My attendance here has been rather spotty lately. I was derailed from this and many other activities early last week by an unexpected hospital stay.
I was sitting at my desk at work on Monday the 7th, minding my own business, when mild chest pains set in. This was soon followed by shortness of breath, lightheadedness, and dizziness. Finally, when I felt what may or may not have been phantom pains in my left arm, I hauled my butt out of my chair and made a couple of coworkers take me to the nearest emergency room. This happened to be the NYU Medical Center on First Avenue.
The triage nurse whisked me quickly to a bed in ER, past the fifty or so other people crowding the intake area—even past the woman who was writhing on the floor in the throes of a kidney stone attack. Minutes later I was berobed and hooked up to a saline IV and electrocardiograph.
My office manager Joe was meanwhile phoning █████, who happened to be in a cab just pulling away from the Diane von Furstenberg studio on West 12th Street near Washington, almost a river-to-river trip away. She's been working part-time with the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, and was at the studio helping prepare an opening for two days later of an exhibit of some of the prize-winning artwork from this year's competition. She told the cabbie there was a change of plan and directed him to the hospital.
It was a godsend to see █████ appear in the ER. The only worry I really had was how worried she would be about me, and how inconvenient my illness had to be coming as it did at the start of her busiest work week of the year. She left me her copy of Family Circle—which drew sniggers from at least one nurse—so I would have something, anything, to read while she ran home to walk the dog. When she returned and sweet-talked the security guard into letting her visit me again, she had brought me a collection of Michael Bishop stories, which helped partially restore my sense of manliness. It was also a far more effective salve than Family Circle for the fact that I was only 40 pages away from finally finishing Cryptonomicon—and Cryptonomicon was sitting in my shoulder bag back at the office.
The long and short of it was, I was admitted to the hospital and held there for nearly 24 hours while being subjected to every non-invasiave cardiac test known to man, and a few that I suspects the residents just made up for the fun of it. (Let me remark briefly on the bewildering array of doctors and technicians to whom one must rehearse one's case history when one is incarcerated in a teaching hospital. Let me remark also upon the bewildering percentage of said doctors and technicians who are, pardon the phrase, cute girls. Let me remark also upon the fact that one thinks the tall, leggy, blonde sonagram tech-in-training who runs six miles a day and got out of advertising after seven years because it was too stifling might possibly have been flirting with one. At any rate.) The final determination was that not only had I not suffered a heart attack but that my heart, cholesterol, and blood pressure were all in altogether fine and healthy condition.
I was released late Tuesday afternoon with my affliction still undiagnosed. Let me remark briefly here on the sharklike feeding frenzy that is departing patients vying for cabs outside the NYU Medical Center. It's even worse than the spectacle of the gray-haired children of privilege who feel entitled to all the cabs outside Lincoln Center after the opera lets out, regardless of who might have had his hand out first. After having three cabs kited out from under me, I decided to walk to Third Avenue to catch a ride uptown rather than suffer a really coronary thrombosis under the hospital's front awning.
The puppy was beside herself to see me back home.
I still don't know what the problem was, but I am following up with my personal physician. Our friend Stephanie, having suffered similar symptoms in the past, suspects I may at last have succumbed to that scourge of longtime city dwellers: asthma. That is for a pulmonary specialist to say, but it would be preferable to the other scary options that occur to me late at night.
I made the gallery opening Wednesday night at Diane von Furstenberg's studio, by the way, which went terrifically well as far as I could see. █████'s coworkers were startled to see me walking around in a suit in the 90-plus-degree humidity after my trip to the brink of death. Frau von F. offered a little toast (to the artists, not to me), and I even glimpsed what other people assured me was the back of Lauren Bacall as she crossed the room and entered the store. (█████ waited on Lauren Bacall once as a seasonal employee at the Williams-Sonoma on the Upper East Side a couple of years ago, and recognized her in a flash.)
Anyway, that's why my homework is late.
