Shivering in a Hospital Gown

What's the real emergency?

“What brings you in today?” the nurse asked.

“I think I may have just had a mild heart attack.”

She typed my answer into the computer without looking over. I didn’t know whether to feel comforted or alarmed that her pace and mood were completely unchanged by my words. She stopped to clean her oversized glasses, and then asked for my date of birth.

I glanced back over my shoulder at the sliding glass doors to double-check where I was. Yes this was, in fact, the EMERGENCY room. Isn’t that where things happen quickly when lives hang in the balance?

I was wearing three shirts, a jacket, and a winter hat when I walked in, but I still couldn’t stop my body from shaking with cold as I followed her into the treatment area where I was passed like a relay baton to another perfectly nonplussed nurse.

She led me past thirty-seven different shades of blue in the form of wall paint, bed linens, pull curtains, face masks, device monitors and latex gloves—handed me a paper-thin pale blue hospital gown—and told me to remove all my clothes.

“Do you have anything else I could cover up with?” I begged.

She opened a silver metal box not more than an arm’s length away and handed me a stack of fresh-baked blankets, which, surprisingly, were not blue.

I curled up on the hospital gurney she led me to. I surveyed my assigned plot of shiny linoleum floor and wrapped the throws around me in shawl fashion. The hot blankets were almost worth the trip to the hospital.

She drew the curtain upon exit with a quick swipe of her hand, zipping it along the metal rails overhead with a deceptive finality, as though she were doing her best to convince me I was now in my own room. In fact, I was only in one big sick bay with a bit of dangling fabric between me and another half-naked stranger who explained to the doctor, in her own audible words, that the burning sensation in her chest was far too severe to be acid reflux and that the chillies she had eaten had nothing to do with it. They’d never been a problem before.

“Come on!” I thought. “I’m dying over here while you keep the only doctor in the ward tied up with a poor culinary decision.”

Is this by design, that we’re given auditory privilege to the idiosyncratic ills of others while we ourselves are unraveling? Is this to help us reflect on the legitimacy of our own emergencies?

The last nine months had included loss of work, other hospital visits by multiple family members, unexpected repairs to our rental property, loss of our tenant, a missed swing at an entrepreneurial project, a move-out notice from our own landlord, and finally, the start of a new business that was thankfully thriving, but was now requiring double-time efforts to launch.

My brain has been treating all of these life events as emergencies.

And for some strange reason my body believes it is being helpful by applying a python-like choke hold to my diaphragm when the stakes are high, allowing approximately one thimble-full of oxygen to enter my lungs during each inhalation. Of course. Makes perfect sense. Why would I want a trifling distraction like breathing to get in the way of the vital tasks at hand?

Since I’m not paying attention to my respiratory system in my desperation to get things done, I push on when I should be taking a breath, literally. Until something happens that gets my attention. Like my left arm going a bit numb and tingly below the elbow. “That’s weird,” I thought—lifting the limb above my head to shake it out and get the circulation flowing again. But in doing so, I suddenly got extremely dizzy, like on the verge of black-out dizzy, and then I was spooked. What the heck is going on? And, holy crap, am I having a heart attack?

I pushed the chair back to get up and walk over to the bed to lay down. I was immediately hit by a deadening thud of nausea that settled in my stomach like a German tank that almost dropped me to the floor.

My wife heard my first call for help, but since she’s never heard me do that in twenty years of marriage she thought she was hearing things until I called out again.

By the time she arrived upstairs I was laying prone, still tempted to just let whatever this was pass, but also now being gripped by the fear that it wouldn’t.

I quickly shared my symptoms and I could see by the look on her face as she googled them—numb arm, dizziness, nausea—that it wasn’t good.

In classic 60s-male fashion, I further weighed whether the facade of my invulnerability and self-sufficiency and the completion of my task list for the day was worth sacrificing in exchange for a trip to an emergency room that might save my life.

Yes, I actually weighed the decision.

Invulnerably dead did not sound better to me than being present at breakfast tomorrow, and so I reluctantly told my wife she should call an ambulance. She hesitated and suggested that she could probably get me there faster in her own car.

Twenty minutes later I was in the emergency room and hooked up to an ECG that has evolved in its efficiency the way an FI pitstop has transformed over the years. In many ways, I’d done the same with my life—optimized for productivity and efficiency—treating things as emergencies even when they’re not.

Tension is how I justify my existence.

My son had had a tight grip on my hand as we drove to the ER that morning. I kept saying, “I love you,” to my wife and kid. Somehow I didn’t feel alarmed. Instead, I said, “I just want you to know that I’m really happy. I’ve had an amazing life.” I was able to express this without tension, but failing to put an immediate signature on a document that could wait until tomorrow had literally taken my breath away.

Life stops making sense when you get your emergencies wrong.

As it turns out, a panic attack can look a lot like cardiac failure. I found out that I have a strong heart, low likelihood of a stroke, and the bloodwork and resting heart rate of a 30-year-old.

All of that puts me in a good position to apply spirited urgency to the game of life.

But without remembering that life itself is never on the line—that the divine, or God, or grace, or love, or great spirit, or whatever you want to call it is never in jeopardy—it’s possible to start treating one’s own trivial losses and gains as an emergency.

There is an indistinguishable flame of creative emergence that we can only properly honor, embrace, and celebrate when we get our urgencies right.

“Panic,” I surmised, there in my hospital gown, “is the misplacement of urgency.”

“Oh, that’s so good,” I thought to myself. “I need to remember that,” and then became instantly anxious because I had no way to record the idea.

A rapid beeping noise suddenly sounded out from the heart monitor, alerting no one but me to the sudden increase in my pulse.

Blind panic will just make you dizzy, numb, and scared. You’ll spend half a day in the hospital instead of making your art, hugging your children, or pursuing your highest contribution to the world—which arguably are the actual emergencies.

Finally, I’m here at home to tell the story.

Do I really need to finish this article and post it before the week expires so I can maintain my writing streak? The tension in my stomach and constriction in my chest seem to be saying yes.

But if I don’t fancy repeated trips to the hospital, I have some re-wiring to do.

I’m sitting in my office, watching a cold winter rain that is just starting to fall on the roof next door. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to back away from the computer, walk outside, and turn my face upward to the descending gift of the night.

Under normal circumstances I’d sit here with you, waiting to hear what you think, wondering whether what I’ve written is good enough.

But I just can’t entertain that worry right now.

I need to feel the December rain on my cheeks.

It’s an emergency.

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Many thanks to the newly forming Write Hearted community for feedback on this essay, and especially to

Claire Coley

Alex Michael

Kathy Ayers

and

Dana Allen

for jumping in with suggestions.

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