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ROLLING STONES 6/11/2011 8:11:38 AM
Vance Packard once wrote a short story about his father, and in the story a doctor, due to some medical necessity, thrust a tube up the old man’s penis and his bladder exploded. The story was part of an anthology some well-intentioned relative had given me for my fifteenth birthday, and it scared the hell out of me.
In the middle of a spring night back in the Dark Ages of 1970, I awoke with an excruciating back pain. I staggered to the bathroom and relieved myself of about nine gallons of red, raw blood. I immediately called Barry Fenton, my close friend and physician
“Sounds to me like you popped a kidney stone,” he mumbled, groggily. “Go to the ER at Highland, and I’ll see you tomorrow.” With that, he hung up; I assume he went back to sleep.
Living alone in a rather forlorn apartment in those days, I got dressed and drove myself to the hospital, glad that I had a doctor-friend like Fenton I could call at 3:15 AM. Barry and his wife had been close with my fiancé and me for a long time.
Highland Hospital, it turned out, was either experiencing SRO sick people or it was going through a general renovation. They finally put me to bed on a gurney in the corridor near the Check-In Desk. An attending physician examined me with other patients looking on and said, “Looks to me like you popped a kidney stone.”
When they finally found a room for me, a nurse who looked like Dick Butkus in drag said an X-ray was called for. They injected me with some sort of dye and wheeled me eight miles down a narrow hallway to the X-ray department. I was placed on a cold flat table that was attached to a motor that tilted the slab in all directions while they spent the next six hours taking five thousand pictures — when they finished, I was ready for my Circ du Soliel audition (if it had been in existence in 1970.)
“Looks to me,” the radiologist said, “like you popped a kidney stone.”
Well-fortified with morphine and convinced I could defeat Mohamed Ali in under one round, I waited in my cubicle for Barry Fenton to show up. Promptly at noon, he walked in wearing a pith helmet, horn-rimmed sunglasses and bent over like Groucho Marx, singing, “My name is Captain Spaulding, I’m an African explorer, please don’t call me Schnoorer! — Hello! Hello! Hello!”
I ignored his irascible bedside manner. “You see my X-rays?” I asked.
“Sure did. Looks to me like you popped a kidney stone.”
“Whadda I do now?”
“Pass it. And save it if you can.”
“How?” I asked.
“Pee through a Kleenex.” Barry took a seat on the only stool in my room. I noticed he was wearing khaki jodhpurs and black puttees. “What you gotta do is drink a lot of water.”
“How much?”
“I dunno. Two or three barrels outta do it. Tell you what.” He leaned forward and assumed his conspiratorial posture, both hands on his knees.
“As a doctor, I can only tell you to drink fifty-three quarts of water. I cannot even suggest you polish off three six-packs of Jenny Cream Ale, as that would be contrary to my oath and the laws of New York State.”
“This ‘passing’ stuff — will it hurt?”
“Only if you sneeze when you pee.”
“Can I get some more morphine?”
“No. How much do you want?”
I was discharged from Highland at about two o’clock, and I found my car right where I’d left it at 4 AM. The ticket beneath the windshield wiper said I could mail in the fine of $120. My goal now, however, was Wegman’s Super Market and a case of Genesee Cream Ale. I made it only to the edge of the parking lot — when I REALLY had to go!
Slamming the gear into “P” (a nasty omen,) I jumped out and raced into the hospital’s public rest room. I grabbed a paper hand towel from the dispenser, unzipped, and let the rain forest of Padesqè Dai begin. Ahhh!
Three short seconds, then — Bingo! Bango! Bongo! — there it was! The stone was larger than a golf ball; my first thought was to have it mounted as a tie tack (actually, it was smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.)
All pain — if there was any left — was instantly gone. I felt like the proverbial million bucks.
Barry put me on allopurinol, and I was faithful to it for a full year. “I never want to go through that again!” I told him. “You probably won’t,” he told me. “If you do, though, don’t call me until 10 AM.”
Fast forward to Springtime 2011. Barry Fenton, his age compatible with mine, is now long retired, if he’s still among us. He probably lives in Western New York or Florida, and I now reside in Georgia. Sadly, we no longer keep in touch, although I used him as a model for a character in my novel, ADIOS, GREAT WALL.
And yet . . . I almost called him in the middle of the night last April. Seems I had a terrible backache and relieved myself of twelve gallons of red, raw blood; my fiancé (now my wife of 38 years) drove me to the North Fulton Hospital ER in Roswell. The attending physician who looked like Martin Sheen examined me within two minutes.
“Looks to me like you popped a kidney stone,” he said.
Because this was 2011, I remembered a piece in the NY Times by Maureen Dowd in which she stated for a certainty that her brother had died of multiple infections allegedly acquired while a patient in a major hospital.
“Would you mind removing your tie?” I asked Dr. Sheen.
Ms. Dowd’s article had said, “A 2004 study of New York City doctors . . . discovered that their ties were contagious with at least one type of infectious microbe. . . .The British National health system initiated a “bare below the elbow” dress code barring ties, lab coats, jewelry on the hands and wrists, as well as long fingernails. . . .The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta say that health care workers, even doctors and nurses, have a “poor” record of obeying simple hand-washing rules. . . .A report in Health Affairs indicated that “one out of every three patients suffer a [disastrous illness] during a hospital stay.”
The attending did not remove his tie, but then neither did I succumb to some obtuse disease. In fact, I recovered quite nicely, proud of myself that I had sufficient courage to overcome the errant kidney stone and assert my prerogative by demanding, as Ms. Dowd says she was instructed by CNN’s senior medical correspondent, Elizabeth Cohen, that “doctors and nurses . . . wash their hands” if they haven’t.
Cohen went on to say, according to Ms. Dowd, “You’ve got to get over the waiter spitting in your soup scenario, that medical professionals will somehow avenge themselves, by giving less attention, if you insult them. There are all sorts of reasons we default to [silence],” she said. “It is general etiquette not to correct another adult, especially when this is their profession. But when the consequences are so grave, you have to summon up your courage.”
You could, as I did, say that you just popped a kidney stone, and ask if they could please just indulge you. At my son-in-law’s recent graduation, I recall hearing freshly minted Dr. Phillip Faucette, DDS, swear that he “would do no harm” in the care of his patients.
He’d better not — even if it means removing his tie.
