10:38 am - Wednesday, Jun. 14, 2006
Little Jimmy's Big Hospital Adventure (Pt 2)

From my journal entry that day:

St Vincent Medical Center�The Emergency Room. Hooked up to an IV dispensing antibiotics and morphine. Waiting for two bottles of a banana-flavored barium drink to work their way through my system, so they can do cat-scans of my abdomen.

I have, in technical terms, �blown a gasket�.

How did I reach this sorry state, you ask?

At that point, I thought I had a hernia, so I went into how I�d carried �The Chopper� in and out of my apartment that past Wednesday, and hadn�t felt right since. But it turned out that didn�t have anything to do with anything�It was just the closest I could come to connecting a feeling (hernia-like pain) with a cause (carrying something heavy).

Is it a �cyst�? Is it a �hematoma�? Or is it an �abscess�?

Looking at my cat-scan, the ER doctor wasn�t sure. But something is definitely amiss in my abdominal region�at one point, I heard the doctor from outside my room, consulting with a surgeon over the phone about my case.

So I�m being admitted to the hospital.

That caught me by surprise. I had though they were going to say �Yup, you�ve got a hernia�, schedule me for surgery at some later date (With nightmarish visions of dollar signs dancing across my field of vision), and send me on my way.

So since I wasn�t expecting to be admitted to the hospital, I had nothing with me but the clothes on my back, a paperback book (Hocus-Pocus, by Kurt Vonnegut), and a journal, to entertain myself while I waited in the ER.

And I was anxious�mostly about the �money aspect� of what was happening�but not doing as badly as you might imagine, under the circumstances. I had been feeling a lot of anxiety in the days leading up to this, and for better or worse, at least now it was finally being attended to.

I�ve called Mark and Jane (There�s nothing they can do, obviously, but I just wanted their sympathy).

I�ve called ArcLight (First to say I probably wouldn�t be in today�at one point, I actually thought I might just be a bit late�then later to say I was being admitted to the hospital, and probably wouldn�t be in tomorrow either).

I called JS, to let him know the deal, and to tell him I guessed I wouldn�t be available to go out for the next couple days (�Unless I actually book something,� I told him. �Then I�ll get off my friggin� deathbed�).

That last bit pissed me off, because the next time I checked my voice mail, there was a message from JS, saying he �didn�t know what to do�, but I had a callback for the Hummer commercial I�d auditioned for a week or so before (This has happened to me before with JS., where I �book out�, just like I�m supposed, and he calls me about an audition. More than once, actually, and it makes me very unhappy, especially at a time like this)

(Employed my native pessimism in the service of good this time out, regarding the Hummer callback�It�s been killing me that I�ve gotten so few callbacks this year, so to get one now was...pretty painful. So I told myself, �Jim, you hardly ever book those anyway, and you probably wouldn�t have gotten this one�, and I was able to quickly get past it, and move on to dealing with what was in front of me.)

And I�ve called Cary thoughout the day, apprising him of my status.

I called him over the weekend, because I was very uncomfortable and unhappy, and starting to get frightened over the implications of having a fairly serious medical problem.

He was very reassuring, and shortly after we talked, he emailed me a page worth of relevant web addresses and phone numbers (All I�d done, up to that point, was call the LA Free Clinic, where I got a recording saying that the clinic was �not accepting new adult patients for general medical care or dental services at this time�).

I think calling Cary was the smartest thing I did. While I probably could have found those addresses and numbers in time, Cary found them immediately, and gave me the �nudge� I needed to get this taken care of.

I�m pretty sure that, without him, I might have gotten as far as hitting a couple of �free clinics�, finding out they weren�t free (Funding�s a big issue when your city�s apparently going broke), then going in desperation, when �discomfort� had turned to �pain�, to the nearest emergency room I could find, where I�d now be writing about my $30,000 medical bill.

 

previous - next

0 comments so far