Bump in the Road #4: This was a Bad One!

Staff of Zombies at Beth Israel

Inexplicably,

I kept getting

sick on weekends.

A few weeks after I was taken to Mt. Sinai for the first time (on a Saturday night), it was, as Yogi used to say, deja vu all over again. Late Shabbos afternoon I felt really lousy. I didn't like using the pulse oximeter on Shabbos, but I had been told that in my condition it was okay. For me that's always been one of the beauties of Judaism: the sanctity of human life takes precedence over any other religious considerations. If that means driving someone to the hospital on Yom Kippur, not only is it permissible, it's obligatory. So there I was, finding it very difficult to breathe whenever I got up and moved around. I walked from the couch to the dining room table and back and took my sats: they were in the high 70's. Of course if anything under 90 is considered unacceptable, you can imagine how bad 78-79 is. I couldn't remember a time since I got sick when they were that low, unless you count my time in Beth Israel, which you shouldn't because I was being treated by brain-eating zombies masquerading as health care professionals. I couldn't believe how bad my sats were, so walked around in a circle for maybe fifteen seconds and then took them again. Again they were in the 70's. This was all while I was connected to a concentrator, mind you. I sat back down on the couch and looked at the concentrator. I was on two liters of oxygen. I bumped it up to three. My niece Blimi came over to me and asked me why I didn't just take deep breaths. I couldn't. It's hard to describe how it feels. It's sort of like if someone had built a wall in your lung and your breath can only go up until where the wall is and no further, no matter how hard you try. I bumped the concentrator up to four liters. Didn't accomplish squat. I sat on the couch for a few hours without budging, trying to convince myself that the limited breathing I was able to manage would be enough to keep me out of Mt. Sinai. Uh-huh. And the Easter Bunny should be here any minute. I bumped the concentrator up to five liters, the maximum. All the while I kept taking my sats; they never got above the mid-80's, and that was with me sitting still. When Shabbos was over Chayie and I discussed our options. I wanted to stay home and tough it out. She wanted me to survive the night. We tried to figure to out if those two points of view were mutually exclusive. We finally came up with the idea of buying a baby monitor so Chayie could watch me and make sure I was breathing during the night. So my nephew Mendy ran out to Rite Aid and got one. By the time he got back, it was pretty apparent that I needed to be hospitalized. Again we called Hatzolah. Again we conned them into taking me to Mt. Sinai. This time I felt so lousy, I was convinced that I would be coming home in a box.