Doctor, Doctor, Give Me the News

The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.~ G.K. Chesterton

Poetry in my life has been noticeably missing in action the past few days because, oh, boy, have I been sick. And I don't get sick.

After a fine start to my Tuesday, breakfast and a walk, it was barely after 1:00 when a hammer came down and I was suddenly sick as a dog.  No warning, no gradual feelings of illness, just one moment fine and the next gone.

I spent all of Tuesday in a haze of vomiting and sleeping, not even able to keep water down. By the time I got up on Wednesday, I'd lost six pounds and was still retching. Something was seriously wrong here.

By mid-afternoon, I had the sense to message the friends with whom I had dinner plans scheduled, explaining my dilemma. Despite their relative youth to mine, their response was quick and authoritative: "We are totally MOM-ing you, Karen. Go to the doctor!"

The problem with that was when I called the doctor and they found out I'd already been vomiting for 27 hours and couldn't even keep water down, I was instructed to get myself to the emergency room. Which I did and promptly barfed in front of a room full of waiting patients. Pretty.

I wish I could say they identified my ills quickly and I was out shortly, but life doesn't work that way. X-rays, blood work, EKG, urinalysis, you name it, they tried to figure it out, along the way dosing me with a smorgasbord of anti-nausea drugs, painkillers and enough liquids intravenously to rehydrate a man twice my size.

In fact at one point, my extremely tall doctor came in, glanced at the near-empty bag of solution dripping into my scrawny arm and marveled, "Wow, you must have been completely dried out to suck down that much liquid so quickly."

You think? As someone who normally takes in over a gallon of water a day and it had already been way more than a day, I expect my body was being the water glutton that it is.

When it was time for the shift switch, my doctor came in to check on me and tell me who his successor would be. "His name is Dr. Li." Looking at the 6'5" man standing in front of me and taking an educated guess with a name such as Li, I quipped, I bet he'll be shorter than you.

"He is, but so is everyone. That doesn't make him special, though." So he left me with a smile.

What I wanted more than anything was water or even a Coke because it had been so long since I'd been able to drink. But when I finally cajoled my nurse into letting me try a little ginger ale, I was rewarded with more retching. So much for that.

By 11:00 p.m., I was finally released from the emergency unit and sent to the observation unit, which was far calmer and had just as many good ant-nausea drugs. The night and next day were a blur of vomiting, drug-induced napping and periodic attempts at more ginger ale, each time only setting me off again.

"You look pretty awful," one female doctor told me after examining me. Tell me something I couldn't have guessed, doc.

And then, with the same abrupt manner it had descended, I felt the veil of food poisoning (because that's what they'd decided after ruling out every possible physical cause) begin to lift. My fifth attempt at ginger ale stayed down.

When my nurse asked what I wanted to try next, I told her I'd take whatever she had. I ate it all. Peanut butter and Ritz crackers, Lorna Doone short bread. Strawberry jello. Graham crackers. A bowl of chicken soup.

It felt miraculous that it all stayed down. Once I proved that it had, my discharge papers were brought to me and a signature was all it took to release me to the world after what felt like much longer than it had actually been.

Walking outside, I had to think about whether it was night or morning. About how something as innocuous as chicken salad eaten in an out-of-town bistro had caused me to lose two days of my life. About what a fortunate thing it is that I almost never get sick.

That there's so much poetry in feeling as great as I do nearly every day of my life.

But Is It Art?

"You're not going to see the bedpans?"a friend asked as I walked past her car on my way to Tompkins-McCaw Library.

Of course I was, I told her, and wasn't she?

"I'd rather read about it on your blog," she said diplomatically.

Not me; I wanted to see the photographs and objects themselves.

After all, how many bedpan exhibits can I hope to see in my lifetime?

"Bedpan Elegance: Celebrating the Beauty of an Everyday Object" included not only thirty large-format photographs of bedpans, but also the Tompkins-McCaw Library's collection of bedpans.

And I don't want to brag, but in addition to the beauties displayed out front, I was taken into the back room to see those that had not made the cut and were sitting forlornly on a cart.

I chatted with the artist William Dubois (Billy) who acquired his first bedpan in 1977 for fifty cents.

Since then he's added five dozen or so antique and contemporary bed pans and urinals to his collection.

Some of them hang in the bathrooms of his home; the guest bathroom has the female urinals lined up along the door.

Now that's a place I'd like to relieve myself.

There was so much to learn about bedpans from the big, beautiful photographs Dubois had taken.

Perfection #1 was patented in June 1900.

The Blue Speckle Relax model reminded me of my mother's turkey roasting pan. 

The Ideal Boots model was labeled a "Bed and Douche Slipper."

The English Slipper had instructions scripted inside: "Slipper should be put under the patient and between the legs."

I'll leave the rest to the imagination.

Despite the number of colorful bedpans (dark blue, coarse brown, smooth gold, caramel, chocolate), along about the 19th century, the medical community realized that patients expected  bright white sterile-looking surroundings in hospital settings and were perhaps jarred to see decorative patterns on such unsavory items.

And yet, current models are pink injection-molded plastic. Go figure.

Leaving the exhibit (which runs until June 30) with visions of ceramic and porcelain bed pans and urinals (including a feminine urinal that closely resembled a teapot) in my head, I knew there'd be no way to top such an uncomfortably fascinating exhibit any time soon.

But there was more art to be had.

Ghostprint Gallery was doing their monthly preview (my favorite way to really see a show sans the First Friday mob scene) and Adam Juresko's new show "Tomorrow Will Be Worse" was full of pictorial and graphic images with a sly humor to them.

The dozens of framed 8 x 10" mixed media pieces showed Juresko's knack for combining vintage print images with bold text to convey an entirely different meaning.

Although I already own a Juresko, I was very tempted to buy another because these were so different.

I went up to the artist and asked him why I should buy another of his pieces when I already had one and, in his understated way, he confirmed that these were different enough to warrant it.

So we were in agreement on that.

There were a bunch of good people to talk to while I was there - the sculptor, the labor organizer, the print maker, the tattoo artist, the gallery owner.

One of the many pleasures of the public previews is actually being able to have a conversation of substance when you run into someone.

Well, that and getting first crack at buying the art, no small benefit at a show where the art is so affordably priced.

I walked out with one of the pieces, leaving a gap in the display, but that's also part of the plan for the exhibit.

It's a conceptual piece, don't you know.

Secco was next and I walked in to find a full bar, but a favorite chef at the end of the bar and motioning me toward him and a friend.

I gave him a European-style kiss, leaving lip prints on both cheeks which he refused to remove, despite having to leave for the airport shortly to collect a friend ("He will say, 'Ooh, I like Richmond! I want to stay!' when he sees this.").

Luckily for me, he was on a boys' night out excursion, so he left behind a friend to entertain me.

Oh, boy, stranger conversation!

A wine recommendation from the master led me to Domaine Henry Pelle Menetou-Salon Morogues.

Meanwhile I ordered the housemade salt cod, roasted red bliss potatoes, and fried leeks in an olive oil emulsion.

I shared one bite of this succulent fish with the stranger, but only because he'd shared a bite of his grilled scallops and mushrooms first.

I mean, fair is fair.

Besides, I'd learned that he was a Jackson-Ward homesteader, having bought into my beloved 'hood back in the 80s.

That's like catnip to J-Ward Girl, as were his stories of Crossroads, my neighborhood hangout.

It was amazing how many of the same people we know in this town, but we also moved to Richmond just about the same time.

Dessert was stinky cheese, this time the bleu d'Auvergne, a briny, piney and creamy delight of the type which, had I been on a date, we both would have had to have eaten it to make it a fair fight.

Or a fair whatever.

I finished out my night chatting up a storm with Secco's queen, Julia, and ogling the Restaurant Week menu.

In fact, we were so busy talking about the juicy stuff that I didn't even remember to tell her about the urinals I'd seen.

Come to think of it,  maybe she'd rather just read about it on the blog, too.

Not everybody needs to actually see a Perfection #2 (the most comfortable bedpan in the world).

For whatever reason, I do.

Judge away.

Hearing is Believing

I don't have a TV, so I don't know how realistic the dialog is on medical shows, but if what I overheard in the E.R. today is any indication, it's got to be hysterical.

Doctor: How much do you drink?
Patient #1: You know, like a 40 every other day.
Doctor: You drink a 40 every single day?
Patient #1: At least.

Doctor: What seems to be the problem?
Patient #2, age 19: I can't stop freaking out.
Doctor: When did this start?
Patient #2: This morning. I got up and smoked a joint and I hadn't done that in a while, so I drank a Red Bull and felt worse, so I started drinking beer.
Doctor: (pause)
Patient #2: Man, I'm really hungry. Can you get me some food?

Doctor: When did the bleeding symptoms start?
Patient: Late yesterday afternoon.
Doctor: Why didn't you come in then?
Patient: And miss Saturday night?

Doctor: Do you still have your gall bladder?
Patient: They didn't give me one when I came in.
Doctor: No, no, you're born with it.
Patient: Then I must still have it.

Somebody needs to enlighten me. Are television writers making up stuff this funny? Cause if they're not, they need to spend a few hours on site soaking up such rich dialog.

If I hadn't overheard it myself, I'm not sure I'd believe it, though.

Literary Loses to Lousy Lungs

I was supposed to be at the Poetic Principles reading at the Virginia Museum tonight. A literary-loving friend was going with me so that we could be read to by writer Randall Kenan, followed by dinner out. I've had my ticket since October and I was eager to hear this man whose fiction focuses on what it means to be black and gay in the U.S. South.

Instead, I was lying in a hospital bed, taking breathing treatments and steroids yet again. Only three days from the one-year anniversary of my 2009 diagnosis of pneumonia and I was back to coughing and wheezing. Only this time, instead of soldiering on, I went to the Emergency Room at MVC where I was told that I did not have pneumonia (whew!), but that my lungs "sounded like crap." Yes, those were the doctor's actual words. WTF?

Returning from my chest X-ray, I smiled at the man in the bed on the other side of my curtain. After my next coughing fit, he asked through the drape if I was okay, which led to a fascinating, but blind conversation. As it turned out he was a "Sir," born in Wales to a British father and Australian mother and since his grandfather had been knighted in 1935, that carried over to him and his oldest son. The things you learn through a hospital drape!

After a couple of breathing treatments, I was reluctantly moved to the CDU (Clinical Decision Unit), aka the Observation Room. I was determined not to be admitted and only agreed to four to six hours there. After my third breathing treatment, I was exhausted and requested food STAT. What I got was penne in a red meat sauce with a side of the kind of gray green beans the color of Army drab uniforms. I'm no fan of tomato sauce, but I ate all the pasta dish, although the beans remained untouched. Luckily the meal had a hefty junk food component (individually sized packages of Oreos, Cheese Nibs, Lorna Doon short breads and Ritz Peanut Butter crackers with a Schweppe's Ginger Ale to wash all those preservatives down) to flesh out the meal.

When I had arrived eight hours earlier, my lung capacity was at a pathetic 140 (optimum is 450) and rose to 220 when I got to CDU, but I wasn't allowed to leave until I got to 300. After my fourth treatment and once the steroids kicked in, I finally made it to 350 and was stripped of my IV and given prescriptions for more drugs than I can afford.

The entire staff was aware that I had one foot out the door, having been told by the ER staff that I was not willing to stay overnight. They praised my response to treatment, told me to avoid smokey places and smokers and walked me to the door.

I'm gratified and appreciative to feel better, if not normal, but totally bummed that I missed a literary evening of Randall Kenan. I wanted to hear him read from works with evocative sentences like this in his southern-raised voice:

They say that day the sun shone while the rain poured -the old folks say that's when the devil beats his wife- the day Estelle Pickett died giving birth to Clarence.

Damn these lungs!