To be honest, I’ve never thought of San Francisco as a real city. There are a few tall buildings, but they’re utterly canceled out by all the cute little pink-and-purple painted houses. And it’s really kind of small.
So when I found myself in the emergency room at the UC San Francisco Medical Center, I had the knee-jerk obnoxious New Yorker reaction: I must flee home, out of the provinces, to where people know what they’re doing! But health status precluded that, and it turned out my surgeon was actually very qualified. Peter’s mind was put at ease when Dr. Schiller, the very heartfelt (no pun intended) cardiologist, took him aside and said, “You know, we’re all from Boston anyway.”
For some reason, I wasn’t thinking of all the thoroughly crappy hospital experiences I’d had in New York. And that’s not the least bit fair, because UCSF was leagues better than even Mt. Sinai, straight from the get-go.
The ER (excuse me, ED–emergency department) waiting room was a soothing off-white, furnished with light-pine curvy Ikea chairs, a warm overhead glow, a smattering of magazines, and, happily, no one waiting. Compare this to the Mt. Sinai ER, where rickety chairs-in-a-row salvaged from some abandoned airport were crowded in the center of a fortress of vending machines, under a grim, dim fluorescent light. Winter air rushed in from a side room under construction, and the ladies’ room made me happy I was wearing boots. It was the kind of place that made you want to wear a face mask.
At UCSF, I was ushered in promptly, and with compassion. Again, not something you find in NYC, where everyone has already seen everything, and your niggling half-blindness is just no big deal, and actually a bit of a pain in the ass to the triage nurse.
Within minutes, I was sitting on a comfy bed in a private room. I can’t convey how astounding this was. If LIJ Forest Hills was Stoner Joe and Buddhist Bob’s Youth Hostel in Nepal, UCSF was the new Uma Paro resort in Bhutan. My nurse was a hip, competent, comforting young woman who explained what they were planning, who they were waiting for, and what would be involved.
And it all happened quickly! Well, quickly for the ER, anyway. Within half an hour, an attending opthalmologist came around; another half an hour, and the opthalmologic surgeon was there. When they said they were going to run a CT scan on me, they came and got me about 40 minutes later–along with apologies for the wait. And directly into the scanner–no sitting abandoned in a wheelchair out in the hall.
I’d go on, but positive reviews are boring to read. Just imagine that for eight days, I had a flock of kindly nurse angels gathered around me–kind of like private butlers. I even got a sponge bath twice. I got whisked from ER straight to the ICU, even pre-surgery. The food was passable, and there was real silverware, not plastic, not to mention butter and yogurt. The nurses made an effort to feed me in off-hours: “We have a very nice fruit-and-cottage-cheese plate today,” one even said to me, as if we were at Diet Bennigan’s or something. (I was, however, very disappointed in the Jello–which was not Jello, I suppose because vegetarians and kosher-keepers would object, but something thickened with carageenan. Humph.)
The only dodgy-feeling part of the whole stay (aside from a really protracted discharge process–but that seems to be the case everywhere) was when I got taken down to the OR for surgery. First, there’s something disturbing about being pushed along at speed on a gurney–I always think of that creepy movie Jacob’s Ladder. Also, we’d descended into what felt like the bowels of the hospital: the halls were narrower, more people were rushing, and everyone was wearing matching scrubs.
I got wheeled into the most cramped quarters I saw at UCSF: a sort of pre-OR holding pen, where gurneys were lined up in rows, separated by curtains. Even then, though, some people got some chairs for my dad and his girlfriend to sit next to me. The atmosphere seemed tense–everyone was pretending to be calm, but they weren’t, and the sense of urgency hung in the air. Imagine, perhaps, a combination of airport and slaughterhouse.
Fortunately the sedative and its amnesiac effect kicked in just when the nurses promised (“It’s like drinking a glass of wine in one gulp,” one said; “I wouldn’t know a thing about that,” I replied), so I have only about ten minutes of memory from there. But those ten minutes did include a nervous-making exchange with the nurses in which I had to alert them to the fact that I’d never been asked what kind of replacement valve I wanted, in case it came down to it.
But to compensate, the ICU room was large enough to accommodate just about every visitor I had at once, and my private room was as big as a hacienda’s dancehall. The view out the window was all wobbly eucalyptus trees, along with some elaborate ventilation systems, all gleaming silver, in the foreground. I felt like I was in some colony on a jungle-covered moon.
Once I got around to walking, I could also take in the view from the fabled solarium, a corner room with a view down the hill and across most of San Francisco, with the Golden Gate Bridge smack in the middle. From there, it really did look like a city.
(Fun in Hospital, Part II)
(Fun in Hospital, Part I)
