AUDREY DRAKE

So, I have this collapsible lung, as a friend put it. Every once in a while it just kind of poops out on me. The whole thing doesn't deflate, as the term would suggest. The medical term is actually "spontaneous pneumothorax." Translated: "totally random air showing up in thoracic region for absolutely no good reason except causing its owner incredible amounts of pain." Air just sort of gets in between the lung and the pleura, causing a part of it to collapse.

There are two causes: getting your lung punctured in some fashion (happens to gunshot victims a lot), and being tall and thin. My cause was the more non-violent, socially acceptable kind.

This is the sad tale of My First Spontaneous Pneumothorax. With a title like that, it has the makings of an excellent children's book, if you don't mind instilling a fear of breathing in your kids.

I was 21 at the time, working my ass off for a now semi-defunct tech company, and living with my ex-boyfriend. I had just come off of two weeks of nigh-constant work--16 to 18 hours a day, every day--trying to get a project completed. Not enough food, not enough sleep, and way too much Sudafed trying to stay awake. To this day, the doctors steadfastly maintain that stress and overwork cannot possibly contribute to spontaneous pneumothorax. But every single damn time my lung collapses, it is after a period of heavy stress, too much work, and not enough sleep or enough to eat. I think they are wrong about my lung.

After aforementioned crazy work, I woke up of a Friday morning and took my dog out, as usual. Upon returning, I went to pick up her water dish to freshen it, at which point something Unbelievably Bad happened in my chest. Let me emphasize that--really, really, unbelievably bad. Pain exploded, but the worst part was that if I bent slightly to either side, there was this horrible sloshing in my chest, like someone had inserted a water balloon just under my collarbone. I went back to bed and lay down, hoping it would go away, then got up after an hour or so, determined to get to work. Seems I was smoking major crack, thinking I could manage that in the state I was in. After walking about three blocks, I headed back home to call in sick.

I had no idea what had happened. The only thing I could make of this, going by my symptoms, was pleurisy, but that didn't make any sense because I had no pneumonia, which is basically the only cause of pleurisy in someone my age. I was stumped. I resolved that if I didn't get better by the next day I would call my HMO's 24-hour Happy Helpful Nurse Line.

It didn't, and I did. I described my symptoms to the Happy Helpful Nurse, who looked up my problem on her computer, dramatically paused, and said, "The system says you have to get to a hospital right now."

Whoops. So we (me and nursey) had to figure out which hospital I was to get to. I named Beth Israel because I had heard of it (Note: this is a bad way to select a hospital), and it was covered by my plan. Memo to New Yorkers: Avoid Beth Israel at all costs. I don't care if you have a heart attack inside their emergency room with equipment already hooked up to you, pick your ass up and cab it to another hospital.

So, my ex-boy and I took a cab to Beth Israel, which had presumably been notified of my dire condition and imminent arrival. I supposed that I might, say, get admitted before my lung got up and walked over to the goddamn desk and kicked some Beth Israel Admittance Staff ass. I was very wrong.

I got there around noon. After a few hours of hanging around with the other folks in the ER waiting room, many of whom were desperately waving bloody stumps in a futile attempt to get the attention of the gum-chewing three-inch-nailed Nazis at the front desk, I was called in for a chest X-ray. Then I was sent back out to the waiting room.

After another few hours (I shit you not, by now it's like 6 p.m.), I was moved into another, smaller waiting room. After an hour or so in there, I was removed to a tiny examining room and told to undress and put on a gown. Approximately two minutes later, somebody else came over with a wheelchair and told me to get in (pathetically clutching my belongings) because they needed that room for another patient. This hospital lady pushed my chair into a big-ass scary room full of injured and sick people and parked me next to a wall. I managed to squeak out, "Um, what's wrong with me?" She said, "Your lung collapsed," and promptly walked off.

The FUCK? I thought, "My lung collapsed? The whole thing? What does this mean? What is happening to me?" sitting there in my stupid paper gown, still clutching my personal effects. A half hour later, some nurse or nurse-like person wheeled me over to a gurney with a little curtain around it (still in the big room) and started taking my temperature and stuff. I started crying. I begged her to tell me what the hell was wrong with me, but she didn't know.

Some 45 minutes later, more people came along and wheeled my gurney into a smaller room within the big room. I looked around, and beside me I saw this big tray full of Very Pointy Objects. Taking this as a bad sign, I leapt off the gurney, ran out of the room, and plunked myself down, sobbing, in the chairs outside. A whole team of people, who until this point had been completely invisible and unavailable to help me, including my ex-boy, surrounded me and told me I had to have surgery. My first reaction was to stick my head between my knees and say, "no, no, no, no, no, no, no" for about seven minutes. Eventually someone came up with the bright motherfucking idea to explain to me, albeit briefly, what the fuck was going on: They had to stick a tube in my chest to drain the fluid out of the place my lung collapsed. I finally gave in to the surgery.

At one point during the surgery, I woke up to the extremely unpleasant and painful sensation of somebody wiggling something about in my chest. I looked up at the nurse standing right next to me, grabbed her hand, and said, "Hello? I'm awake here." She said, "It's okay, you won't remember this later," to which I cleverly replied "bullSHIT!" I only wish the drugs hadn't made me too fuzzy to come up with something witty and cutting to say to her.

Sometime later, I awoke, still on a gurney, in a state of extreme and urgent nausea. I am unbelievably opiate-intolerant. I started screaming my head off until somebody came along, and I said, "Did you give me morphine?" And she was like oh, yeah, of course. I would have cursed the shit out of her except that at that moment I had to vomit my spleen, pancreas, and other lung up into the bedpan.

When they tried to wheel me to a room, I did curse people out. I was not going to be moved until the nausea subsided to a level I could bear. The painkillers were starting to wear off, and I was in the rather not-fun position of being stuck on a gurney in the main operating-recovery place wearing a paper gown with a tube attached to a box hanging out of my chest in quite a fair amount of pain and heaving my guts up.

My stomach finally calmed down some, and I was moved to a room. This was Saturday night. I was nauseous and in horrible pain because I couldn't take any more painkillers.

I tried ringing the little bell thing to summon a nurse, but the people outside were way too busy watching Jerry Springer or some shit to actually attend to patients, and the lady was very nasty to me over the intercom. Not smart, nurse desk lady.

So sick to my stomach I couldn't even bear to stay in my bed, I grabbed my little basin thingy, picked up my lung-box-hose-contraption, plunked my ass down on the floor, and started screaming my head off (between dry-heaves). And I mean screaming. Like "AaaaaiIIiiIIAAAAAAAAAEaaaaaaeeeeeAAAAAAA!" at the top of my functional lung. My poor roommate said, timidly, "Would you like me to call the nurse?" (as if the nurse, about ten feet from my room, couldn't hear me). I said yes, and she did. The nurse-person walked in and asked why I was on the floor. I replied, "Because it's better than the fucking bed." She wisely chose to go fetch an actual doctor at this point.

Swiftly (about the only thing that happened swiftly) she returned with a doctor. He was Indian (which is relevant in a moment). He asked me what was wrong. Really. So I summarily informed him (I believe with lots of cursing) that I was extremely sick to my stomach due to the morphine and also in incredible pain because I had no painkillers and all largely because of the ineptitude of the institution I had so unfortunately chosen. Dr. Genius asked me what he could do. I said, "You could get me some non-opiate painkillers, for one. And/or an anti-nausea medication. Like, for example, Compazine."

He said he could get me a painkiller. I said, "Which one? I can't take opiates, they make this happen." He said, "Don't worry, this won't make you sick." I was like, no, really, which fucking one? Dr. Genius replied, "Demerol," at which point I behaved terrifically shamefully (in retrospect), and mimicking his Indian accent, said, "Dees won't make you seek. Demerol? You're trying to tell me Demerol isn't a fucking opiate? Why don't you just get me some fucking heroin?" Christ. At least I know my pharmaceuticals, otherwise I probably would have killed someone in nausea-and-pain-induced rage.

Dr. Genius told me that was all they had. I asked if I could get something to help me sleep. Dr. Genius offered me Benadryl. I was like, "I'm in a fucking hospital here, right? And all you've got is Benadryl and Demerol? The fuck?" He told me the pharmacy was closed. The PHARMACY? CLOSED? In a HOSPITAL? In NEW YORK CITY? The city may never sleep, but Beth Israel sure does.

What if I were to stumble in with a gunshot wound at 2 a.m.? Would I just have to suffer? Finally I gave up and said, fine, get me the Benadryl.

To close this up--the next day they managed to find me some Percocet, which, while an opiate, has far less poppy in it (which means, of course, that it kills far less pain). I was fairly ill that night. During the day I had some visitors. When they released me late Monday, I don't think I was much better, but I was threatening to rip the tube out of my chest and walk home.