Frequent Flyer

Frequent Flyer
I wake up sweating and shaking with the worst headache of my life. I race to the bathroom to throw up. My peripheral vision is blurry. I look in the mirror and in a tunnel I see my short brown hair sticking up like a scared chicken, mascara smeared under my dark eyes, my lips are a straight, faded pink line. I pull out my diabetic monitoring kit and discover that my blood sugar levels are three times what they should be. My endocrinologist on call says I need to go to the ER to be "evaluated." I pull on dirty sweat pants, a T-shirt, and sneakers without socks. I drive myself to the hospital so my husband can watch the kids. I am going to the hospital for the 18th time this year.
I wait longer and longer to be seen each time I go. Like the proverbial boy who cried wolf, they are not going to take me seriously. I know this, but still I go. Finally, after a five-hour wait, like at the neighborhood deli counter, my name is called and they ask what I need. I visit so often that they all know me by my first name - the receptionists, the triage nurses, the doctors, the x-ray techs, the transporters - even the janitors.
"What is it this time, Janet?" They ask. "Abdominal pain?" I'm aware of the shifty looks. I'm aware that they think I'm slightly insane.
"No," I tell them, sighing heavily. "Blood sugars, elevated."
I have several chronic illnesses yet the doctors aren't sure why I can't stay well, why I can't just stay at home. I take a combination of 15 pills and injections to keep my mind and body working properly. And yet I've come to be known as the resident sickie. They pray for me in my small New England town, at my little church, at the women's bible study. In my hometown of Texas, my mother's prayer group also has me on their list. I spend a lot of time explaining to my children the difference between "chronic" and "terminal." I worry about my health, and this, I know, worries my kids.
Perhaps it's genetic - my father has a cabinet containing at least 24 herbal supplements; there's more in the fridge and a few dark bottles of colloidal silver shelved in the garage that he made and bottled himself. Luckily, he hasn't turned blue.
When my son was four, he would fake chest pains and my daughter can easily become ill at the mere mention of a viral infection. A few years ago, I had a broken left leg after falling down the stairs at my mother-in-law's house. I mention this because when I had a cast on my leg, I noticed something odd. As I dropped my healthy and uninjured children off at school, they both began limping on their left leg. It's sad but true: my children, myself, my father - we all tend to be over-concerned with our health.
My father is an accountant by trade, but in his spare time, he has always tinkered with mechanical things. Nowadays, he tinkers with his body parts. The same father who once refused to take me to the hospital for two weeks (as a child) because he was sure my broken ankle was a mere sprain, now insists on having his colonoscopy repeated because he is certain that the doctors have missed a section of his colon that is possibly riddled with cancer.
Not that I blame him. He has reason to be worried: It took more than a dozen infections to prompt doctors to test his blood for prostate cancer, and when that test came back negative twice, it took my father's urging to convince them to do a biopsy, where, lo and behold, they found the cancer. Yes, my father, whom I don't recall ever taking a sick day in his life, who jogs or walks daily, meditates, eats mostly veggies and fish, was diagnosed four summers ago with prostate cancer and then two years ago suffered a heart attack. The reason, though, that I understand him and his hypochondriac ways, probably has little to do with real empathy and more to do with the fact that I have been "frequent flyer" in the medical community myself.
But I have a real medical need each and every time I make my way to the hospital through snow and ice, through traffic and rain, despite my husband's huffs and sighs and my children's pleas for me to stay home and tuck them into bed. It's almost like a magnetic pull, this force that gets me to the healing place.
And so the process begins. The triage nurse takes my blood pressure and temperature while pretending she doesn't know who I am. I lie on the gurney, the bleached and starched white sheets scratch and claw at my bare back - the part that isn't covered by the clown-like gown. I don't complain. I tell the assistant that I'm fine when he offers me a warm blanket. I tell him the room temperature is ideal. No, I don't need a pillow, I say. "Perfectly comfortable." I give him my best grin-while-in-pain look. He doesn't notice that my eyes are a little too wide. That my voice is shaking.
Another nurse comes in to start an IV and I point to the only vein visible in my left arm. In a way, the pain from the needle being inserted and snaked up my vein feels good. It gives me focus; something to ponder other than the fact that I am, again, in the hospital. I don't like being in the hospital, not really. But I need to be here, too.
The nurse has me sign off on my medical history, which blinks red on the computer and shows that I have been seen in recent weeks for the diabetes complications, celiac disease, interstitial cystitis, and a bad back sprain acquired at Disney World. She raises one eyebrow, asking again why I am at the hospital. Like most of them, she thinks I'm here for pain medicine. I imagine a big red stamp on my chart warning them against me, marking me as "difficult" or as "patient-seeking-drugs." But then, as is usual, she simply wants to know what celiac disease is, and (frustratingly) wants to know how to spell it.
She begins making small talk. She jabbers on about how she could never give up bread if she were diagnosed with the disease.
"What? You can't eat bread? You can't have bagels?"
Yep, I, too, was sure I would starve to death when I first heard that this removal of all glutens from the diet was the only treatment for the disease that destroys the lining of a person's intestines. Keep eating wheat proteins and you become malnourished at best and end up with lymphoma and brain ataxia at worst.
Of course the damaged intestines repair themselves over time, I tell her. But it's a tricky diet to adhere to and celiacs must stick to it for life. When I was first diagnosed, I was afraid to eat anything. All day long, gluten loomed at me from dark corners. At night, I dreamt of bagels.
When we are little kids, we are taught that health professionals are there to help us; these days few doctors actually help. There is no "auto-immunologist" to which I can turn. And most nurses who aren't GI specialists are clueless.
I begin to realize that to have a chronic illness means that there is no cure. I will not be cured. I must learn to live with some amount of pain and illness. I must learn to stay at home and cope. Unfortunately, I'm a wimp. When I begin to throw up blood, I panic and feel the need to go to the hospital for help.
But no matter the reason for my appearance at the ER on any given day, the doctors and nurses who treat me know me so well that they think it is a laugh riot when they see me coming.
"You should get a job here," they say, perhaps trying to lighten the mood with their attempt at dry wit. "We should put your name on a plaque over the bed!"
These people bother me, but I don't let it show. The cold-hearted ones really get to me, though, and I have to concentrate to hold back the tears filling the rim of my eyes. The worst thing would be to let on that I'm not the perfect patient.
Once a doctor yells at me for "taking up space" in his ER when I have only a "mild case" of diabetic ketoacidosis. Another day, I'm scolded for being there after only throwing up blood once. Most days, the nurses are so determined to find a proper vein for an IV that they stick me at least seven times, leaving hematomas as big as grape tomatoes on both hands.
The last two times I am hospitalized, the doctors call a psychiatrist and a social worker in, to find out what's so obviously wrong at home that I would rather spend my abundant free time in the hospital. They enter the hospital room and approach me cautiously. Their white shoes squeak on the dingy tile floor.
"Mrs. Doggett ..." They say in a slow and quiet voice. "Is everything alright?"
"Uh, yeah."
"Is everyone treating you okay? Do you want to talk about why you are really here?"
No, I don't want to talk about it. I just want to get better. No, my husband doesn't beat me. My kids are stressful but they are not the reason I go to the hospital.
I don't tell the professionals this, but the truth is I need the hospital. I need it like one needs a drug or one more potato chip or a drag of a cigarette.
I'm addicted. And each time it takes more to get that high, that exquisite cared for feeling. I need more tests, more doctors, more invasive procedures. And too, I want to be the good patient; the patient, patient who never complains despite all those needle sticks. I want each and every one of the doctor's and nurse's approval. I hunger for it like a forbidden love.
"She's such a good patient," I sometimes imagine them saying to one another. "Never complains, that one."
I want to wear my Band-Aids and gauze like war wounds. You see, I feel like I've been through the war, but there are no signs of it. When someone sees me, they are not seeing all of me, just the pretty outer casing, although it's not so pretty anymore.
When I turned 40, I just felt different. I woke up that day and my hair started coming out in the shower. I looked in the mirror and saw tiny parts of a pink shiny scalp showing through on top and a few slick silver hairs sprouting from the front. My bones cried out to me in the morning with each step. I started noticing permanent half moons under each eye. My butt had fallen and was flatter, and my stomach was bulging. For the first time in a long time, the picture I saw in the mirror didn't match who I saw in my mind's eye. Where had I gone? I noticed that I looked more like a Dr. Seuss character than myself. I was a Sneech! I was beginning a descent into some kind of middle-aged hell.
Before I was married and had children of my own, I had only been to the hospital twice as a kid when I banged my head and required a few stitches. It happened first when I was six years old. My dad used to play softball and he would take me to the games. It had rained one morning and the ground and bleachers were slick but that didn't stop me from running up and down them, and then I ran straight up and off the back. One of my dad's teammates saw me first - or heard my head hit the concrete. I only remember the blood. I remember seeing the oxygenated scarlet red of it mixing with the muddy, orange-red of the dirt next to the sidewalk by the ball field where I fell. My father, in his calm way, swooped me up one-handed and dropped me in the basket on the front of his bicycle to pedal me down the street to the emergency room. It was scary and thrilling and lovely in a strange way, at the end of the day, to be noticed and to be cared for so. It was not an experience I often had, being the middle-child, sandwiched in between my two demanding brothers. That is one of the few times in my life that I can recall my mother and my father holding me in their arms on the couch, just sitting there. Holding me.
The second time, I was nine years old and at Girl Scout camp. It was the first day, just after check-in, and I was sitting in my cabin on my unmade bed, talking to my best friend from down the street who ended up being in my same cabin. Laura Lee told me a joke, and although I don't remember it now, it must have been hilarious because I laughed so hard I nearly knocked myself out on the cinderblock wall by my bed. As I was holding the back of my head and moaning, Laura Lee came over and said, "Let me see it." She peeled my hands from the back of my head and the blood shot all over her face and white T-shirt. She began screaming, and I was laughing again as the counselors came running in to attend to Laura Lee. Once we cleared up the confusion and after I was taken by ambulance to the Hill Country hospital, the counselors asked me if I wanted to go home.
"What, and give up all this?" I thought as I sat there eating ice cream and answering questions from dozens of curious admirers.

I had children the moment I was married - well, almost. I was married at 28 and soon after I discovered that I needed fertility treatments. We saw a specialist and I was pregnant by our first anniversary.
However, both pregnancies were the stuff of nightmares. I was in and out of the hospital with pre-term labor, gestational diabetes and the like. I delivered both babies early via emergency C-sections with my doctor shouting, "Time to sharpen the knife."
Perhaps due to the stress following my two pregnancies, my body began to plunge into disarray. The doctors now think that the strain of the pregnancies set off a series of auto-immune type disorders. Searing bone pain, restless legs, trouble breathing, pancreatic cysts, diabetic complications - these were only a few of the many crisis I began experiencing. I ended up with a roadmap of stretch marks covering my abdomen.
The marks have faded a decade later like so many trials I have faced. I trace them with my finger and remember that sometimes markings are something to be proud of. They are, after all, evidence that we have passed by. They are signs we leave behind on our journey from the past to the future.
Nowadays, I categorize my days into good and bad. On the bad ones, I faint and the ambulance comes. The first time this happens, it is fall and the kids are at school. Five burly men - local paramedics and firefighters - burst through the front door of our home kicking with them dirt and a few orange and yellow-tinted leaves. One begins taking my blood pressure while another one monitors my blood sugars. A third asks me questions about my medical past. My brain feels like it is slugging through wet cotton as I try and answer.
Eventually, the paramedics wrap me up like a papoose and load me into the back of the ambulance and drive helter-skelter to the hospital five minutes away, the siren signaling to everyone that inside lies an emergency. Someone important, someone needing critical care. I imagine cars slowing down, pulling over. People inside their cars say silent prayers as I pass.
When we arrive, I am immediately whisked into the innards of the hospital and nurses and doctors descend upon me like leeches to a wound, asking questions, listening to my chest, taking my pulse. They don't make jokes. They keep me in the hospital overnight for observation. I'm treated like royalty.

My therapist has me count the weeks between hospital visits.
"You made it six weeks last time; let's try for seven this time," she says.
"If your blood sugars become elevated, stay calm. Drink water. Take more insulin. Rest," she reminds me. "If you accidentally eat something with gluten in it, try not to panic. Take your medicine. Drink water. Stay calm. Call your doctor."
The next week, I get a shot of steroids in my back to help dull the pain of the sprain. That day, my blood sugars spike to near 500 (normal levels are around 100). I stay calm. I drink water. I call my doctor. My doctor, though, tells me to double the amount of insulin I'm taking. He says things will be all right as long as I'm not throwing up. He says as long as I don't have abdominal pain, I should be able to ride it out at home.
I hang up the phone, do what he says and take a nap.
I wake up sweating and shaking with the worst headache of my life. My stomach hurts. I race to the bathroom to throw up. My peripheral vision is blurry. My blood sugars are still at 500. I call my doctor back and he says I need to go to the ER to be "evaluated." Alone, I race through snow and ice, traffic and rain.
I go to the hospital for the 19th time this year.