The care and feeding of an ailing columnist...
By Betty Lukas
PV News
Jul 1, 2015
Most travelers open their mail as soon as they return home from a holiday.
I went to urgent care.
The first doctor prescribed a pain killer and laxative for my lower back pain. I didn’t like those results, so the next day I went to another urgent care. That doctor prescribed a muscle relaxant. By Friday, I was unable to drive myself, so my neighbor brought me to the urgent care that prescribed the muscle relaxant.
After a thorough exam, x-rays and conversations with the nurse practitioner, I was advised to visit a hospital emergency room immediately.
Within minutes, two handsome paramedics (aren’t they always handsome?) swept me up in their sleek, red ambulance to the Providence Little Company of Mary Medical Center, as I had requested.
I waited in an ER room for two hours when the inevitable IV was inserted and a beautiful Korean-American nurse, newly arrived from St. Louis, monitored my every moment on the nearby computer. The ER physician stopped by, looked at the computer, looked at me, smiled and — without hesitation — diagnosed pneumonia. Within an hour, I was moved to a fourth-floor room.
The neighbor who had remained with me through all during the two-hour ER procedures was replaced by my daughter, who had driven more than an hour to reach my side.
The fourth-floor room proved to be another dimension where I was sustained and nourished by strangers with precise instructions for care. Their constant presence upheld me as I floated in a space where time for me did not exist.
During those five days at Little Company of Mary, I was in the hands of more then 80 specialists, from housekeepers to lab technicians to doctors to nurses to gurney couriers, who guided my fragile frame from test to ominous test in foreboding surroundings, dominated by frowning machines. (Please introduce some watercolors to these walls).
It is nearly impossible to discuss the advances of modern medicine without falling into the snake pit of clichés. Most of us, I think, surrender to trust, because the vocabularies of science are foreign languages.
I am now recovering at home with lots of tender loving care, a universal language. But all those strangers who tended to me for those five days in another world made coming home possible.
Even now, with all the complexities of my current life, I have been chasing a rebellious herd of words around the room, trying to corral a meaningful close for this column. Maybe I can’t quite do it yet because I’m not yet done. Stay tuned.
Thanks to my three “Boswells,” children Brian, Herb, and Maria. This column, in large part, contains inner musings I dictated early in my recovery. But I put it all together.
Betty Lukas is a freelance writer, a former award-winning writer for the Palos Verdes Peninsula News and Los Angeles Times, and regular contributor to the News.