How It's Going
Capping it off
by Matt Nippert
For a would-be university graduate, a hospital gown is a poor substitute for the real thing.
Shortly after noon, with my arms acting as conduits for a pint of O-negative and a bag of saline, I asked the doctor outright: “Am I going to make it?” Flanked by two interns, the doctor nodded grimly. The residents cooed in sympathy.
That May afternoon, in what was later reported as a dreary ceremony, more than 200 of my Columbia University classmates were graduating, whereas I was detained in the emergency room of New York City’s St Luke’s Hospital. This was nightmarish: I had woken up wearing the wrong gown.
In the days leading up to this wardrobe disaster, I had taken to fortifying my usual breakfast of coffee and cigarettes with the undeniably healthy trio of orange juice, bananas and yoghurt. However, with fatigue and headaches steadily compounding, I had been driven from my normally stoic “she’ll be right” reverie to seek out the medical profession – a nurse – for the first time in a year.
That night, I slept the satisfied sleep of the self-righteous and – as it turns out – the deep sleep of the dangerously anaemic. My telephone rang at the unseemly hour of 8.55am. It was the nurse, who had my blood test results in front of her. “Don’t move, “ she said. “We’re sending an ambulance.”
Chest scans had revealed that my lungs looked like those of “a 40-year-old hobo with HIV”. My kidneys had already sustained permanent damage and were in danger of collapsing.
In hospital, it is far better to be a zebra than a mule (no fewer than eight specialists offered exotic theories as to what ailed me), but I suspect that both look the same coming out of a glue factory.
Modern medicine has yet to design a pleasant medical procedure and local anaesthetic is a half-measure at best. One afternoon at St Lukes stretched into five nights in an isolation ward.
Diagnosis, when it finally came, sounded like a high-class knacker’s yard: Goodpasture’s Syndrome. My antibodies were attacking my internal organs. Cases develop at the rate of one in every two million. Half my kidneys were gone for good, but with drugs for Africa and a fortnight hooked up to a blood-spinning machine (based on a milk pasteuriser), the rest might be saved.
For the unwell, Google is a Pandora’s box. Confined to my hospital bed, I used a purloined wireless internet connection to make a search. The first result told me that: “The majority of cases progress rapidly to end-stage renal failure.” (From this point on, I limited internet use in my hospital room to productive purposes, such as pirating recent episodes of The Sopranos and South Park.)
My view across West Harlem was spectacular and the room larger than my shoebox apartment, but although the ninth-floor window frame was big enough to stand in, my portal to the outside world was screwed shut, with the handles snapped off to discourage any escape. But after two weeks, and with cabin fever replacing actual temperatures, I broke out of hospital – not to seek alternative care, but to watch X-Men 3, a movie featuring mutants with distinctly useful physiological abnormalities.
Placed on a renal diet, I was denied salt sachets. One soup served weekly was officially called “Low Sodium Broth”. Turkey, low in protein, was also a staple. Fittingly, it was often cold.
The same doctor who deprived me of pomp and circumstance ordered me to euthanise my wilfully unhealthy, devil-may-care hedonist: I’d never smoke or drink again. Seven years is a long time to spend painstakingly constructing a gonzo persona, so I’m not entirely sure who is left holding the reins.
Now, after six weeks, I’m on more pills than my grandad. There are pink ones and fluorescent blue ones, and ones that look like discs and bullets and spindles. There are the drugs, and then there are the drugs to manage the side-effects of the drugs. Steroids are the elixir of youth: they add energy, acne, petulance and eight kilos of baby fat.
Finally back home in New Zealand, I seem to have dodged dialysis. I’m again allowed the vice of sodium, and my only dietary restriction is to reduce my potassium intake. As it happens, three foodstuffs especially rich in this mineral include bananas, orange juice and yoghurt.
