I spent a long afternoon last week in the emergency room of a local hospital pondering the inscrutable mechanisms of my aging body and marveling that, here in my eighth decade, there are still life lessons to be learned.
That’s a charitable encapsulation of an episode that began with a late-night dinner at a neighborhood bistro and concluded with an ER doctor employing 12 shiny staples to close a gruesome wound in my noggin. Here’s some of what (I hope) I’ve learned from the experience.
Lesson No. 1: Avoid rich desserts before bedtime.
My Lovely Wife and I dined fashionably late, lingering over our wine and a rather-too-large slice of cake and ice cream. I’ll occasionally decline dessert offerings in the late evening hours, as it often results in some gastric distress, but I cheerfully ate my share, paid the bill, and we bicycled home in the twilight.
I awoke around 4 a.m. with an urgent need to discharge in whatever way possible the materials that were churning in my bloated digestive system. (I will spare you the grisly details.) At some point, I stood up near the bathroom sink, blacked out, and collapsed to the floor.
Lesson No. 2: When you fall down, stay down.
When I came to, after what seemed like a good deal of time later, I figured that I’d fallen asleep on the floor next to the bathtub. I stood up and immediately fainted again, falling backward into the bathtub. I regained consciousness after what again appeared to me to be some period of time and found that I’d taken the shower curtain and rod down with me. That was annoying, so I climbed out of the tub and began putting everything back into place when MLW arrived on the scene.
Lesson No. 3: Listen to common-sense advice.
MLW had heard the first tumble and assumed the cats had knocked something over, but the second fall (which happened in quick succession, she reported later) brought her out of the bedroom to find me dutifully stringing the shower curtain back into place.
“You should sit down,” she suggested as she nudged me away from the bathtub and encouraged me to get off my feet. I backed out of the room, fainted again, and “fell like a board” (as she later described it) into the hallway, banging my head against the molding on the doorway opposite the bathroom.
The drops of blood on the floor indicated some head damage, but MLW noticed no signs of stroke. “Do you want me to call 911?” she ventured. I demurred and shuffled, extremely carefully, back to bed.
Lesson No. 4: Urgent care may not be the first place to go if you’re a senior with a head injury.
About a year ago, I took my “hypertensive crisis” to an urgent care clinic, where doctors ran a series of tests and referred me to the ER for more tests. So, I should’ve known better than to seek some sutures somewhere other than the ER. Still — now the morning after the falls — MLW agreed to drive us to the clinic and, sure enough, the nurses checked my vitals, asked me all the questions I knew I would later be asked at the ER, examined the gash on my skull, and . . . sent me to the ER for more tests.
Lesson No. 5: When you get to the ER, don’t assume the doctors and nurses are going to immediately focus on your primary complaint.
The ER was relatively calm when we arrived, and I didn’t have to wait long before a nurse began taking my vitals and . . . yes, asking me the same questions I’d already answered at the urgent care clinic. She rolled me in a wheelchair to my room, where MLW and I spent the next four hours waiting for someone to attend to the wound on my head.
Our shared solitude was interrupted occasionally for blood pressure checks, blood draws (two), an EKG, a CT scan, and a tetanus shot. “You haven’t had one since 1958!” the nurse exclaimed during one of the livelier interactions of the afternoon. I wasn’t sure how she knew that, but I did mention that I’d had one sometime in the late 1990s at this very facility — a visit that apparently went unrecorded by hospital statisticians.
A different nurse eventually arrived to clean the gash and prepare it for stapling, which is the preferred method for closing head wounds, he explained. I told him I was familiar with the procedure, having paid another visit to this ER in the early aughts when I had cracked my head open after a bike accident. I don’t recall receiving a tetanus shot on that occasion. Or any blood draws, EKGs, or CT scans. Of course, I was barely 50 at the time.
The stapling itself — a dozen thwacked into place, forming a gracefully curved line right along the part in my hair — took hardly any time at all.
Lesson No. 6: The “gut–brain axis” is real.
Before he stapled my noggin back together, the doctor reviewed my test results in that slightly hurried, jargon-filled manner I’ve come to expect from healthcare providers: no skull fractures or cardiovascular abnormalities, no sign of stroke, no red flags from the blood work. I was most likely the victim of some vagus-nerve malfunction.
Gastric disturbances — or even imbalances in the gut microbiome — are dispatched by the vagus nerve to parts of the brain regulating the autonomic nervous system. Trouble in the vagal network is known to cause abdominal bloating (check), acid reflux (check), blood pressure fluctuations (check), nausea (check), dizziness (check), and fainting (check).
That’s what I thought was going on, so it was mildly satisfying to have my theory corroborated, however murkily, by a medical professional. So MLW and I were discharged into the rush-hour traffic, grateful that it wasn’t something more serious.
Lesson No. 7: No one notices if you suddenly begin parting your hair on the opposite side.
Even if they noticed it, MLW tells me, they just wouldn’t comment.
