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fun with prescription beta blockers
Friday, June 7 2002This morning Gretchen went once again to the Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn Heights, this time to have her thyroid scanned by expensive radiological cameras. It's interesting how completely insensitive her doctors are to her sleep cycles. Her health and strength is always at its lowest in the morning, and she'd usually prefer to sleep in until 10am. But for some reason her endocrinologist has scheduled all her appointments for 9am sharp, even for the simplest of procedures.
Sometime after I'd walked Sally and started a load of laundry in the basement, I got a call from Gretchen. Now she was in Long Island College Hospital's emergency room, having passed out and vomited during one of her thyroid scans. It seems that the beta blockers her endocrinologist had prescribed for her had caused her blood pressure to drop precipitously, especially under the duress of finding her way to the hospital and suffering through so many procedures so early in the day. Now she was connected to an IV and receiving a liter of fluids. She wanted me to come and be with her.
So I took the subway, the first time I'd ridden on it in a week. It's easy to forget in my normal reclusive life that there's a whole inter-connected city here. These days, the only time I'm reminded of the potential of the subway system is when I'm walking along the forested ridge above Flatbush Avenue in Prospect Park and pass the IRT's massive air intake grate. That familiar smell immediately gives me nostalgia for the days back when I commuted to work and received a substantial paycheck.
When a nurse took me to her, I found Gretchen lying on a gurney in a sheltered nook of the emergency room, between a sleeping woman with a piss-filled catheter bag and someone with a burbling deathly-sounding cough. All around, the ER was abuzz with activity, though it wasn't the sort of excitement that would make for good television drama. No one was arriving with gunshot wounds to the head or severed limbs on ice; most of the people there where unphotogenic elderly patients with acute symptoms from chronic illnesses. But, as Gretchen was quick to point out, the chief difference between this ER and the sort depicted in such shows as ER was that the majority of the staff was foreign-born and from a wide variety of countries. Where was the WASPy chief surgeon with chiseled features and great bedside demeanor? Where was the perky blond nurse dispensing pills and collecting blood?
A rather long time after Gretchen had taken on her last drops of IV solution, her doctor signed her paperwork and unceremoniously released her from the emergency room. Now it was up to us to find our way back to the seventh floor of the adjacent building so the thyroid tests could be resumed. Strange though it may seem, Gretchen was forced to start all over again from the street because she'd passed out from weakness. This time, though, she had me to help her along. She did what she could to put the best face on her situation, because all she wanted to do was get the tests over with.
It amazed me how run-down and time-worn the equipment and furniture were on the radiology floor. The stool Gretchen sat on for her first scan was protruding a big loaf of foam rubber through its rotting vinyl upholstery. Then, in another room, all the equipment looked like it dated from the late 70s and was worn to a shiny patina on all the corners and controls. "I think this place is sort of a ghetto hospital," Gretchen observed.
One form of thyroid scan took four minutes per picture, so I went off to get some much-needed coffee.
For some reason I also decided to get myself a roast beef sandwich from a pile of pre-made, pre-boxed deli meals. But as I was buying it, I wondered if perhaps it was really a display model made entirely of plastic. It would be funny to put something seemingly edible down on the counter only to be told, "No, sir, that's the display model. It's not edible; it's made of plastic!" When I went to eat the sandwich, I found it so thoroughly bland that I couldn't continue with it, especially when I looked at the way the mayonnaise was poking out over the thin layers of beef. My mind drifted to thoughts of that Valley Proteins truck filled with bloated dairy cows. I had to throw the final third of it away in what for me was a rare orgy of wastefulness.
I went outside to drink my coffee and sat there watching various people waiting for their car services to pick them up. There was this one youngish black couple holding a congratulatory bouquet of helium balloons, one of which was metallic silver and bore the message "In the Lord all things are possible." I thought about that phrase for a moment and realized how truly nonsensical it was. Basically what it means is, "There are no fundamental rules governing the universe because, even if there were, God could break them if He wanted to." What separates modern people from medieval people is that, for the most part, modern people don't actually think this way. But, as I've written before, the great bulk of people in this world are basically medieval in their thinking and there are only a few "moderns" scattered throughout the population. Luckily for them, with a few exceptions, the medieval majority doesn't put much of a damper on scientific and artistic progress. Indeed, the medieval majority is more than willing to take advantage of the clever inventiveness of the scarce moderns embedded within it, even while scorning their philosophy and methods. Thus, while George W. Bush reportedly loves his Powerbook, he doubtlessly would have preferred if the designers of the seminal windows-based user interface had smoked a little less pot while developing their product, even if it meant his Powerbook worked a little less intuitively.
Upstairs, I found Gretchen was all done with her tests and her technician had determined that her thyroid was fine, that it was simply inflamed as a result of her mononucleosis infection. This had, of course, been our original theory, supported by Gretchen's brother and father (both of whom are medical doctors). Gretchen's endocrinologist, on the other hand, had condescendingly sneered at this idea as meddlesome rubbish. He'd taken one look at Gretchen's neck and diagnosed the only thyroid condition he is able to see: nascent goiter, going on to say that she would almost certainly need radiation therapy. Now, not only would she not be needing radiation therapy, but the beta blockers and the resulting emergency room visit had been completely unnecessary. Still, Gretchen will end up having to pay for them. As I pointed out later, incompetent doctors generate a lot more hospital business than competent doctors do.Tonight Gretchen was tooling around on the digital cable channels looking for something - anything - to watch among the hundreds of possibilities. She ended up watching this hilarious show on the "Much Music Channel" called Behind the Music that Sucks. The first segment she saw showcased the boy band N'sync and it was so good that Gretchen stuck around for more. I missed that part because I was out walking Sally, but when I returned I got to see a few other segments. They all looked as if they'd been authored in Flash or some other 2D Macromedia product. They featured simplistic cartoonish visuals with photos of various people's faces spliced in and animated in brief two-to-four frame loops. A segment about a hesher band called Irock was particularly hilarious in a Beavis and Butthead-by-way-of-South Park sort of way, especially the way one of the guys kept insulting the other by insinuating that he'd fucked his mother, making things clear with a gut-splittingly-funny two-frame pelvic-thrust pantomime.
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