Nonfiction by Joan Potter
“Just slip this under your tongue, honey,” said Margie, the night nurse. She held out a tiny white pill. It was six-forty-five in the morning, almost the end of her shift.
“What is this?” I mumbled. I was feeling groggy and anxious, and the pain in the left side of my chest was still there. I had spent a long night in the hospital, trying to get a few hours of sleep while bells rang, buzzers sounded, the IV needle dug into my wrist, and nurses held long, loud conversations out in the hall.
“It’s nitroglycerin,” said Margie. “It’ll help the pain in your chest.”
I dropped the pill into my mouth, and in seconds my head began to pound. Margie had walked away from my bed and was doing something across the room. My skin prickled, and I was soon covered with an icy sweat. I felt myself becoming lighter and lighter, floating upward into some other world.
“Margie, help me,” I whimpered.
I could see the silhouette of her wide back looming by the door. “Take a deep breath,” I heard her say. Slowly she turned and moved toward my bed. “Take deep breaths,” she said.
She grasped my hand and rubbed my palm with her thumb. “What’s your name? Where do you live? Do you have brothers and sisters? Where do they live?”
I couldn’t answer. Through the fog I heard her voice becoming more frantic. “The doctor…blood pressure…red cart.” Then, other voices. “She’s looking better. She’s getting some color.”
I opened my eyes and saw Margie, another nurse, and a blond woman in a white coat, a stethoscope around her neck, all standing around my bed. “Your blood pressure dropped,” the doctor said. “It was a reaction to the nitroglycerin.”
Margie walked away and I never saw her again.
My hospital experience had started the day before on a Sunday morning. I’d had an ache in my chest since Thursday. It was on the left side, but it was not a sharp pain and didn’t radiate down my arm. I thought I might have been focusing on it too much, and figured it would probably just go away. Company was arriving on Saturday, a couple I hadn’t seen for ages. I couldn’t call and tell them not to come. I had to straighten the apartment, cook, chat with them for the two or three hours of their visit, and then clean up.
But by the next morning the pain – which I’d been trying to ignore all Saturday evening – was still there, dull, but persistent. I knew I couldn’t put it off any longer. I called my doctor, who said I should have it checked out. My daughter lived nearby so I gave her a call, trying to sound casual. She soon appeared at my door and we sped to the hospital.
Before long I was on a stretcher in the emergency room, hooked up to monitors. For what seemed hours I lay stretched out in my cubicle, bells dinging in the background, nurses taking blood, a man x-raying my chest, each activity interspersed with periods of restlessness and discomfort.
Finally a doctor entered, a small, pale, humorless man with glasses and thin gray hair. He told me I should stay overnight and have a stress test in the morning. But all I wanted was to get out of that place, go home, and come back the next day. He managed to talk me out of that, and I was soon wheeled away and put in a room on the cardiac corridor. My TV didn’t work, and all they’d given me to eat was tasteless mushy food. I wasn’t especially worried, just exhausted and annoyed that I had to be there.
The next morning, a couple of hours after Margie had fed me the nitroglycerine pill that could have ended my life, I was wheeled down to the ice-cold stress-test room. I sat with a group of patients, all of us swaddled in blue blankets, until it was my turn to get connected to a heart monitor and run on an increasingly speedy treadmill. My heart was fine, a doctor announced. I was released.
A few days later, during a visit with my primary care doctor, I described the nitroglycerine experience. She rolled her eyes. “You could have had a stroke. At least now you know you have strong cerebral arteries.”
Joan Potter‘s essays have appeared in anthologies ad literary journals, including The Bluebird Word, The RavensPerch, Persimmon Tree, Bright Flash Literary Review, New Croton Review, and others. She is the author or coauthor of several nonfiction books. The most recent is the collaborative memoir “Still Here Thinking of You.”
