Can I Keep My Jersey?

by Paul Shirley

  When we got to the bus, my comfort level took a turn for the worse. The general closeness and the smell of my teammates’ post-game meals made me nauseous. When the bus began moving I broke into a cold sweat. But when we arrived at the airport, the fresh air of the out-of-doors seemed to revive me and so I got on the plane. The Bulls trainers, Fred Tedeschi and his assistant Eric Waters, had been concerned enough about my condition that they had called ahead in order to have the flight attendants convert one of the plane’s cabins into a bed. If my brain would have been functioning correctly, I probably would have thought, “Hmm, this seems like a lot of trouble for a guy with a bruised rib.” But I was not in a mood to argue. Lying down seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea.

  After confirming that I was comfortable in my little cabin, the trainers found their seats for taxi and takeoff, meaning that I was alone when the night’s fun began. Each bump on the runway elicited a little whimper from me and the general movement had me squeezing my eyes shut. The takeoff was no better; I began gasping as pain moved in stabbing waves from my side. It seemed that I could find no position that would make it more tolerable. As my condition worsened during the plane’s ascent, I called out to Scottie Pippen, who happened to be sitting in the adjoining cabin playing poker, and told him that I needed Fred Tedeschi. By the time Fred arrived on the scene, I was in bad shape. I was sweating like a whore in church. One side of my body was absolutely pounding. He asked me what was wrong; I told him that I was hurting a lot and could not seem to manage the pain. He informed me that there was not much they could do, as it was not a good idea to give me any pain medication until someone determined what was wrong with me. So I resigned myself to my fate and tried to deal with the situation. As the plane leveled, I hit the eye of my pain storm and my general discomfort subsided slightly. Unfortunately, when we began to descend toward Chicago (fortunately, Indianapolis-Chicago is not a long flight), the pain reintensified, and I began to near the brink of my tolerance. A few minutes into our approach, I went over the edge and began, well, screaming. It wasn’t so much a sustained woman-is-attacked-by-killer-zombie-in-a-movie scream as much as it was a man-watches-as-own-toenails-are-pulled-out scream. The pain seemed to take short breaks, redouble its efforts, and hit me from a slightly new spot every few seconds. The worst of it, as I mentioned earlier, was that I could not find a position that would help. Lying on my back, lying on my side, lying on my stomach, curling into a ball, raising my legs, lowering my legs—nothing helped. I knew at the time that I would later regret my childlike behavior, but I couldn’t stop screaming/crying/blubbering. I kept asking Fred if there was any chance I was going to pass out, because I wanted to. Sadly, he kept saying no. At one point, my face and fingers began to tingle, which only added to my confusion. I learned that the bizarre sensation was a result of my hyperventilation. Apparently, such behavior causes one’s body to expel too much carbon dioxide. I was given a paper sack into which, conceivably, I could either breathe, which was somehow supposed to help me get my carbon dioxide balance back to normal, or vomit, which would have at least given me something to do. At the time, my functional IQ was down to about 65, so I could hardly grasp the intricacies of my blood-gas levels. Consequently, the breathing bag did very little good. As we grew ever closer to the earth, I settled into a position lying on my stomach, my feet in the aisle, my face mashed against the side of the plane, and a paper bag poised under my mouth. I found a method of panting and moaning that seemed to give me the best chance of enduring and stuck with it as long as I could.

  I found out later that the pilots had been informed of my state; they had subsequently radioed ahead to the Chicago airport to request landing priority. I was told that an ambulance had been called from the air and would be waiting for us at the end of the runway. I still had enough brain function to realize the absurdity of that scenario but was too wracked with hurt to care. And, I thought, at least I had something to look forward to. Fred gave me constant updates regarding our proximity to the emergency vehicle, and I tried to maintain my pant-and-moan technique as long as I could. Upon cessation of the plane’s movement, everyone else was hustled off the plane while several EMTs were hustled on. I incredulously received the news that I would be expected to somehow heave myself from my prone position into some sort of seat with which they would carry me from the plane. I told them to wait a few seconds; the plane’s new found non-movement found me, if not pain-free, at least in better shape than I had been in for some time. They informed me that it would not help much to wait, at which point I thought, Easy for you to say. (A thought that would be repeated many, many times throughout the ordeal.) On the count of three, I gave it a go and fell, shrieking, back to my same position. It felt as if someone had stabbed me in the side with a bowie knife. After some consideration, I made another effort and, with the help of everyone standing around, made it into the stretcher thing, but certainly not silently.

  My first-ever ambulance ride was another pain-filled extravaganza. To me, it felt like the ambulance had the shock absorbers of a 1952 Ford truck. The EMTs started intravenous morphine, but it didn’t make much of an impact. Fortunately, the hospital was not far away. At least, that’s what people kept telling me. I disagreed. When we finally arrived, it was necessary to transfer me to a hospital bed. It was less than fun—in fact, as soon as they managed it, I flipped back onto my stomach with another yell and hoped I would never have to move again. A nurse came in and said they needed to remove my shirt; she asked if I minded if they cut it off. Again, I was struck with the absurdity of such an action, but was in no mood to voice my reservations. So a long-sleeved blue-and-black-checked shirt—size XL tall—met its demise at the hands of an ER nurse in Chicago. I was just happy that I didn’t have to move. At this point, the various parties involved had pumped a rather impressive amount of morphine into my system, with little result. Whether this speaks to the amount of pain I was feeling, the fact that I have the pain tolerance of a five-year-old, or just the sheer largeness that is me, I do not know. I was very thankful when they switched over to a wonder drug called Dilaudid. It did ten times the work of morphine. Heavenly. If I ever meet its inventor I will offer him fellatio. The Dilaudid finally took effect sometime after my CT scan (another uncomfortable experience—being moved from my bed to the CT machine and back again), and I was finally able to take stock of the situation. It was not a good one. The results of the hurried CT scan suggested that something inside me was bleeding rather spectacularly. It could not be determined whether it was my left kidney, the involved renal artery, or my spleen. The correct course of action, apparently, was to monitor my vital signs and wait. I was grateful that our trainer, Fred, was with me. Dealing with the situation with him around was hard enough; it would have been nearly impossible on my own. Fred stayed with me until six in the morning, and remained calm throughout. He called my parents with updates all through the night and kept the ER staff informed about my state as often as was needed. He did not, however, have an elixir that would stop the bleeding, so it was decided that I would be transferred to another hospital, one where the doctors under the team’s employ worked, so that I could be kept for observation. Fortunately, my blood pressure remained stable, so there did not seem to be any immediate need for surgery, although the idea was bandied about. I was told that if the bleeding did not stop on its own and/or my blood pressure dropped significantly, it would be time for an emergency surgery to remove part or all of one kidney and/or my spleen. So overall, my prospects were pretty good. Twenty-six years old, one kidney, no spleen. Fantastic. When I was sent by ambulance to the second hospital, Fred left to go home and I was finally able to try to get my bearings. I was shipped to intensive care and, as the Dilaudid finally started to take effect, went to sleep.

  April 5

  The impact of Austin Croshere’s knee with my side resulted in a lacerated spleen and a fractured left kidney. (I learned that it is termed fractured because the kidney is brittle and thus cracks more t
han tears.) The force carried by his knee drove both organs into my backbone, which opened up their respective backsides, spilling copious amounts of blood (a liter and a half, I was told) into my retroperi-toneal cavity. The bleeding stopped because the cavity filled with blood and, in essence, dammed the leak—there was no place for more blood to go. It turns out that millions of years of evolution are good for something after all.

  Fred had been concerned that I had ruptured something almost immediately after the incident in Indiana. At one point in his career Fred was on the training staff of the San Francisco 49ers and had observed a similar injury occur during one of the team’s football games. Because of his experience, he knew that standard protocol was to monitor the athlete’s blood pressure; if he were losing too much blood internally, his blood pressure would drop. (Which explains to me why they kept taking my blood pressure immediately after the incident. I was not smart enough to be suspicious of the fact that they were telling me I had a bruised rib yet kept measuring my blood pressure.) Given it all to do over again, I think Fred would have kept me in Indianapolis and would not have risked the flight back to Chicago. Luckily, I did not bleed out on the plane. Someone probably would have felt bad.

  The final diagnosis was not given to me until after the bleeding had slowed down enough that the doctors could pinpoint exactly what was going on. As I mentioned above, their first concern had been that the renal artery had been severed. If that had been the case, they would have operated in order to cauterize that artery and stop the bleeding. When they eliminated that scenario as a possibility and realized that my kidney and spleen were doing the bloodletting, they decided that I needed to stay in the hospital until they were sure the bleeding had stopped. The early discussion of the possible removal of either or both of the two organs in question remained theoretical; I was told that such barbarity was unlikely unless the bleeding did not cease on its own.

  Once it was determined, by the battery of doctors under the watch of the Bulls’ team doctor, Jeff Weinberg, that I was going to live, the next step was to control the substantial pain I was feeling and get me out of the hospital. The agony I was suppressing with massive doses of painkillers was being caused by the blood that had escaped its normal habitat and settled in a very abnormal place—outside, instead of inside, my spleen and left kidney. As blood filled the area around my spleen and kidney, that part of my body became similar to a very large bruise. A bruise is simply a collection of blood that leaks out in a particular site on the body. In my case, there was a whole bunch of blood in a place it was not supposed to be. Consequently, it exerted a fair amount of pressure on parts of my body not equipped to deal with that pressure. Of course, that same pressure will not subside until the blood is gone. (Eventually, it will be absorbed by my body. Which is both gross and comforting at the same time.) Until that process begins, there is no real reason for the pain to subside. Therefore, I take lots and lots of drugs.

  April 10

  I would like to discuss the Foley catheter now. Doctor’s orders included nothing but bed rest for the first few days of my hospitalization. Unfortunately, when a person is pumped full of fluid intravenously but cannot leave his bed to visit the bathroom, a bladderific logistical problem arises. Enter the Foley catheter. And when I write enter, I mean it both figuratively and literally.

  When the word catheter is spoken, I think small. I think of a tube that could fit in a vein or artery. I do not think of the length of hosing the nurse held up as she described how my logistical problem would be solved. If I were instructed to describe the particular piece of machinery they held in my best layman’s terms, I would say something like, “That there looks like some quarter-inch or three-eighths-inch industrial hosing.” (That was in layman’s terms…and white trash’s terms. I am familiar with both dialects.) I would not think immediately of a conduit between my bladder and the outside world. Unfortunately, there is no gentlemanly way of putting the next part. In order to get said catheter (and I’m not kidding about it being at least a quarter-inch in diameter) into my bladder, it was necessary to insert it. Into my urethra. I had always thought there was something in there that did not allow for wrong-way passage, like one of those spiked speed bumps in parking garages that result in flat tires if navigated going the wrong direction. Apparently I was wrong. The doctor did ease the transition by lubing the catheter. He then attempted to, er, straighten his target and next, gave everything a good shove. It was not the worst pain in the world, but it certainly ranks up there with the strangest. Women always like to blather on and on about the difficulty of pushing the head and shoulders of a baby out into the world—“imagine pushing a watermelon out of a hole the size of a quarter.” Bullshit. That’s supposed to happen. It is a biological norm. However, pushing a tube the wrong way down a tiny one-way hole is not meant to occur. Ever.

  They had to leave the catheter in for three days. The first twenty-four hours were the most difficult. Words fail to express the feeling; every movement caused chafing in a place I didn’t even know I could feel. It was not comfortable. But after a day, things seemed to work themselves out (or maybe the nurses finally got the tube taped to my thigh tightly enough that it couldn’t move around anymore) and I settled into the blissful existence of an infant…if said infant were on heavy pain medication and had the ability to complain about his situation.

  As I mentioned, I was subjected to the catheter for only a few days, which meant, of course, that at some point they had to take the thing out. I was none too keen on the plan, as I could not imagine how ripping something back out of the aforementioned hole could possibly be even remotely comfortable, but I was anxious to get back to the very male activity of vaguely taking aim in the direction of a toilet, so I relented. Again, the process was not as painful as I expected, but it was very odd. Indescribable, really. But I was safe in the knowledge that I wouldn’t have to do it again anytime soon….

  Wrong. They had to put it back in.

  Warning: the following is quite disgusting. Stop reading if the above was offensive—this will be worse.

  The pain “specialists” had come in on my case a few days after my arrival. My reliance on the wonder drug Dilaudid (or, as I liked to call it, heaven) was becoming a concern. It was the only drug that allowed me to sleep, but it is also a highly addictive narcotic. People in the know tell me it is bad to get addicted to drugs. I was all for ending my dependence on Dilaudid, but I could not seem to effectively express that all the Vicodin, morphine, Toradol, and Darvocet was about as effective as Children’s Tylenol. The solution was to put me on as many different things as possible and then hope for the best. I probably was not actually on that many drugs; I just remember taking a myriad of different pills and then, if I wanted to get some rest, asking for some Dilaudid. The upshot of all of these various medications was that they are very constipating. (As I noted earlier, it may be time to go read something else.) Five days into my hospital stay, I was not only loopy from the painkillers but couldn’t poop either. This eventuality led to another fun little hospital game I like to call Put a Foreign Object in Paul’s Ass—also known as Suppository Time. (Fortunately, I was spared the enema bag, but only by about twelve hours.)

  One night, post-suppository, I went on what was then a very long walk—probably about fifty yards. When I got back, I figured maybe I had loosened things up enough that I needed to make a seated entry into the bathroom log. So I sat down and had a go. Strange thing, though—I could not urinate. When I finally did force something out, it was little droplets of blood. This concerned me. I called out to my mother and sent her in search of a doctor. The resident on call came and, after some consultation with the bladder sensor, which told him I was full up, decided I needed the Foley treatment once again in order to relieve the pressure in there. I was overjoyed at the prospect. He repeated the catherization…to almost no avail. He used a syringe to pump saline in and out with the hopes of breaking something loose, but no real results were had. After some
consultation with his side-kick, he decided that he had inserted the Foley catheter incorrectly and would have to take it out and put in a new one. Again, splendid news for me. As he pulled that one out, I felt something give way and called for the bedside jug. Out poured about 500 milliliters of a cranberry-juice-like substance that was somewhere between blood and urine. (I know, this is repulsive.) Unfortunately, the flow abruptly stopped, leaving me still half full according to the bladder sensor. At this point, he scared me a little by saying that my little walk might have shaken something lose in the kidney region, thereby restarting the bleeding. He inserted the second catheter without difficulty and did his pumping move again. His second try worked, and little clots of blood began to flow down the clear tube. It was as beautiful a sight as something so disgusting can be. Relief was at hand.

  It turned out that my straining had caused my prostate gland to bleed. How the resulting blood found its way into my bladder I do not know or understand, but things cleared up nicely by morning and the resident’s doomsday words were pushed to the back of our minds.

  I have used the words us and we a lot because my mother was intimately (too much so, at least for her own sanity) involved in my stay in the hospital. She flew to Chicago the morning after the injury, with plans to stay as long as I needed her to. Aren’t mothers (especially mine) wonderful? It’s great that she’s here; I don’t know how a person would survive a hospital stay without an advocate watching over the situation. I know a reasonable amount about health care because of my mom’s nursing background and my own frequent encounters with doctors and trainers, but I would have been totally lost if left to my own devices. I was drugged up and sleep-deprived and in no condition to make decisions about my own future. I could barely choose between the chicken salad sandwich and the meat loaf for lunch, let alone make any decision about what was best for my body. I recommend no trips to the hospital without my mom at one’s side.