a rough towel across me until it dried and wore away any dry skin that might disrupt the sensors. Plugged in like R2-D2, I was wrapped in a spongy mesh that took care of that common nuisance we humans like to call breathing.

With my oxygen restricted and an empty stomach groaning, I stepped up on the treadmill to get to work. I walked for three minute intervals. After two minutes the nurse took a manual blood pressure reading. Then they boosted the speed and the incline -- rinse and repeat. By the end of the cycle, I could feel an ache growing in my quads. I wasn’t surprised. Lying in bed for a day straight, rising only for bathroom breaks, my muscles were bound to be shot.

Should have stretched first.

The stress tests came out ideal (though I did get the impression that I needed to be more active in my daily life) and I returned to my room. I hoped maybe the privilege of a meal might have been granted to me, but instead I found a liter of milky white liquid on my dinner tray.

“Your CT scan is up next,” my nurse informed me. “This is dye they need you to drink before they can do the scan. They say it tastes like Sprite.”

I wasn’t buying that for a second. I took a sip and confirmed the invalidity of their description. To a young man who used to drink Mountain Dew like an exile in the desert, a liter did not seem like too much to deal with, but as I tried to force the pseudo-Sprite down the one, lowly liter seemed endless. I did everything I could to trick myself. I poured the dye into Styrofoam cups. I sipped. I chugged. Eventually, the bottle emptied. I say the bottle emptied, because I think it felt sorry for me and tossed away its contents. I doubt I actually ingested the whole thing.

I notified the nurse that I had finished, and she passed the message on to the CT specialists. Apparently the ER was packed to the gills, so it would be some time before they could do my particular scan. In the meantime, a woman with a thick Russian accent wheeled another new contraption into my room. It was time for my echocardiogram.

Of all the things I experienced during my stay at Central Florida Regional Hospital, I found the echocardiogram the most fascinating. Another new jelly was introduced to my chest as the Russian nurse rolled the sensor underneath my ribcage. The nurse sat oblivious to me, concentrating exclusively on the screen. Since it seemed riveting to her, I took a glance myself.

For most of our lives the majority of us live with only minor awareness of the processes that keep us alive. Breathing, the beating our hearts, digestion. Most of them go unnoticed when everything is in working order. The heart is a curious thing. For 25 years it has beat religiously, incessantly, loyally, and aside from those vague thumps in my chests I am barely aware of it. Yet staring at this tiny black and white image, pounding away, I felt exhausted, unable to process that it was a part of me. This little fist of muscle, tenacious and unyielding, was at the core of my person. I literally saw my own heart, and I quickly realized how much more this resilient little muscle could take. I swore then and there to use it more.

At around noon the CT opened up for me, and while I was forced to ingest another pint or two of dye (this time it wasn’t diluted in generic soda) the scan went completely without incident.

All of my tests were completed by noon, and all indications showed I was free of any worrisome ailments. Unfortunately, the bureaucratic doe-si-doe finally bit me in the ass. It took another eight hours to get the tests results to my physician and get my discharge notice passed up to me.

My nurses gave me the order and I immediately hopped out of bed. My legs felt light and numb and still a little tender from the stress test, but I had been waiting to go home for half-a-day and would not wait another second. I dressed swiftly and went straight into the hall and informed my nurse of my departure. She offered to have me wheeled downstairs, but freedom had already enveloped me.

“I think I can make it,” I told her.

I bid my fans adieu and made my way outside, where a torrential downpour cleansed me of my trials as I walked to my car. As my glasses blurred with raindrops I kicked up my gait to a light jog. I only got about fifty yards before they began to ache and I was forced to take things slower than I would have liked.

I was amped to get away from the hospital, but little did I know how the effects of those two days would linger.

My erratic sleeping habits continue to plague me. The barren spaces on my chest itch like the devil as the hair grows back in, often causing me to unconsciously caress myself in awkward places like the grocery line. And I celebrated my return to work with a 12 hour day; I went home for the night with a pulled hamstring and some sort of allergic reaction that caused my hands to swell up. I don’t know what that was, but I like to blame the hospital.

It’s been a little over ten days since my escape, and I seem to finally be clear of all the mysterious side-effects of health care. Although one particular side-effect will probably remain for a very long time:

I’m gonna have to be hit by a Mack truck before I ever check into the hospital again.