CHRISTMAS IN THE E.R.

I am appalled with myself (and apologetic toward anyone still checking on here) for this immense gap in my posting here. Perhaps the title of this post gives a hint of a reason (or perhaps it is merely an excuse).

About 10 days before Christmas, I came down with bronchitis. Not that unexpected -- Sabrina and Lee had both had mild colds, and I get bronchitis out of a cold every 2 or 3 years. It really wasn't too bad -- the first few days, I was able to keep symptoms at bay with just strong black tea and chicken soup. But I was trying to finish responding to producers' notes on a script, and Christmas was coming, so I put off the blogging.

Then the bronchitis got a bit worse. I started with over-the-counter meds. I'd feel better for a day -- then worse for two. Not a good pattern, you can see. But by now we were up to the weekend before Christmas, and I had a lot piling up --packages to mail, shop, wrap, present-exchanging to arrange and show up for. So who had time to be sick (or to post)? I just kept pushing myself, even though I was clearly not getting better. Worst was a nasty gut-wrenching cough.

Someone suggested I try Mucinex, which I had never tried. Okay, why not? Turns out it has the same active ingredients as Robitissin (expectorant and cough suppressant), but at four times the dosage. Wow. It sure worked -- in a sense. It made my coughing much more, um, productive, but also more violent. But also kept them under control enough so that I could keep going, so all was well.


But I wasn't getting better. Lee was concerned that I was heading for a bout of pneumonia, as I had had three-plus years ago. Sorry. I didn't have time for that (or for posting here, as I had just no extra
energy to spare).

So I made it to the day before Christmas, when I had a shopping/lunch date with a girlfriend. We're sitting happily at California Pizza Kitchen solving the problems of the world when I have to cough. 'Excuse me,' I manage to say --and proceed to cough --and suddenly am engulfed in so much pain I can't see my friend sitting across the table. Everything goes white and bright and all I am aware of is pain pain pain.

I didn't tell my friend what had happened, though I doubt the rest of my conversation made much sense. But I still wasn't done with my shopping. Other than new ski gear, I hadn't bought a single item of clothing for Sabrina and I still hadn't bought the kids their Christmas ornaments for the year. I was at a mall with two hours left to shop, and incredible price reductions going on all around me.

I couldn't do it. In fact, I could barely walk. I stumbled to the nearest store, grabbed the most pathetic ornaments I have ever given the kids, and called Lee just long enough to grunt out something like, "Pain. Hurt. Don't know what I did. Can't finish." And then, through some absolute miracle of God, somehow I drove home.

I have no idea what really happened at Christmas Eve services. I was there, but I was wholly focused on trying to breathe through the pain (and let me tell you, Lamaze breathing was really no more helpful than other was I'm childbirth). We went out to dinner with some good friends and their in-town-for-the-holidays family, and somehow I made it. And we stuttered through some of our Christmas Eve rituals -- we lit the last candle on our Advent wreath, and opened one present each. But we skipped Jesus' birthday cake.

Now, as I struggled to get to bed, I was getting worried. I could barely move my right arm in any direction without enough pain to make me scream (literally). And I couldn't cough. It hurt too much. And I knew how dangerous that would be. If I couldn't cough out all the yucky stuff piling up in my bronchial tubes, I would get pneumonia.


I was up most of the night, and Lee probably was, too. I was up enough for my mind to take a blessed mental inventory of my medicine chest. And when I finally dragged myself up in horrid pain in the morning (where my phenomenally patient kids had been waiting for 2 or 3 hours already, I dug waaaay in the back of an old basket of pill bottles, and found two lonely Vicodin. Who cares that they were over a year expired? They got me through Christmas morning with the pain muted down to a dull roar.

And that's how I ended up at the emergency room on Christmas Day. When I came in complaining of shortness of breath and back pain, boy, did I get seen right away. It was only as I realized that they were rushing to get me an EKG and asking all kinds of questions that I realized they were checking to see if I was having a heart attack. Of course I wasn't, but I do recommend those complaints if you want to be seen quickly in an E.R. (It wasn't crowded; I wasn't keeping anyone from being seen who should have gone first.)

Everyone was incredibly nice. My doctor was a handsome young man in his 20s who reminded me of our friend Ocean up in Seattle (also a doctor). My nurse, Mike, rushed on every time I coughed to see if I'd brought up anything interesting. And after a breathing treatment with a nebulizer and a nice portable X-ray, they told me I did not have pneumonia --but that I did have a fractured rib.

I guess I don't know the power of my own coughing.


So they loaded me up with Vicodin (to blunt the pain of that rib and make it possible to do things like cough and sleep) and an inhaler (because the type of bronchitis I have is "asthmatic bronchitis" in which it's harder to breathe out than in, and because I told them I was headed for an altitude of 7000 feet, where there would be considerably less oxygen to breathe in the first place), and Prednisone (because I apparently I also had a touch of pleurisy, a disease which seems much too Dickensian to exist in 2008, but which is ultimately just an inflammation around the lungs).


And off we went to the mountains, so I could sit and read, and drive everyone else to the ski slopes, and play with my new iPhone, and cook, and take my meds, and recuperate.

Oh, and actually, finally, perhaps unbelievably, post on this blog after an unheard-of almost-three-week gap.

I'm back. Sorry for the delay. More to come now.

And let's hear it for Vicodin.