Under Treatment

Last Friday was a bizarre day.

I had had a cold all week, but still looking forward to going to Denver. Tyler had 50-yard-line tickets to the Chargers-Broncos game and had asked me to come visit him and Kathleen and go to the game. Friday morning, getting up and getting ready to go to the airport, I actually felt better. But as Karen drove me down, I felt some real congestion starting up.

She let me out, I got into a curbside line, but was coughing so hard I had to step out of line twice. I couldn't get my breath and felt like I might throw up. I started to feel totally isolated, alone in a crowd. I got upstairs and through security, but on the concourse it really hit me. It felt like I had a column of warm, salty water, bubbling in my windpipe, and it was coming up to drown me. Coughing did no good. The water was right there, bubbling just beneath my throat, and I couldn't breathe.

I stopped and sat down. I envied the people passing by, completely unconcerned with their health or immediate future. I had my boarding pass in my pocket but realized that I was not going to get on the airplane. My seat was 25A, and I could see one of these futile coughing fits starting up as the plane left the gate, and I could not get up to go the restroom and put my head between my legs to let the mucus drain and get some air.

I took my pass up to the gate and handed it to the boarding agent. "I am sick and can't go on your airplane today." I called Karen to come get me. "You're kidding!" she said, knowing how I had looked forward to this trip. Tyler and I had been figuring menus all week, and he had asked me for a recipe for elk chili. I made one up and sent it to him, without any confidence it would be edible.

An hour later Karen and I were on the phone to Kaiser, begging to see my primary care physician. When I told the screening nurse what had happened, she referred me straight to the emergency room. I felt so bad for Karen; she had been looking forward to some quiet time, and now this. Talking to the registration nurse, I could barely breathe. Half an hour later, in Bed 13 of Module D in the emergency area, a nice, engaging doctor named Chiang confirmed I had pneumonia. "But I had a pneumonia shot last year," I said. He shrugged. "There are different types of pneumonia."

He and a wonderful nurse named Rhonda took care of me, getting xrays, studying histories, taking blood cultures out of one arm and feeding antibiotics into the other. I told her I had really wanted to be on an airplane on this particular morning, but the way I felt, this emergency room, under her care, was really the place for me to be. And then I had an epiphany. Money is the combat issue in the health care debate, but to anyone in a situation like mine, there are two words that are priceless: "under treatment." Until those two words are available, on any given day, to any given citizen, this country is not prioritizing correctly.