Spelling It Like It Is (20 page)

Oh, babe.

Meanwhile, the room-parent e-mails for Stella’s preschool class kept rolling in. “Hey, guys, how about Wednesday after drop-off we grab coffee and discuss the harvest festival?” We room parents needed to set up the pre-K booth at the festival. We needed to man the pre-K booth in shifts throughout the festival. We needed to clean up the pre-K booth after the festival. Also, there was something called a class roster list that had to be distributed. There was a daylong e-mail chain about that. Plus the room parents had weekly meetings, which required a zillion e-mails to schedule.

Oh my God! I didn’t have time for this on a normal day, much less with a gaping, probably infected wound. Man, this involved-parent thing backfired on me every time. But at least right now I had a good excuse. Things really weren’t going well. I was running a fever and the pain level wasn’t decreasing. Eventually, Dean took me to the ER, where the doctor diagnosed me with an infection and, upon learning I had four kids, asked me if I was a Mormon. Because there is such a big Mormon population in the San Fernando Valley.

Even with a megadose of antibiotics, I just kept getting worse. On Saturday, September 15, just two weeks after Finn was born, the home-care nurse came in to see me at three
P.M
. She repacked the wound as usual. It looked fine, she said, but she didn’t like that I was still in so much pain. She said, “Let’s keep monitoring it. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Then she left.

An hour and a half later I was lying in bed. Patsy was sitting at the end of the bed, holding Finn. I said, “It shouldn’t be hurting this much.” Then I looked down. The incision was supposed to be packed with gauze. But the packing had pushed out. A red ball was sitting on top of my skin. It looked like a shiny, hairless scrotum. Holy fuck.

“Pats, something’s coming out of me!”

Patsy came over to take a look. Infinitely mellow, Patsy always talks me off the ledge, telling me everything’s fine. But this time she just said, “We’d better call Dean.” Carrying Finn, she left the room.

I stared down at this red golf ball on my abdomen. It was just sitting there. What was it? I was starting to freak out.

Dean is absolutely the best person to have around in an emergency. He came into the room, looked at me, and calmly said, “It’s going to be fine, but we should get you to the hospital. Let’s head there now.” He started to pick me up. I panicked.

“Please don’t touch me! I can’t go to the car! I’m scared to stand up!” I said. I was afraid that more of whatever it was—something that clearly belonged inside my body—would make its way to the outside of my body.

Dean said, “Do you want me to call an ambulance?”

I said, “Yes, call an ambulance, please. Hurry.”

Within minutes, two emergency units arrived, both with lights flashing and whirling. The EMTs wheeled me on a gurney through the house and out the front door. Liam and Stella were playing on their scooters in the front yard. Now they stood and silently watched me roll by. I waved at them.

“Hi, guys!” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back soon.”

They said, “Bye, Mom!” and went back to playing.

They had seen me go to the hospital so many times it was like,
Okay, will you be home for dinner?
Just another day in their lives.

At Los Robles Hospital, when the ER doctor came in, he confirmed what Dean, Patsy, and I had all suspected. What we were seeing was part of my intestines. It was life-threatening, and it had the not-comforting term “evisceration.” I would have emergency surgery at midnight.

So they pumped me up on pain meds, and I waited for surgery. Meanwhile I could hear a gurgling sound as . . . well, let’s just say that within a couple hours what was emerging from my incision was no longer the size of a golf ball. Now it was a grapefruit, sitting on my belly. It was alarming. The doctor came back in and said that instead of waiting until midnight, I was going into surgery immediately.

I could see the urgency, believe me, but, as always, I asked a million questions about every aspect of the situation. Even so, I can’t say that my questions make me an informed patient who understands the situation. They’re just a hopeless attempt to quell my hysteria.

“For the surgery—do you do light sedation?” I asked. I’m terrified of general anesthetic.

No, he told me, it would be general for this surgery.

“But I had a bowl of chicken noodle soup!” I said. “I thought you said I couldn’t be put under if I’d eaten in the last five hours.”

The doctor told me that general anesthetic was protocol for this surgery.

“But why do they tell you not to eat? What can happen?”

The doctor explained that with general anesthetic, if you’ve eaten, there’s a chance that you can throw up and aspirate. If this happens while they’re inserting or removing the breathing tube, you can die.

I said, “But that could happen! I ate! I don’t want to die.”

I understood that I might also die if I didn’t have the surgery right away, but I really thought these doctors should think outside the box. I started trying to negotiate.

“Technically, this is like having a C-section. Can’t you just give me an epidural?”

“No,” said the doctor. “We always put people under for this.”

I could see that the doctor was trying to be patient. Dean was at my side, ready to convince me to go through with it. But I was thinking about my dad, and the story he told about when he was shot in the hand in World War II. The doctors were going to amputate two of his fingers. He said he went straight into storytelling mode. “I told them, ‘I’m a pianist. It’s been my lifelong dream. My parents had no money, but they found a way to send me to music school. I can’t lose my fingers.’ ” Somehow my father convinced them to do surgery instead of amputating. They saved his fingers. They were crooked his whole life, but at least he had fingers.

My father had kept his fingers by sheer force of will. I was fighting for something much more important—my life! (Or so I saw it.)

I said, “I don’t want to go under! I’ve eaten! I’m scared! Can you try an epidural? If there’s a problem, you can put me under.” The poor anesthesiologist couldn’t take it anymore. He gave in and agreed to do the epidural.

The doctor had to take my intestines out, wash them off, and put them back in. As soon as he started tugging at my internal organs, the pain was intense. I felt like my insides were being pulled out of me. I started screaming. The doctor said, “I can’t do this. You’re moving, and you’re screaming. If you keep screaming I’m going to put you under.”

I clenched my fists so hard that my nails cut into my palms. I bit my lip and forced myself to stay silent. It was really, really awful.

Yeah, that epidural was a big mistake. Afterward, the doctor said, “That was bad.” He admitted that if I’d been under general he would have checked around to make sure there was no other infection or issues to address. He said, “But I couldn’t do that with you screaming and moving around.”

I said, “I’m the patient! You let me talk you into it!” If he’d told me he couldn’t do everything he needed to do, I would have let him put me under! I must have been more persuasive than I intended. Maybe I should’ve been a lawyer.

Sometime later, when a doctor at Cedars was looking at my records, he said, “You had an epidural for this surgery? Why did you have an epidural?”

I said, “Um . . . I convinced the doctor?”

He was shocked. He said, “It’s incredibly dangerous that you were awake through this surgery. If I were doing the surgery I wouldn’t have given you that option. It’s not okay.”

Oops.

VIP Fail

I
was in Los Robles Hospital for ten days after the surgery. During my recovery, they gave me a Dilaudid drip, which had a button that I could push when the pain was extreme. The dose is controlled so that you never get too much, but I was still worried about taking an opiate, so I tried to get by on as little as I could. The nurses would come in and ask about my pain level. I’d say, “Pretty bad.” They’d say, “Well, push the button!”

When Liam and Stella came to visit me, Liam thought that the drip button was some kind of video game. He pushed the button. I said, “Don’t push that! It’s my medicine!” Stella thought this was pretty funny and started pushing the button too. I knew it wouldn’t give me extra Dilaudid, but even the unfulfilled requests for meds were monitored. I was embarrassed that the nurses would think I’d been hitting the button like a desperate addict.

Then I felt a dose of the medicine hit me. It instantly helped the pain and made my eyes feel heavy. Liam said, “Mom, why do you go like this?” He imitated me, rolling his eyes back into his head, his tongue lolling. I was horrified. How many friends and nurses had seen me like that? The next time a nurse came in I made sure to tell her the kids had been the ones to push the button. She said, “Of course they did,” and I could tell she didn’t believe me.

Liam, Stella, and Hattie all came to visit, but I was apart from Finn for that whole time. That was the hardest part—they change so much in those first few weeks. I had to stop breast-feeding him, and I knew that even when I went home I wouldn’t be able to pick him up, much less Hattie (again!), for a long time.

The nurses drew blood every day. Though I had many lovely nurses, for some reason the ones who were responsible for taking blood had no bedside manner. They would shuffle in at the crack of dawn, grab my arm without so much as a hello, and start probing for a vein.

One morning a nurse flew in at the end of the morning shift. At some point I had a complication with the incision—an abscess—and two nurses were in the middle of explaining something about it to me. The nurse who’d come in to get blood was obviously in a rush. She snatched my arm.

“Can you wait a minute?” I said. I started to sit up, but she pushed me back down with all her might.

“You’re fine!”

I gasped. The two nurses, shocked, said her name sternly.

“Whatever,” she said, throwing my arm down and storming out of the room.

Now, at the hospital there was a woman in the admissions office, part of whose job seemed to be handling PR and VIP stuff. When I had arrived, she had checked in on me to make sure all was well and to reassure me that this hospital was completely discreet. To drive home her point, she had made sure to tell me that when Heather Locklear was hospitalized after a 911 call, this was where she had been admitted—and none of the staff had leaked anything. She was proud of their security . . . so why was she telling me this? Was it because all celebrities were in some elite club where secrets were safe?

Anyway, since the woman who handled VIPs had been so concerned about my experience at the hospital, I called her to report the nurse who manhandled me. She said, “I’m meeting with the board. We’re going to take care of this. I’ll let you know what happens.” She never got back to me on that, but a couple days later she made an unexpected appearance.

While I was stuck in the hospital, I had postponed the Camp Little Maven launch party at the Hotel Bel-Air. That was easy enough to delay, but during that time frame I was also supposed to do a voice-over for Glad plastic bags. They had a hard deadline, and if I couldn’t meet it, they were going to move on to someone else. Lying in my hospital bed, I texted my agent,
“I can’t lose this campaign! Can’t we do the voice-over in the hospital?”
I’d done something similar for
Craft Wars
when I was on bed rest.

We made arrangements, and the day of the Glad voice-over a guy showed up in my room with a microphone and an audio box. That was it—no crowds, no camera crews. But someone must have told the VIP woman that there were cameras, because just as we were getting started, she came flying into the room.

“What’s going on in here?” she asked. “Are you filming your reality show? I don’t know what kind of show you’re making, but we don’t allow that.” It reminded me of the Beaver Avenue neighbor who said, “You might be making porns in there.”

I told her it was just a voice-over, a PR plug for a brand, and that it was for my website. She insisted that they didn’t allow filming, but I finally made her understand that we were not, in fact, filming anything.

She finally left, and at last, I was able to record my Glad spot. I played the perky host of
OMG Extra: After the Wild Life,
a mock reality series produced by Glad, starring famous wild animals. “Hi, this is your correspondent for Glad!” I chirped. “Mr. Grizz is on the loose today. Will Possum be there to stop him? Or is he back on the juice?” It was very high energy, and there I was with my sewn-up intestines and IV drip, a workaholic reality star playing a pseudo–news anchor reporting on a mock reality show. Hamlet had a play within a play. This was a send-up within a spoof within a parody. Bring on the drip.

Oh, and I never saw that VIP woman again.

WHEN I CAME home from the hospital I was like an old lady: feeble, unable to walk, and constipated from pain meds. This last condition was particularly unsettling, especially when I took a long and panic-inducing wander down the path of Google self-diagnosis. My research showed that with my post-op condition, I was at risk for bowel obstruction. And bowel obstruction could lead to sepsis, which pretty much guaranteed death. Thus informed, a bowel obstruction became my biggest fear, and I was on high alert. Dr. J, who did not see my situation as quite so dire, recommended that I try a laxative. I took one—no results—and another.

It was Mehran’s birthday, September 30. He was meeting his other friends for drinks. Ordinarily I would have been there, but instead I started having diarrhea and terrible stomach pain. This was bad. Then I got chills. I called Dr. J, crying in pain.

“Could I be septic?” I asked.

Always calm, Dr. J said, “The safe thing is to go to the ER and have them do a CT scan of your intestine.”

Dean, always cool as a cucumber, picked me up and carried me to the backseat of the car. I was weeping in pain. I wanted an ambulance, but Dean wanted to drive so he could make sure I went to Cedars instead of Los Robles, the hospital of the major surgery by epidural, the nurse who pushed me, and the VIP administrator who didn’t like tape recorders.