Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [115]
“Twelve hours for what?”
Shocked that I'm not grasping the full gravity of what he's telling me, he tries again, making it simpler still. “If you don't let us operate within the next twelve hours …”
“Yes?”
“… you're going to die.”
Five hours later, I wake up in an uncomfortably hard bed with the smell of disinfectant in my nostrils, a sharp cramp in my gut, and a tube from an IV pole attached very painfully to a hole in my wrist.
I'm sharing a room with another patient. Youngish-sounding guy. I can't see his face owing to a plastic curtain drawn between us, but I eavesdropped on one of his phone calls earlier on my way to the bathroom and overheard him telling someone he'd come in for a routine biopsy after finding globs of blood in his urine. Yeuw.
Popular “dude,” though. Very Hollywood. Sounds like one of those well-oiled business types you might encounter at the Hyatt Regency in Century City, the place I first met The Thumb, the kind who are always “on,” always wheeling and dealing to stay afloat. Roses arrive for him by the truck-load almost daily. Some are delivered, others brought personally by a steady chorus line of male friends, plus a few—usually male—associates from his office, who drop in with scripts for him to read or contracts to sign.
Throughout his stay, the man's BlackBerry rings almost nonstop with work-related matters, whereas mine rarely stirs, although I did receive a couple of supportive messages yesterday, including one from The Thumb, which was good of him.
Nothing from Fat Kid, I notice. No e-mails, no calls, no cards or flowers. Naturally, this leaves me troubled. The host of a major cable travel show nearly dies on your watch, and you don't even check in to see how he's doing? I mean, it's crazy. Then again …
There's a rule in television: it's never your fault, even when it is. Any display of interest or concern at this pivotal time might be interpreted as an admission of guilt, or that he contributed to the problem in some way, and nobody wants to place themselves in that position. Therefore silence is the best option for now, he's probably thinking. Stay quiet, keep his head down, and let the crisis pass. Which means, no get-well e-mails, no calls, no cards, no flowers.
Ho-hum.
It's very boring lying in hospital. The doctors won't discharge you immediately after a gall-bladder operation, in case something went wrong during surgery and your bowels have stopped working. Plus, in my case, they have to completely flush the laplap, oily sardines, cod's tongues, pappardelle, and God knows what else out of my liver and get it back up to speed. Result: I'm confined to bed with the IV tube jammed into my wrist for almost an entire week.
Friends and neighbors have been ordered not to come visit. My stomach hurts too much to talk. And the last thing I want right now is the Vice President of Overseas Sales (Pacific Rim) sitting at my bedside with a broad told-you-so smirk on his face. Damn him.
But I'm not completely without company. My partner drops in twice to see how I'm doing, which helps break the monotony. And, once, I open my eyes to find a crowd of student doctors hunched in around my bed, smiling, as if I've just told the greatest joke ever. Subsequently, I find that half of them are fans of the show and wanted to come up to the ward to tell me that. One of them admits that he'd like to host a TV travel show of his own someday. (“You do? Well, great,” I mumble, unimpressed. “You can have mine. I'm pretty much done with it. Television's not for me. I'm just not suited to it. Physically, emotionally, temperamentally”)
Otherwise, the days crawl by without incident.
Mind you, I'm not whining. At least I'll survive. Which is more than the guy in the bed next door has got going for him.
I heard the result of his biopsy this afternoon. The doctor stopped by after lunch and addressed him somberly, dropping his already-soft voice to a grave, guarded tone that had me craning my neck to hear.
“I'm afraid the news is not too good,