the waiting room, he noticed that the whites of my eyes were yellow. He filled out my registration form because I was too weak to hold a pen. Then he had to leave. He had an interview with a crucial source for a newspaper article he was writing. He’d been trying to set it up for months; there was no rescheduling it. “Just try to avoid going to the hospital,” he said. “People get sick in hospitals.” I was put in an exam room, where I lay on a table getting saline from an iv bag. An hour or more passed. Every so often I pried myself up and took a step across the room, where a Dixie cup sat on the counter. I’d turn on the faucet and fill it with water, knocking it back in one gulp. Then I’d collapse back onto the exam table. This sequence of movements felt equivalent to lifting a car off the ground. But I was thirsty in a way I did not know it was possible to be thirsty. It was as if all the moisture in my body was evaporating. My head was throbbing. My urine was the color of tea. When my mother was dying, “urine the color of tea” was one of the things the hospice workers told me to look out for as a sign of “imminent passing.” But I didn’t think I was dying. What I was thinking was that the clinic doctor had said I might have hepatitis but that maybe that wasn’t the worst thing in the world because, after all, Pamela Anderson has it and she’s basically walking around like a normal person. After a few hours on the saline drip, a nurse came into the room and told me I was being admitted to the hospital down the street. I said I didn’t care where I went as long as I didn’t have to get up. An ambulance took me from the urgent-care clinic to the hospital, a trip of approximately two blocks for which my insurance company would later be billed $860 (and for which it would decline to pay). Though I could already feel myself shrinking back from the world, I tried hard to appear normal, joking around with the paramedics until suddenly I couldn’t remember exactly where they said we were going. In the emergency room, I met with an intake nurse who sat by my gurney and took note of every personal item I had with me. Purse, wallet, phone, keys— also my clothes, which had somehow been removed from my body and swapped for a hospital gown, though, like a drunk girl taken home and put to bed by kindly friends after a party, I didn’t notice it happening. There was much about the situation that was like being very, very drunk. Far drunker than I’d actually ever been, though I seemed to be following some hardwired personal protocol for saving face, as if I’d been in this predicament before and knew the drill. It took every ounce of concentration to appear coherent. I didn’t want to look stupid. “What is your religious affiliation, if any?” the nurse asked. “What are my choices?” I tried to say this in a tone that suggested I was being funny, making an ironic little joke. The truth was that I needed some prompting. A Journal of Creative Nonfiction
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