Chapter 1; Part 5

Continued from part 4

Hours passed and still no one came to take him to his room. M'Liss finally went home while Hal was still trying to find a comfortable way to lie on the board-like stretcher. A nurse started an intravenous and told him he wasn't to have any food or drink until the problem was isolated.

It would be nineteen days before he had a meal.

A Resident came along and threaded a tube through his nose down to his stomach. This was a nasal gastric tube, called N.G. The doctor explained that the pain had been caused by food passing through the stomach into the intestine and when it reached this mysterious blockage, the food was forced back, often causing vomiting followed by painful gas and a distended abdomen. Obviously, this blockage allowed some food through sometimes.

In the evening when he got sleepy, I left him and went home to feed the cat and get some sleep.

The shortage of beds forced him to endure the entire night in the emergency cubicle and he reported later that the night was punctuated with cries from a senile old woman a couple of stretchers away; she kept trying to escape to god knows where and an exasperated nurse kept dragging her back to her pallet. Finally, around seven o'clock in the morning, a bed was found for him and he was taken to a room on the seventh floor.

The next two weeks were painful, both physically and emotionally; X- Rays were done, and then an endoscopy was next. This is a tube with a camera and light at the end, threaded down his throat through his stomach and on from there and the doctor could follow what was happening. After that experience, Hal made a point of insisting that if they tried anything like that again, he wanted a strong dose of sedative first. Makes you wonder why that wasn't done as a matter of course.

Doctors now knew the blockage was somewhere near the join of the small and large intestines and believed it was in the small one. They thought chances were Hal had Crohn's disease, a chronic and often painful disease that can cause inflammation of the alimentary tract. Still, the results were inconclusive.

When this last test didn't show anything, the gastric tube was removed to see if the blockage had cleared up on its own. Hal had a pleasant day drinking any liquids he wanted but by early evening he was writhing in agony and the tube was re-inserted. Everything he drank that day returned to the bottle at the end of the tube, proving conclusively that nothing could pass all the way through his intestines. He continued to be in terrible pain for hours and when I called the nursing station around ten that night I learned he had just been given his first shot of pain killer, Demerol and he slept like a baby until morning.

Why did I let them wait so long to dull the pain? I spent the night at home wide-awake pondering that question. There is so much blind trust involved when you're dealing with doctors and hospitals. They know what they're doing, right?

Continued in part 6