Things You Should Know(53)

“Is it your appendix?”

“That’s the one thought I have, but I’m not sure. I don’t have the classic symptoms. I don’t have anorexia or diarrhea. When I was eating that pizza, I was hungry.”

“Is it an ovary? Women have lots of ovaries.”

“Women have two ovaries,” she says. “It did occur to me that it could be Mittelschmertz.”

“Mittelschmertz?”

“The launching of the egg, the middle of the cycle.”

At five in the morning her temperature is one hundred and three. She is alternately sweating and shivering.

“Should I drive you back to the city or to the hospital out here?”

“I don’t want to be the doctor who goes to the ER with gas.”

“Fine.”

I am dressing myself, packing, thinking of what I will need in the waiting room: cell phone, notebook, pen, something to read, something to eat, my wallet, her insurance card.

We are in the car, hurrying. There is an urgency to the situation, the unmistakable sense that something bad is happening. I am driving seventy miles an hour.

She is not a doctor now. She is lost, inside herself.

“I think I’m dying,” she says.

I pull up to the emergency entrance and half-carry her in, leaving the car doors open, the engine running; I have the impulse to drop her off and walk away.

The emergency room is empty. There is a bell on the check-in desk. I ring it twice.

A woman appears. “Can I help you?”

“My wife is not well,” I say. “She is a doctor.”

The woman sits at her computer. She takes my wife’s name. She takes her insurance card and then she takes her temperature and blood pressure. “Are you in a lot of pain?”

“Yes,” my wife says.

Within minutes a doctor is there, pressing on my wife. “It’s got to come out,” he says.

“What?” I ask.

“Appendix. Do you want some Demerol?”

She shakes her head. “I’m working tomorrow and I’m on call.”

In the cubicle next to her, someone vomits.

The nurse comes to take blood. “They called Barry Manilow—he’s a very good surgeon.” She ties off my wife’s arm. “We call him Barry Manilow because he looks like Barry Manilow.”

“I want to do right by you,” Barry Manilow says, as he’s feeling my wife’s belly. “I’m not sure it’s your appendix, not sure it’s your gall bladder either. I’m going to call the radiologist and let him scan it. How’s that sound?” She nods.

I take the surgeon aside. “Should she be staying here? Is this the place to do this?”

“It’s not a kidney transplant,” he says.

The nurse brings me a cold drink. She offers me a chair. I sit close to the gurney where my wife lies. “Do you want me to get you out of here? I could hire a car and have us driven to the city. I could have you medevaced home.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere,” she says. She is on the wrong side of it now.

Back in the cubicle, Barry Manilow is talking to her. “It’s not your appendix. It’s your ovary. It’s a hemmorhagic cyst; you’re bleeding and your hematocrit is falling. We have to operate. I’ve called a gynecologist and the anesthesiologist—I’m just waiting for them to arrive. We’re going to take you upstairs very soon.”

“Just do it,” she says.

I stop Barry Manilow in the hall. “Can you try and save the ovary, she very much wants to have children. It’s just something she hasn’t gotten around to yet—first she had her career, then me, and now this.”

“We’ll do everything we can,” he says, disappearing through the door marked “Authorized Personnel Only.”

I am the only one in the surgical waiting room, flipping through copies of Field and Stream, Highlights for Children, a pamphlet on colon cancer. Less than an hour later, Barry Manilow comes to find me. “We saved the ovary. We took out something the size of a lemon.”

“The size of a lemon?”

He makes a fist and holds it up—“A lemon,” he says. “It looked a little funny. We sent it to Pathology.” He shrugs.

A lemon, a bleeding lemon, like a blood orange, a lemon souring in her. Why is fruit used as the universal medical measurement?

“She should be upstairs in about an hour.”

When I get to her room she is asleep. A tube poking out from under the covers drains urine into a bag. She is hooked up to oxygen and an IV.

I put my hand on her forehead. Her eyes open.

“A little fresh air,” she says, pulling at the oxygen tube. “I always wondered what all this felt like.”