Day 228: Emergency Room

My sister calls, waking me from a nap in Alaric’s car. We’re still a few hours away from LA.

“Hey, grandpa just called to ask me to take him to the emergency room tomorrow. He says that his feet are swollen and that he’s having trouble breathing.”

I’m wide awake. My grandpa isn’t one to ask for help unless it’s absolutely necessary, which must mean it’s serious.

I search “swollen feet and trouble breathing” and Google answers “congestive heart failure”.

I call home, and Stepmom picks up. I ask for Grandpa. I hear her calling his name and wondering where he is. I fear the worst. Maybe he’s passed out in his office?

His voice comes on the phone. He sounds tired. I ask him how long ago he started experiencing his symptoms. I’m ready to call an ambulance. He says it’s been six months. Oh, that’s a relief. Somewhat. We agree to talk more once I get home.

I lug my suitcase inside and my parents and grandpa come to greet me. I hug my grandpa first. His body no longer fills out the worn-out undershirt he always wears at home. It’s startling because it betrays the way I’d always described him to friends: The tank that could kick my ass even in his eighties. I look at him again. He is small.

He shows me his feet and I see my grandma’s legs before she died. Swollen and shapeless, like overfilled water balloons. He pressed hard on his skin and shows me how the skin stays depressed for a few seconds before filling out again. I look at him and want to cry. He is old.

My sister arrives in the morning, and we take him to St. Jude Urgent Care, where we are directed to go to the emergency room instead.

What brings you here?, the nurse in front asks.

My grandpa’s feet are swollen and he’s having some trouble breathing, my sister says.

How long has that been happening?

Around six months.

For a moment, I wonder if they might turn us away. Six months doesn’t sound like an emergency.

He asks a few more questions and says, Okay, we’ll take him.

The three of us step forward, and he stops us. Only the patient is allowed in.

We explain that my grandpa can’t speak English.

Okay, one of us can come in.

I go.

We wait in the lobby, and I pull out my laptop to try to do some work. It’s impossible — we’re right beneath the TV blaring some action movie where Wesley Snipes beats up some guards and gets chased around by Sylvester Stallone. I consider putting on my noise-cancelling headphones but then I won’t hear my grandpa’s name being called. I decide to try to read instead but have my attention constantly regularly pulled into the noise box hanging on the wall.

The screen shows 40.

Is that really his heart rate?

No, he wouldn’t look this good if it were that low, she says, pointing at my grandpa.

My grandpa apparently has an irregular heart beat which makes it difficult to get his readings.

We’re admitted quickly. The first nurse had said that we should expect to wait three hours minimum. It’s very busy in the back, and a bunch of people had just walked in, she had said. It made sense. Compared to the man behind us who’d apparently just suffered a stroke, my grandpa seemed perfectly healthy. But something about my grandpa’s heart reading had made another nurse put him at the front of the queue.

More people. More questions. They always ask the same things. What is he here for? How long has he been experiencing it? Six months? Why did he decide to come in today? I wonder why they don’t just write the answers down and hand it off to the next person. As they probe into his medical history, I learn new things about my grandpa. I had no idea he had surgery to remove a tumor in his thyroid five years ago. Or did I just forget in the meantime?

My grandpa is shown to a room and when the curtains part and I’m allowed inside, he’s lying in a bed in a hospital gown hooked up to a beeping machine and an IV. Even though nothing’s changed in the past few minutes, he suddenly looks so frail. I again see my grandma, who was the reason I was last in this same ER.

A knock on the door. A man in a checkered button-down shirt walks in, and I say hi. He says ahn-nyung-ha-sae-yo, and I blurt out, oh, amazing. He’s good friends with the nurse in charge of my grandpa, and she had told him that my grandpa was Korean and that he should swing by. How kind. Joe tells my grandpa that he’s a pastor serving as a hospital chaplain, and my grandpa excitedly shares that he’s a retired pastor himself. Joe asks questions about my grandpa’s past and listens generously as my grandpa tells him about his theological training and experiences teaching. Turns out that Joe’s father is also a pastor and he attended the same seminary in Korea as my grandpa. Small world. My grandpa decides to introduce me and tells Joe that I went to Princeton. Some people enter and tell us that we need to leave so they can take an X-ray of my grandpa.

Joe and I stand outside, and he asks whether I went to Princeton University or Princeton Theological Seminary. I say the former. He says that my grandpa must be very proud of me because he was clearly chomping at the bit to share that about me. Not my name or anything else, but what school I’d gone to. I laugh. I’d gotten so used to it that I no longer notice. I’m sure a big part of the reason my grandpa wants me to go back to Google is so that he can brag about that, too. Joe’s pager goes off. I gawk. It’s a pager, he says.

My grandpa tells me that he needs to go pee. I tell a nurse, and she tells me to use the urinal as she pulls out a cardboard carton from a cabinet. Not what I usually associate with the word “urinal”, but I’m learning. I hand it to my grandpa. He asks me to close the curtain. Oh, of course. He unzips his pants, and I help him position the carton. Seeing my grandpa’s penis is a bit strange, but in the emergency room, dignity, shame, and social norms are put aside in the quest for life.

We wait. My sister asks, Any updates? I reply:

I’M HUNGRY

that’s the update

Forty-five minutes later, I meet her outside and she hands me a bag with two vegan sushi rolls.

I chose the most delicious looking ones, she says.

In that moment, I decide that my sister is the greatest being to have ever graced this plane of existence.

More nurses. More specialists. More questions. I repeat the answers I’d given before. The process is sometimes maddening, not only because of the repetition, but because of how difficult I find the translation process. My Korean is rudimentary and I sit there boiling trying to translate words like “thyroid”, “kidney”, “appendix”, “blood pressure” and simple questions like “do you feel dizzy?”. Even when I manage to find the words using Google Translate, my grandpa often still doesn’t understand what I’m saying or responds using words that I don’t understand. The frustration of knowing what I want to say but being unable to feels like clutching a pile of burning coals in my chest.

My grandpa’s vital signs monitor triggers an alarm and beeps loudly every several minutes. They’re all false positives. It turns out that the nurse from before had been wrong: My grandpa’s heart rate really is extremely low. Another nurse comes in and tells me that it’s one of the lowest she’s ever seen. A normal resting heart rate is between 60 to 100 beats per minute; my grandpa’s heart rate hovers around 40, sometimes dropping as low as 34. The nurses tell me that he’ll probably need a pacemaker. I fail to find a time to make a dumb joke about my grandpa secretly being a world-class athlete.

At 8pm, I tell him that I’m leaving for the night and that I’ll be back tomorrow. He asks me to wait until he’s transferred to one of the hospital beds upstairs. I tell him that there’s no way for us to know when that’s going to happen, but that I’ll stay with him a bit longer. Thirty minutes later, he tells me that he’ll be okay and tells me to go home. I give him a hug and wish him good night.