TLW (The Little Woman) had spoken to the doctor and he had given her the impression that it may be leukemia. The white cell count was high, but he wasn’t sure. That afternoon she came to the hospital, and they would not allow children into my room, so she stood outside my window as I look down from the second floor. There on the walkway stood my 2-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter.
“Daddy? Are you working?” My son asks.
TLW told him I was working, and I would be working for a little while, that was why I wasn’t coming home for a while.
I left the window and it was the lowest pint of my life. I hadn’t cried that hard in many years, and I thought that that might be the last time I would ever see my kids again. The afternoon was depressing, and then I got a call that they were going to come and extract bone marrow from my chest.
The technicians came and inserted a needle/tube into the chest after spraying it with a red disinfectant. They stuck an extractor into the tube and drew some bone marrow, leaving the red spray on my chest. Overhead they had a mirror where I could see what they did, but I don’t remember if it hurt or not.
That evening my father came to visit me. Dad was squeamish when it came to blood, or incisions, and he was getting impatient about my being in trouble and no one knew what was wrong. Seeing my chest from his stance at the end of the hospital bed he asks:
“What’s that red stuff on your chest? Blood?”
“No, they drilled a hole in my chest and drew out bone marrow.”
Dad’s eyes roll in his head and he falls back, onto a chair, looking very pale.
The next day, the doctors do a scan of my chest, and as they do, my regular doctor pops his head into the x-ray room and tells me the next day they will do a biopsy of my liver, that they will stick a needle in me and snip a piece of my liver, that it would hurt!
The next day my doctor shows up bright and early and very cheerful.
“I’ve got great news for you, we have figured out what you have.”
It seems his brother, also a doctor in Manhattan, is very sick. What does he have? The very same symptoms I had! I had an infected spleen that infected my liver. I wet home the next day, and the only thing I could do for it was wait it out. It seems I probably caught the bacteria on the subway commuting back and forth to work in the city.
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