Somebody Tell Me How I Got Here

I just couldn’t remember calling the ambulance. My mother told me I’d been complaining about the pain in my stomach and how she said to get a taxi and go to a hospital and instead I called 911. “I don’t remember any of that,” I said. “You know, I don’t remember how I got here.” All I remembered was the dreams during the coma, then waking up in an ICU and my brother coming in to look at me like I was back from the dead. “Well, I told you to get a taxi,” my mother said. “But an ambulance makes more sense.”

The conversation shook something loose, because later that night the memory dropped into place. I was lying there and counting the tiles in the ceiling and wondering about the gray plastic box they had set among them. One nurse, Jamaican accent, was joking with another, Filipina, in the hallway. I got out my phone and looked at my recent calls and there it was: 911, 2024-10-07. I’d called; now I remembered. The dispatcher had asked no questions. I said I needed an ambulance and five minutes later a hamburger-faced man was peering through my building’s front door (it’s mainly glass). He gestured; I gestured back and locked my apartment door behind me. I remember thinking that with a little more organization I could’ve been out on the front steps waiting.

The ambulance proved a mini-affair, room for a two-member crew and me. The hamburger-faced guy was in his 30s and his sleeves were rolled up; he had curly black hair, lots of it; it climbed high. The other crew member was a small, trim woman in her 20s with cheekbones that flared out so dramatically her other features seemed lost: slot mouth, sharp little nose. Nice-looking in a distinctive way, I guess, definitely not pretty. The man asked me some questions and maybe he felt my pulse. Then the two of them strapped me into a gurney and we were off. Either the city streets are mainly potholes or the ambulance had been set to blend. Anyway we shook hard and kept on shaking. After that, nothing.

Not much from before it either. I couldn’t remember what had made me call. Pain in my stomach? I remembered no pain in my stomach. Saturday night I’d indulged a favorite habit in warm weather and slept straight on the floorboards; believe it or not, I like the firmness. But it was fall and cold had crept in. I shrank beneath the thin blanket until I almost felt warm. Then I decided not to be an idiot, got up, put on sweatpants and a sweatshirt, and slept on my futon. Too late. I woke up with a temperature and had to stagger a long two blocks to the pharmacy, where I bought Pedialyte and a six-pack of protein drink. Eating was out of the question but I wasn’t going to starve myself. The rest was a matter of canceling appointments and hunkering down in my apartment. That is, until I was in the ambulance shaking its way to the hospital.

Lie immobile with tubes down your throat and after a couple of weeks your muscles turn to pudding. That’s how I am now, learning how to walk down a corridor without a walker and without falling over. Sometimes I wonder why I let myself in for this. Was my chilly hour on the floor really that catastrophic? In pulling that stunt, had I been a complete idiot? Alternatively, what felt so terrible that I needed a hospital? I raised the first pair of questions with one of the young medical residents; they come by to talk with cases and get some experience. He listened carefully and seemed to think I hadn’t been that stupid, but he didn’t really say much. The second question stayed with me until one night when I was cleaning out my inbox. There I found emails from October 6, the day before the ambulance call.

Me: “I have terrible cramps in my right side, near the heart. When I move, I find myself yelping and groaning from the pain.” My friend said things had to get better fast or it was time for the emergency room. Me: “Maybe you’re right. The pain is absolutely incredible. I have to consciously stop my right side from going into spasms.” Friend: “Go!” There we have it, in black and white. Not stomach pain but still pain, intense and located near the heart, and it’s documented in a piece of correspondence. I felt the pain, I worried about it, I wrote about it, I got intubated because of it. Then it was all gone, along with a section of my memory.

I told my mother the next time we talked. “It was you and Lucien,” I said. “You both told me to go.” This spurred reminiscence on her part. “They didn’t carry you in,” she said. “When you got there. You got up and walked to the desk yourself.”

“I don’t—,” I said.

“Did you tell me that or did your brother tell you that?”

“I think—,” I said.

“Or did I tell you that?”

“You told me,” I said. “He told you and you told me.”

“I thought so,” she said. “I guess you don’t remember much.” She’s right, I don’t.