Friday: February 17, 2012 (Part Two)

I tried to fill the time as best I could but grew impatient as I sat on my hospital bed awaiting my final instructions and my departure from the Clinic.

Finally, just after 3 p.m., they freed me. The nurses allowed me to walk on my own, sans wheelchair, to the hospital lobby to wait for a friend of Mary Lou's to pick me up.

I found the ride down the elevator discomforting. I started to feel worse when I sat in a chair in the cavernous atrium. My chest felt tight and it became difficult to breathe.

I'm not having a heart attack? The nurses were concerned earlier when, still attached to the monitor, my heart rate spiked as I dressed for the trip home. I assured them I was fine. Now? I'm not so sure.

I felt frightened. My hospital room had become my bright, warm and safe place. It was time to return to the big bad world and I wasn't sure I was ready.

  

Mary Lou’s friend pulled her car to the curb. I reminded myself to breathe and got in.

  

Heavy traffic on Euclid Avenue made for slow going. The conversation turned to levels of medical care. As the wife of a doctor, she said she said she receives more attentive treatment. She laughed at my assertion that I'd been getting the same care as everyone else even though the doctors and nurses knew I was writing about my experience and would be making a film as well.

   

This is a touchy and strange subject for me, the journalist.  Ethically and morally, a journalist cannot accept anything that someone else is not entitled to. I refuse to believe that the folks at the Clinic treated me any differently because I'm a reporter. Everyone, from the surgeons to the folks who cleaned my room (and didn't know who the hell I was), struck me as genuinely kind and compassionate people.

It was not until later that I realized I should have the woman this question: Does your husband treat patients differently because of who they are?

      

I concede that medicine is not rationed fairly. There are winners and losers. When I told a nurse I was trying to be the most compliant patient ever, she said: “Not everyone can afford to be compliant.”

Adequate medical insurance has given me a chance. Who knows what kind of bill the Clinic will create for this past week? Big money, I'm certain. Yet Mary Lou and I will be obligated to pay a few thousand dollars at most.

  

If I were living in Kazakhstan or Nicaragua or some other Third World backwater, my disease would be a guaranteed death sentence. Here I have a chance.

Life is not fair and there's not any fucking thing I can do about it, so give me all of that expensive medicine and make me well. Make me well.