Mud on the Canvas

When I got to Mt. Sinai, it was like old home week: Oh, you again...how ya doin'? The same nurses in the ER, the same doctors, etc. There was a Dr. Khan, a nice, young guy I remembered from just a few weeks before, whom I had decided was much too good looking to be a doctor. He looked like one of those TV doctors, kind of a cross between Patrick Dempsey ("Dr. McDreamy", for the uninitiated) and Jimmy Smits ("Jimmy Smits", for the uninitiated). He remembered me, too. He gave me one of those "what are you doing here again" looks and then he wanted to put me on a c-pap machine. It's funny how the longer you're sick, the more familiar you are with all the ways they can torture you in hospitals. I had been on a c-pap once before, in Beth Israel; they're insanely uncomfortable. I told Dr. Khan that I preferred trying to hold my breath until the coming of the Messiah to having that G-d-awful contraption strapped to my face again. They gave me a regular oxygen mask instead, and it was enough. My breathing was okay and my sats went up into the 90's. So since the c-pap machine had been ruled out as this week's cruel and unusual punishment, they hung an IV loaded with about a keg of Lasix. I think I may have mentioned in a previous post that I find it difficult to pee in a prone position. That complicates matters when I'm in a hospital room...it's even more complicated in the ER. There are people running hither and yon and sticking their noses into everything. Except when you want one of them; then they're nowhere to be found. They get antsy if they see a guy with an oxygen mask and an IV pole standing rather than lying down like a good little drone. So I had to pull the curtain and try to be discreet. The thing is, Lasix is brutal. Being discreet once is relatively easy, but being discreet literally every five minutes becomes something of a drag. There came a point where I didn't even bother getting back into bed anymore. Thank heavens they found me a room relatively quickly where I could pee in peece. I armed myself with not one, but two urinals and I was up literally all night. Dr. DePalo came to see me bright and early Monday morning and was not happy. The gist of what he said was that I was doing this (winding up back in the hospital over and over) to myself because of my eating/drinking/salt consuming habits. "I'm an artist," he said, "and you're throwing mud on my canvas". Gee, I had never heard myself referred to as a work of art before, but then again, I had never had a doctor quite like DePalo before. In the same breath, he acknowledged that Prednisone makes you hungry and thirsty, so sticking to his regimen was damn nigh impossible. Suck it up, Zweig, he said. Look at me, fit as a fiddle, he said. Stick it in your ear, DePalo, I said. Okay, I didn't. But I wanted to. Should have, even.