Five days in Limbo

At the Met Opera, Wednesday evening last week, I felt light-headed and inordinately fatigued, as I watched Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, unable to concentrate properly as I usually do and wished I did, despite the impassioned singing of Susan Graham in the title role and of now 70-year old baritone Placido Domingo as Oreste. I was faint through the evening but stayed on till the finale. I got on the crosstown bus to 1st Ave and started walking 9 blocks toward home as I usually do but felt so weak that I had to sit down on the next bus stop bench and waited for the bus to hop on. As soon as I got home I ran into the bathroom and I had a most vile looking tarry black stool. Between 11:00 pm and 1:00 am, I had six bouts of similar stool, later ones with raspberry colored liquid, and then two black vomits between them. Over the night, I had three more similar stools, and when I got up in the morning still another. I felt no pain all through these episodes. I had a bowl of well-cooked oatmeal for breakfast, which I was able to hold. I felt weak, and, having done some reading on the matter on line, made an appointment with my doctor at 3:30. The doctor’s office is a short bus ride, but atypically I got a cab. Hearing my story, the doctor was alarmed and delivered me directly to the ER at the Lenox Hill Hospital. So started my five days in Limbo. The gastroenterologist my doctor referred me to came to see me, and I was taken to a hospital room and was rigged up with IV tubes and Foley catheter for draining the urine; and the following morning I was given blood transfusion by which time I learned that I was suffering from anemia caused by the massive gastrointestinal bleeding. I have rarely been in a hospital in my lifetime, the last one in 1985, when as a result of an automobile accident the steering wheel broke and pierced my duodenum-jejunum, and I was hauled to a hospital for surgery, where I stayed ten days in the ICU. Otherwise, I have been very healthy. But at Lenox Hill, for three days and three nights, doctors and nurses came and went, and I had my blood drawn for tests nearly every three hours interspersed with the check-up of vital signs. I had no internal pain at all and no treatment, except for the blood transfusion; all the pain came from the tests -- much ado for almost nothing, as I put it. Eventually, I was relieved of the tubes; I had endoscopy earlier and then on Monday, colonoscopy, which proved negative, and I was discharged on Monday afternoon with my right arm black and blue from multiple venipuncture needles. Diagnosis for the cause of bleeding was not known, or, if known, never given. Five days, it seemed, vanished poof from my life. The opera on Wednesday should have been another Gluck, Orfeo ed Euridice.