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Wednesday, April 17, 2024

The Longest Pause: My Cardiac Arrest and Me (Judean Rose, Part II)

I am on the phone with Hatzalah, faint, one hand on the tile floor to steady me. I just want to lie down and feel the cool tile on my face. But the Hatzalah guy on the phone won’t stop asking questions. He wants me to describe what I’m feeling. I don’t know how to explain that weird feeling in my face and hands in ENGLISH, let alone in Hebrew. Yet somehow, my blurred mind flashes to this, from Bava Metzia (58b):

A disciple taught before Rav Nachman bar Yitzchak: “Anyone who publicly mortifies his companion is comparable to a shedder of blood.” He replied: “Your statement is correct, for the red color of the face disappears, and it becomes white.”

So in bad Hebrew, I tell the Hatzalah guy, “I feel like you feel when you’re very embarrassed or have a shock.”

He has no earthly idea what I am talking about, and I am filled with a hopeless despair. I need help. And I can’t make anyone understand. I hold out my phone to son down the hall and beg him. “Please. You talk. Just tell him to come.”

He takes the phone, annoyed. “Shalom. My Eema is dehydrated.”

“I’m not, I’m not,” I say weakly, from the other end of the hall. “Give me the phone.”

Son down the hall, truly exasperated, walks over to me and hands me the phone. “Eema, you’re just dehydrated.”

“Open the front door,” I tell him.

“Eema!” he says. Translation: Don’t exaggerate.

“Open the door,” I say, raising my hand to point in that general direction.

He stomps down the hall, goes to the front door. Opens it.

At some point the love triangle of me, the Hatzalah guy on the phone, and son down the hall, becomes a love quartet. “What’s going on?” calls querulous post-surgery Dov from the bedroom.

I would normally reassure him, but I can’t. I can no longer deal with anyone else. I am barely there. Words are difficult to form. I want to save them for the medics, to tell them what’s wrong, though I don’t know how. There aren’t words for what I’m feeling.

“Varda! What’s going on?” Dov calls out, his voice rising. When no one answers him, I hear the sound of his walker, smack creeeak, smack creeeak, and I know he is determined that he will know what is going on under his roof, though he hasn’t been able to get in or out of bed without help since his operation, four days ago.

It’s too much for me. I can’t worry about him now. The air around me feels wavy and brown.

“Eema’s dehydrated. She called Hatzalah,” says son down the hall.

“I knew it!” says Dov. “I knew it would be too much for you,” meaning me dealing with his care and our household in the aftermath of his surgery, which he had resisted for years. “You’re having a nervous breakdown!”

“No,” says son down the hall. She’s just dehydrated. She needs to drink.”

“Stand outside and wait for them, to show them where we are,” Dov says to him, pointing to the door, the exasperation plain in his voice.

I hear the medics come in. I know them. One of them had paid a sick call to Dov only seven hours earlier. When he comes in, Dov says, tongue in cheek, “Can’t get enough of us huh, Shlomo?”

Shlomo and the other medic, Moshe, crouch on the steps next to me. They ask me to tell them what’s wrong. I am fuzzy, but I try. “I’m nauseated, my head is spinning, and my hands and face feel like the blood has drained from them.”

“Do you want us to call an ambulance,” they ask.

“No.” I say, hoping there is a way for the medics to take care of me at home.

Here, I must interject with another story. This time, my husband’s. The pain of Dov’s spinal stenosis had made his blood pressure spiral out of control a few months earlier. I had suspected that it was the pain that did this, and my suspicions are now confirmed. Since the surgery, Dov’s blood pressure has improved and somewhat stabilized, as has his general health.

But one night, I woke up, saw Dov wasn’t in bed, and wondered what was wrong. I got up, went into the living room, and he was sitting there. “What’s the matter? I asked.

“I don’t know. Something’s not right.”

“Well, what do you feel?” I asked. “Do you hurt anywhere? Do you have a headache?

Dov was as unable to describe what he was feeling as I was on that otherworldly dark Friday morning. “I don’t know. Just something’s not right.”

“Should I call an ambulance?” I ask him.

“I don’t know,” he says.

I call an ambulance. When it arrives, one of the medics is my friend, Elisheva. They take Dov’s blood pressure. It’s high. So high that maybe they suspect their equipment has malfunctioned. They take his blood pressure during the whole ride to Shaarei Zedek Hospital, and I hear them wondering if the machine is broken, because the number is crazy.

When we get him into the hospital, his BP is 233. It’s a hypertensive crisis. Dov is treated over a period of some 18 hours, in the ER, until his blood pressure is a more manageable 180 (!). They take tests, and even though Dov is obviously showing signs of confusion, and keeps forgetting words, the hospital releases him. We pay for the ambulance, because I made the call. We pay for the ER visit because he isn't admitted.

Yes, we were able to pay the bill, but I mean, the man was seriously ill! And they didn’t admit him. Maybe they were too full up with wounded soldiers? I don’t know. But I knew that Dov SHOULD have been admitted.

This had been percolating in my brain for months, as I schlepped with my husband from doctor to doctor, and to all kinds of tests, some I’ve never heard of. They should have kept him. He is still now quite ill. I am angry at the hospital.

I was thinking of all this when the nice Hatzalah volunteer lady, my angel, said, “Why call Magen David Adom? Call Hatzalah. It’s free.”

I did not now want to go in an ambulance, because I’d be damned if they were going to make me pay for that again. In fact, Dov had called for an ambulance after he sustained minor injuries in a car accident only a few months before his hypertensive crisis. They made us pay for that ambulance, too. It was the money, but it wasn’t the money that made me say no to calling an ambulance. It was the principle of the thing, the injustice!

This is WHY I had called Hatzalah in the first place. I didn’t WANT to call Magen David Adom (MDA) and pay for ambulance service. “Are you comfortable there on the floor?” asks one of the medics.

“Yes,” I say, grateful to give in to the desire to lay my head on the floor, to feel the coolness of the tile against my face.

“Your pulse is very weak,” said one of the medics. “We’re calling MDA.”

Maybe they won’t charge me, because Hatzalah is calling, not me. I think. But then I think of Dov. I can’t let him down now. He needs me right now, after his surgery.

The MDA medics come in and crouch around me on the three little steps that lead up to the hallway where I am prostrate. One of them says, “Varda, do you want to go in the ambulance?”

“No,” I say weakly.

“Do you think you can walk to the living room if we help you?”

“I’ll try,” I say, so weak.

Somehow, the four of them, the two medics sent by Hatzalah, and the MDA guys, manage to lead me to the living room. They motion to the chair we think of as “Dov’s chair.” It is close and I am relieved. I make for the chair, but Dov is about to lose his balance. At that point, even with the walker, he can only walk a few steps.

So I stumble to the next closest chair, on the other side of the room, directly in front of Dov. The MDA guy hooks me up to an EKG. He really wants to take me to the hospital. But who’s going to take care of Dov? I think. And what if it’s just dehydration, or like Dov says, I’m working too hard, I’m overwrought?

So I say to the MDA guy, trying to sound nonchalant, “Can’t you just hang a bag?” I ask, meaning give me some IV fluids here at home, and I’ll be fine.

I really don’t want to go to the hospital. I really don’t want to go in that ambulance. I say so.

So while I’m still hooked up to the EKG, the MDA guy hands me a clipboard with a form to sign saying that I refused the ambulance. I take the pen, put it to paper, then slide off the chair in a dead faint.

To be continued.