1. Were you scared?
“Were you scared?” she asked.
It was 5:30 in the morning. We were driving home in the dark from the hospital.
“No,” I said.
This kind of thing has happened enough that it’s frankly not scary, anymore. It might be serious, but it’s not scary. When death comes knocking time after time, you eventually get used to it.
2. A mess on the floor
[Note: This section is a bit graphic.]
It was Saturday, and for some reason I got out of bed very early. I was moving around at 6:00 and outside before 7:00, before the oppressive heat set in.
And in the evening, I made the fatal mistake of drinking several glasses of iced tea with dinner. “What the heck,” I told myself, “it’s the weekend.”
Predictably, it was 2:00am before I finally made my way to the bedroom, brushed my teeth, threw my clothes in the hamper and did those other things you do before you go to bed. You know, those things that keep you from … um … getting up in the middle of the night.
As I stood there, what came out was, there’s just no gentle way to put this, a bloody mess. It looked as if a water balloon full of bright red paint had exploded before my eyes. All over the floor, all over the toilet, red paint everywhere. There was no pain, but it was quite a mess.
I stood for a moment, half in shock from the vibrant red and half in shock from the total absence of pain. I stood there and briefly considered cleaning it up and just dealing with it in the morning.
3. What Trudy said
“Trudy?” I said.
Remember, this was 2:00am. The fair and industrious Trudy has been sleeping for hours, being substantially less sensitive to caffeine than I am.
“Trudy?” I said again, slightly louder.
“Huh?”
She stumbled into the bathroom when I said there was something I wanted her to see. She didn’t exactly shriek, but it was close, and she did almost black out. Like I said, it was a shocking mess.
My feeble protestations about “What can the ER do that I can’t deal with on Monday?” were rejected out of hand.
I cleaned up the blood. We got dressed. And Trudy drove us to the hospital.
4. In the emergency room
The emergency room was empty when we parked. But as we were walking in, a woman with a slashed face arrived, and evidently other folks came in after us, because we sat and waited for a long time before they triaged me. And then we waited some more, while I lay shivering in a skimpy hospital gown in that ultra air conditioned place.
After quite some time, the doctor came into the room, apologizing sincerely for the flood of people that had arrived all of the sudden. She listened to my story about the blood on the floor and about my 1986 cancer and 2004 near-cancer and 2007 cancer. She scheduled me for a CT scan.
And so we waited some more, and I shivered some more even after the fair and industrious Trudy tracked down a heated blanket.
After the miracle of computers and graphics and electronics and some radiologist who I bet was on the other side of town, the scan came back negative. The doctor gave me some precautionary antibiotics and told me to see my urologist on Monday.
5. Afterword
In retrospect, my urologist conceded that we didn’t need to go to the emergency room that night, although I doubt that he would have been happy if I had called him that night to ask.
Two visits later, he doesn’t have anything alarming to say. There’s nothing in my blood that suggests anything has gone awry. The pee-in-a-cup sample didn’t show anything alarming, although he’ll send it in for more analysis. And the cytoscope showed nothing more than a varicose vein.
It’s probably that vein, he said. Probably the radiation and that vein.
Nothing else has happened since. No pain. No red paint. No nothing.
Come back in December, he said.
And that’s that.
