May 28, 2007

A Night With the Sticker-Stickers In The Chest Pain Unit

Beep, beep, beep.

You wake up from a light, fitful sleep at 3 a.m. to the sounds of your heart monitor beeping and the semi-hushed voices of two nurses outside your room discussing household indiscretions of their husbands and kids. The IV stuck in the back of your hand keeps you from rolling onto your side to get comfortable. Your hospital gown is wadded and twisted around your various body parts in strange and awful ways.

And then it gets worse. You hear a weird change in the sounds coming from that heart monitor, and you try not to imagine what could be going wrong inside your chest to make those changes.

But the voices of the nurses who are keeping track of your monitor don’t even break stride, and after a while you decide that the changes you heard were all in your imagination. Besides, you’re so exhausted that at that point you no longer care, and so you doze back into that light, fitful sleep.

Beep, beep, beep.

Last week I went through a night just like that when, after carrying some lawn chairs up a flight of stairs, I felt a radiating pain in my left arm. With a family history like mine (I lost my father to heart disease when he was nearly 10 years younger than I am now), this is something to take seriously.

When I walked into the hospital emergency room and told the triage clerk that I was experiencing symptoms of a heart attack (and showed her my health insurance card), I got a fair amount of attention. I was immediately ushered into a small room, where a woman asked me a lot of questions while a man stuck that IV needle in my hand, then pasted a bunch of stickers on various parts of my body and hooked electrodes to them.

Beep, beep, beep.

It seems that when the emergency room staff thinks you might be having a heart attack, stickers become their main priority. Every time they moved me from one room to another, someone would slap a few more stickers on me and attach more wires to them. By the time I was getting my fourth set, I asked my current sticker-sticker why she couldn’t just use the ones that were already there. This was apparently the funniest thing she had heard in a while, because when she recovered from her helpless laughter and left the room, I heard her in the hall repeating my question to, presumably, a gang of other breathlessly howling sticker-stickers.

Beep, beep, beep.

At about midnight they checked me into a room in the Chest Pain Unit, where I received 10 more stickers and a turkey sandwich. They also hooked a portable heart monitor transmitter thingy to my stickers, so the nurses could keep an eye on my vital signs if I should get out of bed and wander down to the bathroom. I spent a fair part of the next few hours wondering what effect each of the various possible bathroom activities might have on the displays the nurses would see on their monitor screens out there at the nursing station.

Beep, beep, beep.

When nature overcame heart monitor modesty and I finally did wander down to the bathroom, there was a sign on the wall over the toilet that said, “No Smoking In The Chest Pain Unit.” As a long-ago ex-smoker – the most sanctimonious kind – it seemed a little crazy that you would have to tell people that. Then it occurred to me that smoking probably had a fair amount to do with at least some of my fellow chest pain unit patients being there in the first place.

Beep, beep, beep.

In the morning a pretty young blonde woman came around with a wheel chair to collect me. There are very few things I can think of that are harder on a man’s self-esteem than wearing a hospital gown and something like 50 stickers, being pushed around in a wheelchair by a pretty young blonde woman.

She had come to take me for my “stress echo cardiogram,” a test in which the pretty young blonde woman put more stickers and wires on my chest, then made me walk as fast as I could on a treadmill. Once the pretty young blonde woman and her treadmill got me wheezing like a steam engine, her partner (a pretty young brunette woman) made me lie down and hold my breath while she poked around my chest with a metal probe. OK, this is one thing I can think of that is harder on a man’s self-esteem than the wheel chair and hospital gown deal.

Beep, beep, beep.

Back in my room few hours later, my nurse told me that the tests came out all right, and that I could go home and follow up with my own doctor. Then she disconnected my IV, gave me my clothes and wished me good luck. To that nurse, and the pretty young women and all the sticker-stickers and other doctors and nurses who helped me through that frightening, uncomfortable, sometimes humiliating night I say, “Thank you.”

From the bottom of my heart.

  © 2007, Michael Ball