Someone Thought to Decorate the Room
When I open my eyes, everything is blurry, but the steady beeping of machines has a dreary rhythmic quality that threatens to lull me back to sleep. I try to move my arms, but I’m hooked up to those machines and I’m yanking with two weak arms.
Just two weeks earlier, on a typically cool and foggy San Francisco evening in November 2003, I was curled up on the sofa covered in blankets, alternately freezing and burning up. My friends Luke and Keith, or Dr. K to all who knew him as an ER doc at Saint Mary’s Medical Center, came to check on me since I felt so terrible. They whisked me away to the hospital, and I entered a seven-week journey to hell and back, with much of that time passed in a morphine-induced haze.
Today, fragments of memory persist: friends crowded around my bed, the hum of machines, that particular quality of fluorescent light. I tried numerous times to pit one friend against another to let me out of the hospital, refusing to accept or believe how sick I was. But I had a MRSA staph infection in my liver, which turned into sepsis, a serious bloodstream infection.
25 November 2003: “Michael is truly fighting the battle of his life and has a long way to go. At the moment he remains in the ICU at St. Mary’s and is receiving one-on-one care. He’s mostly incoherent due to the heavy load of infection that his body is fighting. His delirium causes him to be combative which…can become an unneeded drain on his overall energy. So he is being…sedated to keep him from wasting unnecessary energy. For the time being he won’t likely respond to you in any attentive or direct way.”
Reading that update that Dr. K sent to our friend group a week into my stay, I barely recognize the person being described, and yet I know it was me, unconscious and fighting. Many memories from those early days are long gone, but one factor in my survival was my healthcare proxy and steadfast friend, Luke, who managed the chaos: family visits, friend rotations, the weight of decisions I couldn’t make for myself. He held it all together.
26 November 2003: “Michael remains semi-responsive in the ICU at St. Mary’s. Yesterday his doctors drained a large amount of fluid from his abdomen which is being generated by the infection and blockage of his liver. The drainage of fluid has helped him out a great deal.”
If I listen carefully, I can hear voices as I’m wheeled down yet another corridor for more tests or another x-ray. I feel distended and uncomfortable during those rare periods of lucidity, and I don’t think people know I can hear and understand them. Dr. K continued:
“Although he is far from being out of the woods with this fight, his progress in the last two days is encouraging. I expect his progress will be something like 3 steps forward, 2 steps backward for a while to come.”
Three steps forward and two steps backward turned out to be optimistic.
5 December 2003: “Sadly, Michael had a significant setback in the last day. His battle just got a great deal more grave. The staph infection reentered his bloodstream, from one of the many abscesses in his liver, which has caused a high fever…and his breathing began to fail early Thursday morning. His doctors placed him on a ventilator which is now handling the work of breathing for him. From a medical perspective, everything possible is being done for Michael…more than ever, he needs your thoughts, intentions, prayers.”
I was on a ventilator. A machine was breathing for me. A constant stream of friends kept vigil at my bedside and my family flew in from Ohio, bracing for the worst. One friend, knowing me well enough to know I’d hate the sterile bleakness of an ICU room, took it upon himself to decorate it with photos, a colorful mobile, and other tchotchkes from home, a small, fierce act of love that I only learned about later. All those thoughts, intentions, and prayers seem to have worked, because a few days later, Dr. K’s tone was notably more upbeat:
9 December 2003: “As some of you have already heard, Michael turned around just as quickly as he had worsened at the end of last week. He improved while on the ventilator and it was removed on the weekend. He’s already able to get out of bed and sit in a chair and is eating light food. He remains confused and disoriented, which is not unexpected considering all that his body has gone through. Clearly he benefited from your collective energy of prayer, thought, meditation or whatever you sent his way.”
When the last of the morphine wore off, and I could communicate clearly, I looked around the room and saw the decorations and cards and a few friendly faces as people continued to stop by. Seventeen days after that last email from Dr. K, and seven weeks after two friends walked into my apartment and saw the yellow in my eyes, I was wheeled out of the hospital on Boxing Day, December 2003. I’d lost 30 pounds, could only walk with great effort, and had to undergo a six-week regimen of intravenous vancomycin at home to ensure the MRSA infection was clear from my body.
I recovered fully. But survival, I discovered, is not the end of the story. It comes with an aftermath. Mine arrived in the form of an $800,000 medical bill, the result of a lapse between COBRA coverage and a new policy I’d obtained. I spent months navigating a healthcare system designed to exhaust people into giving up. In some ways, it was a second battle: less dramatic, less mortal, but grinding in its own particular way.
To this day, I still have the physical copies of all my medical records, thick folders of lab results and doctor’s notes. My entire near-death experience, the fear, the vigils, the ventilator, rendered in the cold clinical language of medicine. Strange to read and stranger still to know it’s me they’re describing. I was 33 years old, and I almost didn’t make it. I came out on the other end with a newfound appreciation of life and endless gratitude to all who provided me with such good care. I’m just glad someone thought to decorate the room.
