“So do you want to go to Spaceland?”
Josh came in my room and laughed. I looked up from my bed.
“So that’s a no?” he asked.
I was lying on the bed with one arm hanging off, touching the ground. I couldn’t move.
“Your stomach still hurts?”
“It’s bad. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
A few hours later Josh got back from the club and I was lying on the couch, sweating and breathing heavily with agony. The feeling was of something terribly wrong in the stomach, a sharp and relentless pain.
“Jesus, what’s wrong with you?”
“I don’t know,” I panted. “It’s bad.”
“You probably need some Mylanta. And a Sprite.”
“Yeah, I took some Pepto-Bismol awhile ago.”
“I think Mylanta is a different thing. Because when I had your problem awhile ago, I took some Mylanta and it worked. And the next day I had a chili burger and chili fries and, well, it turned out I was just badly constipated. The chili actually did the trick.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll go get you some Mylanta.”
He returned with the Mylanta and it soothed a little bit of the pain. I laid down and tried to sleep and Josh went to bed. Sometime at around four in the morning the pain became unbelievable, a burning, twisting force within me that would not give me a moment of peace. I knocked on Josh’s door.
“I think I need to go to the emergency room.”
We drove down Sunset Boulevard in the pre-dawn light to Kaiser. I hobbled into the front room of the ER while Josh parked. It was strangely empty. A woman took my temperature and my blood pressure and my Kaiser card. Minutes later I was inside the ER, a crowded, chaotic series of hallways and rooms, and I was lying in a hospital bed in the hall.
“I am going to give you a morphine drip,” said a nurse approaching, carrying an IV. Soon the IV was in my arm and the world dissolved. The sounds of the ER – chatting Filipino nurses, talkative homeless patients, constant beeping- became echoes in a dreamland. I fell into a wonderful sleep while the pain in my stomach remained in a steady throb. Soon Josh’s face was swimming in the haze above me.
“Are you alive?” his voice reverberated in the half-consciousness.
“Oh, yeah…they gave me a morphine drip. It’s awesome.”
“Well, I think I’m going to go home. There’s some weird people in the waiting room. Just call me when you need to be picked up.”
“Okay,” I said, and went back to sleep.
Soon I was a awake and an Indian doctor was asking me questions, prodding around my stomach.
“You probably have appendicitis,” he said in perfect English. “I’ll have you go through the CAT scan to do some x-rays.”
Soon I was out of the hallway and in a room of my own. A patient outside had a lot to say and I sat and listened with nothing else to do.
“Yeah, I don’t have a place to stay usually, but right now I stay over on Edgemont, with my friend, right down the street. He be letting me stay there when my asthma gets bad.”
“You know where I am on Wednesday nights, right?” asked a young doctor.
“You be somewhere else on Wednesdays?”
“Yeah, on Pico, at the clinic. Anytime you stop there I can get you the asthma medicine.”
“Oh, really? ‘Cause that’s all I need, is the Flonase thing. You know, that’s the only thing I be coming in here for, just when my asthma gets bad…”
While this went on a huge Jewish man with a yarmulke was outside my room in a cot, attended by a nurse.
“Your leg is very bad, okay? If you stay at this weight the weight on your ankle is going to get worse. Do you smoke or drink?”
“Yes, both.”
“I don’t like that. You can’t do either. Both are very bad right now. And who are you, sir?”
“I am his friend,” said an old man in a thick Yiddish accent. “I am a doctor as well, I am a surgeon. I come to see he get good care, but now I see I have nothing to worry about! I am very impressed! The care is excellent here!”
While the nurse and the old man bickered about his proper care I texted my lovely girlfriend and said I was in the ER because my stomach got worse.
Soon they wheeled me through well-lit, maze-like hallways and down an elevator to go through the x-ray machine. After that I was back upstairs and a smooth, fast-talking black surgeon came to talk to me.
“Okay, Andrew, it looks like you have appendicitis. We’ll be taking out your appendix, okay? Hopefully soon. I’ll come by later with my boss and some other surgeons to talk to you.”
“Okay,” I said. Well, that’s good to know. A simple procedure. I texted Elizabeth again. “I have appendicitis. They’re doing surgery to take it out.” I texted Josh so he would know he didn’t have to pick me up that day. Then my cell phone ran out of battery and I was stranded in the hospital with an IV in my arm. I wondered if Elizabeth would be able to find me before the surgery. As the hours wore on, I realized that the hospital was a strange place, with an inescapable sense of loneliness and camaraderie.
The nurse came by to give me the paperwork and consent forms to sign, and I waited some more. I had no idea what time it was or what it looked like outside. Sometime that evening the surgeons came by. An older white man, the boss, felt my stomach and reiterated the need to take out the appendix, and that it would be done that night.
“Your appendix is extremely inflamed. That’s what is causing the pain you’re experiencing. We’re gonna try to get you on the board sometime in the next few hours, okay? So just sit tight, we’re going to get this out of you and you won’t have to worry about it anymore.”
“Sounds good!”
I waited some more.
A nurse came in and told me there was a phone call from my mom. What? How did she know I was here? I went to the phone outside my room and picked it up. It was Elizabeth, and she had tracked me down as I figured she would. Thank God. I told her where the ER was, across from the Scientology center on Sunset. Then I waited for her to come. After several hours she arrived at my bed and we shared some of those intimate moments that you just don’t have with your buddies.
A Filipino nurse came in.
“Okay, they’re ready for you,” she said, and instructed me to take off my clothes and put on my OR scrubs. I felt an attack of nervousness. They were really going to cut open my stomach and take something out of me.
They wheeled me away and directed Elizabeth to the waiting room. They wheeled me down countless hallways until I ended up in the surgery wing. It looked like a laboratory where strange creatures were created by mad scientists. I was in the surgery room, lying on a narrow cot.
A black orderly pointed me towards a man at my left.
“This man is going to make sure you don’t feel nothin’ while this is going on.”
“Hi,” I said as he put a needle into my IV. A mask was placed over my nose and mouth.
“Breathe deeply,” he said, and I did. Very soon all was dark, and I was aware of nothing.
“Yeah, Michael Phelps can swim like a motherfucker.”
“Hell yeah.”
“I don’t be watching the basketball, because it’s always a blowout.”
“Kobe just be crushin’ ‘em.”
“Yeah, that shit is boring, dude. I can’t watch that. But you know, I be watching the female volleyball, I be watching everything. Gymnastics, diving, you name it. It’s all good to me.”
“Yeah, it’s all pretty good.”
“He’s awake. Hey man, you wakin’ up. Just relax, everything was okay.”
“How did it go?”
“Good.”
“Where’s my appendix?”
I was completely disoriented.
“It’s gone. Just sleep. They gonna take you to a waiting room.”
My head was swimming in a half-conscious stupor. An orderly came and wheeled me down several more hallways where I waited, sleeping, for about an hour. I wondered where Elizabeth was and when I could see her. When I woke up to the sound of Filipino nurses gossiping about a co-worker, I was wheeled to an elevator where I ended up in a room of my own. Elizabeth walked in and sat next to me. She looked at the big bandage on my stomach.
“It went well,” I said, my eyes drooping. I was very sore and very relaxed.
“I have to take a picture of you,” she said. “This is so cute.”
She got her camera out and snapped the picture.
“Are you making a face?”
“No, what do you mean?”
“Your eyes are barely open! Here, let me take another picture.”
“Was that good?”
“Are you sure you’re not making a face? You have this goofy smile.”
“No, I’m really tired right now.”
We spent some moments together and she left, with instructions for me to call her when I woke up. She would come straight to the hospital and skip work.
I spent the whole next day at the hospital with Elizabeth, taking Vicodin and peeing with a catheter. My whole body was incapacitated and nothing would work right. It took me the whole day to learn to walk again. Eventually they sent me home with thirty vicodin. I rode in the late afternoon sun in Elizabeth’s car, staring sleepily out the window at the rush hour traffic. I called my parents to tell them what had happened. They were relieved I was alive. I received an outraged call from my sister who couldn’t believe I hadn’t called my family sooner. It wasn’t that big of a deal, I said. I knew I wouldn’t die.
