An Unexpected Adventure by George Ziemann -- October 20, 2008 While the idea of meeting an attractive woman and having her literally rip your clothes off within the first five minutes seems like a pretty awesome thing to have happen to you, especially when you're over 50 and it's in the middle of the week. But when they take you hostage on the very day your first album finally hits iTunes, it's still kind of annoying. Okay, some of my family has already heard some of this story and, as you can imagine from the intro, they probably have some misconceptions about what happened. As you cannot possibly imagine from the intro, some of them think I'm on the verge of death. Okay, some of you may remember the story of my migraine back in August. This has slowly improved, but as a result of what it did to my blood pressure that day, I had already linked up with my cardiologist, which was good because I had some artery blockage in the past that required angioplasty and stents on two separate occasions. I had been wanting to get that checked out again because it had been a while. In fact, I have an appointment for Wednesday to do a preventative maintenance check on all that stuff, which I expected to end up with another angioplasty sooner or later. The point of all that is that the migraine issue had put my personal medical team into action and they were taking pretty good care of me, or at least as good as the bureaucracy of the system would allow. So here's my adventure... So it's October 15, about 4 in the morning and I'm up for no good reason, but I've got several web pages ready to be swapped out because I have to downgrade the free versions of the Hayden's Wall songs to coincide with selling higher quality files on the major services that day. I've been waiting 35 fucking years to get into the retail market, today is the day, and I did it without a record label. It's going to be a great damn day. I'm going to send out some press releases and try to make a big thing out of it, blah, blah blah -- the promotion grind. But I get distracted by what seems to be gas pains in my chest. I get up and am walking around, my stomach is making gurgling noises, so I'm not overly concerned and expect it to pass momentarily. After a few minutes, it goes into my arms, making me consider that maybe this is not gas pain. Woke my wife up and told her I was going to the hospital because something wasn't right, but I didn't want to wait for her to wake up, get dressed and get her shit together to take me. The hospital is only 3 miles away. I got there in five minutes, parked in the garage and walked into the ER. I was still not really feeling bad until about the last 30 feet, when I started sweating profusely and my face turned cold. I walked up to the desk and said, "I think I'm having a heart attack." In reality, I didn't really think I was having a heart attack. Still don't think so. I saw my dad have a heart attack. He went "Ack!" like Bill the Cat, passed out and went down. I'm feeling gas pain. Granted, it's kind of getting intense for gas pain, but I did not fall down, pass out, or go "Ack!" It's been less than 15 minutes since I first started feeling something wasn't right, less than 10 minutes since it spread to my arms. Another 10 minutes of nitro tablets and then, a miracle - one of those truly unusual moments in time that bureacracy vanishes and the right thing happens. I have stepped to the front of the line to have the angioplasty done that I already suspected it was time for, except now they call it the Cardiac Cath Lab. Instead of waiting a couple more months, they're going to do it right this fucking minute. I have already had this done twice, knew it was due, so there's no real fear or panic. While the nurse is telling me this, the morphine begins to kick in. I sign the "Permission to Not Let You Die This Morning" agreement. The pain is disappearing, rapidly drifting into comfortably numb. The nurse says, "Okay, we have to put you in a hospital gown, so we're going to take all of your clothes off now, but don't worry, I've seen a penis before." I can't respond to that statement because I'm way past comfortably numb and well into the strange land of Dr. Morpheus, but I'm thinking, I've seen breasts before... and wondering if there's an agreement form for that. A doctor appears. He starts talking to me and I want to respond, but speaking seems far too monumental of a task for my brain to handle yet. "Well there were two blockages..." And now they're gone. "One where a earlier stent was..." That'll probably interesting in a couple of days but I'd like to go back to sleep now. "We put one new stent in, but you bypassed the other one by yourself..." I did what? How the hell does that work? "...which saved your insurance some money..." The Hostage Crisis The next time I wake up, I meet Jen, the ICU nurse. She starts asking me questions like do I know where I am, what day it is, how much I weigh and a few other questions. I'm still foggy so my responses come slowly at first, mostly because I have to remember how to talk first. But even if I had just waken up from a year-long coma, all of the answers were written on the whiteboard hanging on the wall behind her. Then she asked about pain. Chest? Arms? Groin (where they jabbed into me)? No. no. no. but my back is killing me. More morphine? Absolutely. The next time I wake up, I stay awake. It's noon-ish. I never lie flat on my back, I've already been that way for 6 or 7 hours now. My back is extremely unhappy about all of this, and it's still the only place on my body that hurts. A doctor comes in, starts asking me the whiteboard questions again and throws in, "What kind of work do you do?" "Well, I'm a musician and a producer, and I have this website..." The doctor is asking another question, but I'm still answering the last one, looking at the date on the whiteboard. "...and I'm releasing an album on iTunes today. I've got things to do, I can't be here." Jen says, "Yeah, you've got appearances to make, right?" No, I just need the Internet for about a half hour and, no, dammit, that won't work either. I need MY computer so I can upload those pages and song files I have ready to go. And send a few PR releases. Not that difficult, not a big workload, no excessive wear and tear on my body or any part thereof. I could do this flat on my back, medicated and chained to the wall. But I can't do it here. The pragmatic approach would be to say, "Oh, well. This album has been out for 6 years already, another couple days won't make a big difference." However, this was a personal milestone, and I was feeling particularly obsessive about it, like putting out a press release would make some difference and my master plan would be dashed because there were still high-quality free files out there. Irrational, I know, but that's how I felt. Added to this is the basic truth that I truly hate being in the hospital, and always have. It's like a hostage situation and this time I've got shit attached to, plugged into or embedded in both arms and my face, and I feel like a puppet on a short string. I've missed my antidepressant and, well, it takes me about a week off of them before I get depressed, but I start to get crabby the first day, especially if you deny access to every other vice at the same time. The odd thing is, the addiction that I craved most, the only one I gave any real thought to being deprived of, the only one I desperately wanted, was the Internet. And it was secondary to my primary desire, which was simply to roll over on my side and give my back a break. A lunch arrives and it actually looks appealing -- breaded chicken, green beans, some dessert-y looking stuff and fruit. This is merely an illusion because I am on the cardiac diet. There's coffee, but it's decaf. The sugar is fake. The creamer is fake. This looks like breaded chicken, but it has no semblance of flavor whatsoever. In retrospect, this was because the oxygen being pumped into my nose prevented my sense of smell from getting involved. If I had taken it off, things would have certainly been tastier. Duh. Of course, I didn't think of this obviousness. If I had tried the fruit, it would have been tasteless, too, and I would have become convinced that I was doomed to replicated, taste-free food that only looked like real food. That's the conclusion I came to anyway, but a tasteless grape would have sealed the deal. Plus, I'm still not allowed to sit too far up, I'm tethered to oxygen and IVs and a blood pressure cuff that were all making the simple process of using a knife and fork into a big production that sets off alarms every time I move. For tasteless food. By late afternoon, my back hurts worse than the chest pain that made me come to the hospital in the first place, and it has lasted 10 times as long. My Crabby Level has climbed into the yellow zone, and now I'm starting to embrace it. I'm giving Jen a hard time, despite her every effort to appease me. The Night Shift At 7 p.m., the shift changes, and I get this guy named Bob. Without my glasses on, Bob looks like Chas (Chad?), the blonde, spikey-haired guy from the telephone service commercials. You know, the guy who is having dinner with the wizard when the other guys show up. So Chas gives me his "hello, patient," speech and leads into, "I'm going to ask some questions now that might seem silly, but we've gotta make sure you're still coherent and there's not some delayed reaction going on." Naturally, just like everyone else who has asked these questions today, he's standing right next to the whiteboard. "What day is it?" I must have rolled my eyes, because he looked at the whiteboard and said, "I suppose it would be more challenging if I didn't stand right next to the answers." There was a brief effort to bring me some food, but I'm still tied to the wall, on my back, and I'm just not in the mood to deal with it again. A glass of ice water will be fine. Okay, we need to poke your finger for the third time today to check your blood sugar, then we'll take your temperature. And we need more blood. It's getting to be 8 p.m. I'm going to try to relax and watch one of my favorite shows, Criminal Minds, which I still think should be using my song, "Criminal Mind." The pillow speaker for TV is too damned loud, you can only turn it down to annoying, and Criminal Minds will obviously not be on this evening, judging from the fact that Obama and McCain are on every damn channel. Fuck it. I'll just try to sleep. The thing is, it's almost impossible to sleep in a hospital at night. Lights are on, speaker announcements, doctors being paged (including Dr. House, who was paged at least twice), alarms and buzzers are going off, and if it's yours, someone is going to come in and mess around for a while. If you do happen to accidentally fall asleep, or let them sedate you, they're still coming back around every few hours to poke your finger, take your temperature, take more blood, make sure the incision site wasn't bleeding. Every time they come in, they yell at you. "I'm turning this light on! It's going to be real bright!" Pow! Yes, it is. You guys ever heard of dimmers? You might want to check into it. Day 2 At 7 a.m., Jen is back. My wife, Deb, had come in to visit just before Jen left the previous evening and clued her into the idiosyncracies of my personal insanity. and why I'm going to be an raving lunatic asshole by the time she comes back, with special emphasis on the fact that this is why I take the Happy Pills. I am on the way to acting exactly as predicted, because I'm already off the Grumpy Scale. Now I'm starting to be pissed off about not being able to move. Other than that, I'm feeling physically fine. I've been watching my monitors every time they wake me up. The numbers are all good. Only one of the times that people came in to poke at my groin did anyone ever hit a tender spot. "Good morning, George. How are you feeling?" "I feel great. I need to get the hell out of here. I've got things to do." "Not gonna happen. Maybe tomorrow. I'm going to poke your finger now..." The day goes pretty much the same as the previous day, except I'm way more frustrated because I'm ready to do something. I feel great. I want to get up and move around. Problem: I was still in ICU. You can't get up and walk around if you're in ICU. If I was in a regular room, I could do that and, by midafternoon, the doctors had said I could be moved to a regular room, but there weren't any regular rooms available. And still the puppet strings. My wife shows up, with my daughter, Mac. Deb says, "Did they give you a Happy Pill yet?" "No." She reaches in her pocket and gives me two. I took one and dropped the other one in the hospital gown pocket, which was carefully constructed so that you miss the pocket completely and it falls through the other side. But it's coming a little late. I'm . While Deb is there, Jen comes in and says, "Is there anything I can do for you? Anything I can get you? Maybe a magazine?" "No. I am not a normal person. I am not entertained by the same things normal people are." And if it's in a magazine, it's old news anyway. While this is true, I was being a jerk about it because I was frustrated and pissed off. Didn't even bother to explain that I spent most of my time pushing information out instead of passively taking it in. I even chased Deb and Mac out, because who wants to hang around a snippy old dude with a bad attitude? I love you, but you don't need to watch this. See ya tomorrow. I'm just going to sit here and be pissed off. Eventually, I got moved to another room, got to stand up, walk around, and went home the next day, although there was one incident where a girl stabbed me four times with a needle trying to find blood. I think it goes without saying that she was doing it wrong. There was also a guy named Charlie that yelled gibberish all night and laughed about it. Dr. House was paged once again. I wondered if that keyboard he let Dave Matthews use was handy anywhere. And headphones.