It was true. Every day was an adventure. Cops would show up before 9am and be going room to room with the hall coordinator looking for power tools, because the night before someone had somehow removed a lounge door and a bulletin board. (*cough* They did it with a screwdriver. *cough*) Cops were a regular sight. We once had a large wine party on our floor-- in the halls and everything-- that would even spread downstairs to the laundry room when people kept spilling boxed Franzia on themselves and needed to wash their clothes lest the stains become permanent. Someone pissed in one of the dryers.
It seemed like a weekly ritual that someone would excuse themselves on one of the lounge couches as well. We defaced every bulletin board. We'd heard of "Quiet Hours," but we couldn't remember from where. The smokers that congregated out front once completely destroyed a metallic green bike locked to an adjacent rack, bending the wheels and the frame, and for a whole semester no one ever took it away. We threw unlocked bikes on the roof of the entrance. We duct-taped someone's door shut and did it again right after the hall coordinator tore the first attempt down.
We kept our mouths shut because material damages that showed up on the bills were just part of the entertainment costs.
One of our most dubious records was the number of ambulance visits in a single semester, and I was the thoroughbred that 2nd floor Wolpers rode to victory.
Almost everything up until that point, naturally, had been alcohol poisoning (though it's a miracle my neighbor across the hall didn't kill himself with the Drano/Extacy/coke concoctions he made regularly). Some straight-edge engineer on the upper floors would find one of our guys cruising up and down in the elevator in an alcohol coma with some delightful messages on his forehead. Slap 'em on the stretcher. They'd swear off drinking for about a week before getting back on the wagon.
Mine was legit, however, or so I thought. I had a heart condition called Wolff-Parkinson-White, which is a fairly common one as far as heart conditions go. A normal heart has an electrical pathway that goes back and forth between the atria and the ventricles, which is why heartbeats come in accented pairs. There's a little device like an organic Pacemaker in that pathway that regulates the electrical impulse and keeps your heart from beating about twice as fast as it needs to. People with WPW have an additional electrical pathway, like a service entrance, that lacks that regulating device, so every now and then, when playing, say, basketball, I'd go up for a rebound and get jostled and that electrical impulse that went down the normal pathway would suddenly get diverted down the alternate pathway, and my heart would start beating at an unregulated 200+ beats per minute. That's over three per second, and it doesn't slow down. Sometimes the episodes could last for forty minutes. Then, after spending quite a lot of time laying on the ground, feeling like I might pass out, my heart would suddenly seize up, stop for a moment, and then start beating at a mercifully regular tempo.
Most of the time, WPW isn't fatal, but sometimes it is. Needless to say, the idea of dropping dead of a heart attack at the age of nineteen kind of freaked me out, and that whole heart-stopping-for-a-second thing freaked me out too. (If you're laying down, it feels like you're falling forward.) This lead to a lot of thinking too much, too much worrying, and so the weekend before my first finals week I started feeling strange and thought I was about to bite the Big One. My heart started racing in a specific way that it had never done before, and I felt sick, and I was laying in my bunk bed in the middle of the afternoon thinking that this was it. I was having a real heart attack and was about to buy the farm.
It's a strange thing to call 911. At least it is for me. I'm too polite: I'm sitting there, thinking I'm about to die, and I'm like, "Man, what if I'm not really dying and I called 911? That would suck." I'm sitting there in my bed, in my possible last moments, and I feel self-conscious for having to punch those numbers on my cell phone. I remember being polite to the operator.
Even stranger than calling 911 is hearing the surreal sound of sirens that you know are coming for you. "No, no," you think, "let's please not draw too much attention to me, OK? Just get me to the hospital, thanks." It's embarrassing to be on a stretcher.
Well, the paramedics came and burst dramatically into the room, pulled down my jeans, hooked me up to all manner of electrodes on my chest and legs, put me on an oxygen mask, slapped me on a stretcher, and dragged me half-trousered out to the dozens of my friends waiting in the hallway with a What the fuck, Pearce? look on their faces.
"Hey guys," I said, weakly. "Record-setter!"
℘
The cowboys in the University Hospital E.R. were practically reaching for the rib-spreader to do some exploratory surgery when my Mom showed up, took one look at me, and somehow just knew that it was only a panic attack. What a fucking disappointment.
I don't mean that literally. I mean, I'm glad that I wasn't dying, but I was royally pissed at having to feel disproportionately worried over something that was absolutely nothing. (P.S. -- what E.R. can't diagnose a panic attack? Don't go to the University hospital.)
Much later I decided to get my condition taken care of anyway just so I didn't have to think about it any more.
Getting surgery was a big decision for me, because I'd never been anesthetized before. It's just one of those philosophical things, that you're completely handing your life over to someone else, and if something goes wrong you'd never even know it-- you just don't wake up.
But heart surgery for WPW is a funny thing, because it's not really heart surgery-- at least not in classical medical definition. They actually don't go through your chest. What they do is stick a pair of tubes up your thighs at the place where they meet your pelvis, work the catheters up the veins to your heart, where they use tiny lasers to stimulate various parts of your heart to beat in order to "map" them. Then they burn tiny holes in the extra electrical pathway to stop electricity from passing through them anymore, just like you would with a circuit board. Your heart is really just a muscular circuit board anyway.
We got to the hospital in Kansas City real early, before seven in the morning, and they had me changed into a gown and got on me laid out on a stretcher pretty quickly. Before taking me to the Prep room the nurse was kind enough to ask me if I was all right before throwing a pack of plastic tubes and IV bags right onto my balls. Thanks, Nurse. Could you please throw some more things at my nads? No, I don't need anything else. Thanks. I'll see you in the OR.
On the upside, they give you a cocktail of Valium and something else, so I was riding pretty high by the time they wheeled me into the operating room. They'd stuck an empty IV in me by now, but I was still a Van Wilder in my mind, cracking jokes at all the surgeons and nurses. "Man!!" I said to them. "There are a lot of you guys!!!!" "Can we watch some football on that screen?!!!!" "This must be a pretty sweet job!!!!" Then without my noticing one of the green scrubs had plugged my IV in and I passed out immediately into a dreamless sleep.
℘
Woozy. Big lights. Big colorful screens all around. A big theatre of screens. I can see a map of a heart on a TV. That's my heart!
I could feel my heart beating, except it wasn't beating normally. I could feel it rapidly accelerating, stopping, accelerating in a different place, at a different speed. I realized that I had woken up in the middle of my heart surgery, though I was too doped up to care. It was like waking up in the middle of a hard nap on the couch and realizing that Jerry Springer was on TV but not really acknowledging its existence. Except Jerry Springer in this case was feeling them tinkering around inside my heart. Thank god for drugs.
DOCTOR, a huge booming voice said, THE PATIENT IS AWAKE.
And then I passed out again.
℘
They were wheeling me out of the O.R. and into an elevator when I came to again. The doctors seemed pretty fucking proud of themselves, so I guess it had gone well. My parents were there and the doctors were debriefing them.
"Why hello," the head surgeon said to me. "How are you feeling?"
"Urgh," I said.
"Yeah, he won't remember any of this," he said to my parents. "We've got him on some post-op stuff that has some amnesiac effects."
"Bah," I gurgled. "I remember everything! I'll remember this!"
And I did. Then they laughed, and I forgot everything that happened after that.
No comments:
Post a Comment