Days of Wine and Roses, and Vasectomies

2006. Scrupulously had I followed my doctor’s advice to get a lot of Vitamin C to ward off more kidney stones, since they first hit in 1982, so when the uncomfortable sensations started early that Thursday morning, I thought, oh boy, this can’t be kidney stones again, but it might be appendicitis. Within 10 minutes it was clear I had to get to the hospital.

Laurel Regional is only minutes away, and we pulled up to the curb by the ER entrance. I told my wife I could make it inside on my own, while she parked the van, and I did make it, too, all the way to an uncomfortable chair by the triage nurse’s desk. Fortunately for me there were no other patients waiting, because I was now sweating buckets as the pain got steadily worse. The nurse asked me for my insurance card, on which my name is printed in big black letters, but for some reason I also had to fish out my driver’s license—maybe so she could determine the color of my eyes, which were closed pretty tight by this time.

“Now, Mr. Carnation, I can see you are in pain, and I am trying to help you. Am I pronouncing your name right?”

“Yeh—no—it’s Carna—oh man,” I replied, and that was the last normal thing I said for many hours. I was able to ((—form sentences in my mind—)), but the waves of pain and nausea kept me from getting much out except gurgles and moans.

“Carrigan? Callowell? Umm …”

((—IT’S ALMOST FREAKING PHONETIC—CARNAHAN!!—)) “Urk …”

“Oh well! Is this your date of birth, March 19, 1952?”

“Yehkk—”

“And how old are you today, sir?”

((—DO THE MATH!!!—)) “Fiff-thrAAAAA!!”

“He’s 53! Why don’t you have a gurney out here for him?” My wife had now arrived at the desk, just as I had decided it was lie-down-or-fall-down for me.

“Who are you, ma’am?” the triage nurse asked.

“I’m his wife and, oh great, now he’s on the floor! Is there anyone else here?”

“Ma’am, you’ll have to step back and let us work. Someone should be here shortly.”

“SHOULD BE?? You have to get him in there now!! We don’t even know what’s wrong with him!”

“Ma’am, you will not have that attitude with ME,” the nurse warned. The gurney then arrived, pushed by two nurses, who both went over to review the paperwork on the desk, while I lay thrashing in the Dixie cups on the floor.

“OK,” wife insisted, “there’s the gurney, get him in there, and I’m going in, too.”

“BLAAAAAAA!!” (That was me.)

“No, you’re not, and I will not hesitate to call security if your behavior does not improve right now,” the nurse continued.

“Fine! Call security, and we’ll let the lawyers sort it out later! I’m done talking to you, and I AM going in there with my husband!”

At that point I got myself up and flopped onto the gurney, if only to keep from being stepped on by the crazy persons. I was then duly whisked into the ward, but some orderlies, attracted by the noise, gang-tackled my wife and kept her out in the waiting room. The doctors got me hooked up to some machines, determined very quickly I was not cardio, and then started a Phenergan IV. Ladies and gentlemen, that is one hell of a potent recreational drug—it must have a morphine base, because the pain dropped off the table and I spun into outer space. I still couldn’t say anything, but I definitely did not care.

Some time later I realized that my wife was there, and then I saw a younger woman at the foot of the bed whom I did not recognize. Just as I realized it was our daughter April I did get out a sentence, but it was right out of “Lord of the Rings”: “I know your face—my body is broken.” These of course were the words of the mortally-wounded King Theoden, as his young niece Eowyn discovered him lying under a dead dragon or something on the battlefield at Pelennor.

About seven identical kindly doctors then appeared and informed me in unison that I did in fact have kidney stones, and they described what I was in for—the screaming, the bloody urine, the whole catastrophe. I tried manfully then to channel Boromir, but was unable to reproduce his comment about the One Ring: “‘Tis a strange fate that so much fear and doubt should be caused by so small a thing.”

Every so often I came around to find myself in a different place—in the X-ray department, inside an MRI machine, and briefly, so I thought, the Manhattan Medical Center in 1970 with George C. Scott and Diana Rigg. Then they gave me some Percoset and kicked me out about noon. The Percoset was almost as much fun as the Phenergan, and I had numerous shadowy visitors on old Montgomery St. for the rest of the day, some of them real. Every time I surfaced, my faithful wife was there with a big glass of water to say, “Here, drink this, fool.”

I thought I would be out of it through the weekend, but upon awakening Friday I felt perfectly OK. I did manage to catch some tiny red specks in my sieve, so I think the “phlebolith,” so called, must have broken up before getting to the really sticky wicket. When April came over to check on me that morning, she was astonished to find me on a ladder painting the ceiling—but that really only added to my legend…