THIS PART DOESN’T HURT
All Things Must Collapse
No not my pelvic floor — but I did learn to kegel
During that magical time when I had a gorgeous body — the result of performing, on a daily basis, such physical labor as manually unloading steel bar stock from trucks — I noticed one day that the removal of a single 1" diameter bar had me slumped on a stack of pallets, gasping for breath. Must be the flu, I thought. I excused myself, drove home, and collapsed.
Awakening a few hours later and thinking, hmm, I don’t feel bad at all, I make a move to rise from my mattress-on-the-floor.
Big mistake. A two-by-four launched by some invisible demonic hand slams into my chest, reeling me back to prone position. Was I having a heart attack? Dying? Already dead, and this is Hell? What the mother fuck! I’m only 36!
Let’s try this again. Care-full-yyy — OK, I’m standing. Can I drive? The hospital isn’t far.
Fffuuuccckkkk! Collapsing into a chair, I call out to my roommate Ken.
“What’s up? You look like shit!”
“Thanks. Could you take me to Good Samaritan?” I wheeze.
“You sound like shit too. Get in my car.”
He drops me off. I stagger through the doors marked “Emergency” and inform Big Nurse that I am inches from death. She commands me to take a seat. Is this the last seat I will ever take?
Hours pass. Despite the discomforts of the plastic chairs and having nothing to read but old copies of Us magazine— this is way before cell phones — I’m not feeling half bad when I hear my name called.
They take my vitals.
“You work out a lot, right?”
“Well, I work a lot, why?”
“You have the resting pulse rate of a highly trained athlete.”
Say it again! I think. Despite my immense beauty, inside I’m still a lonely, insecure teenager.
They wheel me to what appears to be a parking lot except instead of cars, gurneys. They pull my gurney curtain shut. From my parking spot I can overhear the doctor who’d auscultated me earlier:
“And this patient — Paul Hossfield — move him to the front of the queue. I suspect something serious there.”
Something serious! My sphincter peaks at 8.5, minimum. Cancer? Heart disease? I’m too young to die, much less spend the rest of my life dragging around an oxygen tank or some shit!
They wheel me into a little examination room. In comes a new doctor — new to me that is — about my age and amped as fuck. “You have a collapsed lung. It usually happens to young males who are in good shape. No one knows why.”
Before I have time to bask in his evaluation of me as being in good shape he starts rooting through cabinets as frantically as me searching for my perpetually lost glasses. “Oh Christ! Where’s the pneumothorax kit?” He storms out of the room muttering, “What’s with this fucking hospital?”
Minutes later he bursts back through the door carrying a polished wooden box. He snaps open the latches and pulls out a contraption about the size of a severed forearm with a handle sticking out one end and an array of vicious-looking mechanical claws protruding from the other. It looks like an instrument of medieval torture! Sphincter clench 10! He must see my look of horror because he opines, “Oh don’t worry. This part doesn’t hurt.”
How reassuring.
“OK let’s numb you up.” He pulls out one of the biggest syringes I’d ever seen and before I could react buries it between two of my ribs. As a mercy from God the Novocaine acts almost immediately. Then he whips ’round the aforementioned instrument of torture, jams the clawed end into the numb spot, and begins turning the crank. A series of sickening crunching sounds issues forth but as promised, it doesn’t hurt.
When he finishes he attaches a tube to the nice new hole in my chest. The other end is connected to a little bubbling plastic tank attached to my gurney. Then he gets up in my face and asks, “Ever clench your ass really hard when you are holding in a wicked shit? That’s called a kegel. Do it for me now.” I do it. “Good,” he says, “You’re going to need that later.”
He plunks down on one of those little doctor stools and wheels himself around to face me again. “OK. I’m going to turn this thing on.” Wasn’t it on already? “No, I mean on on. When I do, about 95 percent of the re-inflation of your lung will take place in about 30 seconds to one minute. Most patients find this very distressing. In fact, many say they felt as if they were dying, but don’t worry. No one ever dies during this part of it.”
Gotta love that bedside manner. Points for honesty though. He fires that sucker up and DAMN! I think I have some idea what waterboarding must be like.
They wheel me into the hallway. I tell one of the attendants, “I had to wait so long in the lobby I almost went home,” conveniently forgetting I would have had to walk 8 miles on a collapsed lung.
“Oh, that’s OK, you would have been back. Dead maybe, but back.”
Everybody’s a comedian.
There is more to this story but having hit the five-minute mark I’ll set it aside for now.
Special thanks to Raine Lore for the inspiration, to Holly J See for her eagle-eyed editing, and to Amy Sea and Gary Chapin for their encouragement.
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