That's where I am now…home from four nights in a hospital. And I can hear some of you saying, "Huh? You didn't mention anything about being in a hospital" and it's true, I didn't. I figured I wasn't worried about my health so there was no reason any of you should be. Briefly, I had an attack on Monday morning. I wasn't sure what kind of attack it was but it was sure painful. I'm guessing it felt like whatever a heart attack feels like but I have to guess because I've never had a heart attack and still haven't.
In fact, just about every doctor-type person I encountered the first 24 hours of this experience ran tests on me and said with great certainty, "You didn't have a heart attack," which is always a nice thing to hear. Okay then…that left the question of what the hell it was.
Those pains stopped on their own about an hour after the 911 responders got me to the Emergency Room and I was thinking maybe they were just going to send me home. But no, the examining physician said, "No, we're not letting you out of here until we figure out what it was and how to prevent it from happening again." I wasn't about to stop them from doing that so all Monday evening and much of Tuesday, they ran test after test after test and finally arrived at this conclusion: I had passed a gallstone. Once it fully passed, that was when the pains had ceased but it had left some toxic infections in my bloodstream. So then I had to stay two more nights until intravenous antibiotics had obliterated most of those infections.
This morning, they said, "Okay, you're out of here." Next week, I'm meeting with a surgeon who will decide if the best thing to prevent this from happening again is (a) Laparoscopic surgery to remove the remaining stones from my gall bladder or (b) complete removal of the gall bladder. So we'll see.
I'm still a little sleepy and woozy from four days of eating and drinking almost nothing. Part of that was because I always seemed to have a test pending of which they said, "You can't eat or drink before that test." But when I could eat, I couldn't eat because while the medical personnel in this hospital were first rate, whoever was prepping the meals was a culinary Incredible Hulk. Simply awful and inedible.
I gather from the reactions of the orderlies who picked up my largely-untouched trays that they were used to seeing 90-some-percent of each meal return untouched. I do not understand how a facility that can do such great work saving folks' lives can do such a bad job feeding those people. I couldn't even eat the plain white rice or the diced carrots. Seriously.
But I'm home and I've had actual food and all is mostly well. It's interesting to me — maybe not to you but to me — that this thing hit me just as I was finished with two projects with urgent deadlines: The Mike Schlesinger Celebration of Life which I arranged and hosted, and making the last little fixes on the book about Charles Schulz, which had to be finalized. If the gallstone had done its damage two days earlier, both those projects would have suffered more than I did.
Anyway, this is why posting was light here for a few days. I felt I owed you an explanation. And please — I do not want to hear about your hospitalization or your experience with gall stones or what you learned about them from reading some website or anything. My policy in life is to have real good professional doctors and to listen only to them. I believe I had the best-possible treatment and I can only regret that it so often comes with the worst possible meals.