In the summer, it would have been later afternoon, but then none of this would have happened. About 4:45, I set off with my dog Buddy to walk around the next block. Walking around the next block adds up to about 1.3 miles; the block next to mine is really big. In December, night has already fallen by quarter to 5 and it was enhanced by the beginnings of a snowstorm which was laying tendrils of slightly lighter snow over the black ice.
My dog and I were starting up the hill. I was making an effort to avoid the patches of ice which had formed during a 1-day melt and frozen suddenly when then temperatures plummeted during the past day. Buddy wasn't quite so adept. Once he scrambled with all 4 legs trying to get traction on a larger patch of ice which allowed for no traction. I laughed at him and said, "See? That's why I told you to walk slowly!"
As I began to rouse up, I was surprised by the verisimilitude of the dream. Even I seldom have dreams this vivid, I said to myself as my conscious mind began to pick out some of the features and voices going around in my head. "Can you hear me?" asked one of the voices. "We're Green Bay firemen." I wasn't too surprised to be dreaming about a rescue squad, my parents' last years having been on my mind for days, although it did seem a bit odd for me to be taking the role of the patient in a rescue squad dream.
Then the needle stick. Wait … people don't dream the pain of a needle stick. Could this possibly be really happening? No, it's a dream. You aren't even fully awake yet. Reality happens when you are awake; when you are asleep, events are dreams. Everyone knows that.
"What hospital do you want to go to?"
"What are my choices?" I said. I know the hospitals in reality, but who can predict what is available in a dream? Besides, I was too sleepy to remember the real hospitals' names.
"We'll take you to St. Vincent's. Is that alright?" Sure. I know them. I even used to work there. I wonder if anybody I know is still there?
After arriving at the hospital, and being moved out of the truck into a trauma room, the firemen were joined by trauma nurses, an ER doc, and the Animal Control Officer. She introduced herself and asked me, "What do you want us to do with your puppy? Is there a friend or a neighbor who can take him?"
This is when I realized that I had really gone out without either my wallet or my cell phone. All the addresses and phone numbers which I had so carefully arranged for easy use in the unlikely case of an emergency were, in the actual reality, useless at home.
Fortunately, I know Travis' address by heart. Later I learned that the humane officer had driven Buddy to Travis' house (prompting him to wonder what his dog had done). The real miracle of this story may be that Travis was at home when Buddy came. Not only was Buddy welcomed into the house, but Travis himself came over to the hospital.
"Is this just a friend?" asked a nurse.
"He is … my pretend nephew," I equivocated. My brain may not have been working at 100% effectiveness, but I know why the question is asked and I wanted to give an answer which would insure that they wouldn't try to kick him out.
In retrospect, the medical staff must have been worried about my condition. They never left me alone, which they regularly did with my father when he was old and in distress. (I always felt as though the ER staff would decide that he wasn't going to die in the next hour and so it was acceptable to leave him alone. Based on that impression, my ex post facto conclusion would be that they were still wondering whether I would die in the next hour.)
Meanwhile, the ER doc ordered a computed tomography scan of my head and neck, an obvious and important step. Finding little evidence of severe trauma in the CT, he began to lose interest.
Soon enough, the hospitalist arrived, followed by a very small entourage. Now elevated to the status of attending physician, the hospitalist asked me all of the same questions which the ER doc had previously asked, reached the same conclusion, and proceded to order a bed for me for the night.
After all this, they took me upstairs to a room and slid me into the bed. I asked, "Where am I?" They replied with some generality about 4th floor. "No, I mean which part of the floor? What do those windows look out onto?" Apparently they were unprepared for the question in that form, for there was a bit of hesitation. In actual reality, the windows look out over the Fox River and beyond to the west side of town whence I had just come.
Travis left, my cousin called and the local minister came and talked and left. You may think that is just a list of events, but it is actually cause and effect. These other people were able to get involved because Travis left, went to my house, found my phone, and made the calls.
And so I settled in for a long night. "I may just leave the TV on," I said presciently; "I probably won't get much sleep tonight." I really am good at forecasting the future. When you are actually injured, the time doesn't pass quite so slowly as when you could otherwise be active. I think that so much of my available resources were committed to healing my brain that little was left to track the passage of time. Besides, I did doze occasionally.
It isn't as though they were treating me for anything, so that I could measure time from treatment to treatment. Being an observation patient means that you could just as well be at home in your own bed, except that a trained professional is down the hall treating somebody else. The trained professionals didn't observe most of what was happening, however. Lying in the hospital bed with nothing to distract me I was aware of everything from the growling in my bowels through a slightly stiff neck to the development and resolution of a light fever (presumably in reaction to the trauma).
When morning came another CT scan came with it. If you can't treat a problem, you can at least repeat the diagnosistics. After returning to the room, the nurse and I were discussing my lack of symptoms (no headache, no nausea, and so on) when the hospitalist swept in with his minor entourage.
"Do you have any dizziness, headache, or nausea?" he asked.
"I was just talking about that with the nurse," I said.
"But I'm the one that counts," replied the hospitalist.
"No, " said I, quickly, finger pointed, "I am the one who counts." Then I left ever so slight a hesitation before I added, "You can help." His shrug told me that he knew he didn't have a leg to stand on and would accept the sop I left him. But he did delay my departure until after lunch – with the obvious and well-attested purpose of making sure that a real meal would not unsettle me.
So after lunch it was … about 3 hours after … before the hospitalist's Nurse Practitioner returned along with the third member of the entourage. She introduced herself this time and asked the same questions as before.
"I know who you are," I said, "but who is this?"
"This is Shane," she said. "He's a 4th-year nursing student from Oshkosh who is following me around for a few days."
"Then you've probably had every disease known," I suggested to Shane.
"No, that hasn't happened yet," he said. So I began to tell him about my reading in Science, in the past week just before The Fall, and how I found that I was suffering (serially) from necrotizing bacteria, extremely drug resistant staph, and widely resistent TB. "Oh," he said then, "that's happened to me."
"Shane seems to have a lack of confidence," I remarked to the NP.
"That'll all change when I graduate," he said. "Then I'll have all the confidence in the world."
"No," I countered. "You'll always have a lack of confidence. If you get to be too confident, you'll be useless. Maybe you could help with an immunization clinic (and keep your license) but not do real nursing." This, or something else, must have been accepted as sufficient evidence for my continuing rationality as I was allowed to leave for home, though not without further delays for paperwork.
They also had to arrange for a transport aide with a wheelchair. While they were confident enough that I would remain safe walking around my own house with no medical support available to me, they were uncomfortable allowing me to walk through the front doors of the hospital using those same abilities.
Never mind. No sooner was I physically across their threshold than I was also on my feet and walking to the waiting vehicle. And then to home.