The un-common cold

Well without fail I am sick. Shut-up to everybody who is thinking they already knew that. What I am getting at is I now have the cold Shaymus has. I knew it was coming, it was just a matter of time, what with him coughing and sneezing all over me not to mention wiping his runny nose on MY SHIRT. When he is sick he wants to be all over you which I guess most kids do, but this really sucks when you are immuno-suppressed. Since my transplant I dodge sick people like they have the plague. I have to since I no longer have a natural defense system. Shay has really been into being read to lately. Now that he is sick he really wants to just sit on my lap and have me read books to him while he coughs, sneezes, oozes and drips snot all over the place. If he were not my kid I would have chased him off with a bottle of spray bleach. But I cannot so, inevitably every time he gets sick, I get sick. So here I type with a sore throat and a stuffy, runny nose hoping this one passes quickly. What has been interesting since my transplant is that I no longer get the whopping colds that make you lay low for days on end making you think you are gonna die. I asked a fellow transplant about this and he said experienced the same "dilemma" if you will. He inquired with one of our Cardiologists at Stanford who had found that the immuno-suppressed body can develope a way of ignoring some viral threats that the body is exposed to. I have not gotten sick as often as I did prior to being transplanted nor as badly. But, I have developed a keen eye for the sick, kind of a self-defense mechanism for I know I am at a huge dis-advantage. After surgery you are "indoctrinated" on the "new do's and don'ts" of life. Your new best friend is a bottle of hand sanitizer. Public restrooms are.....well, I am sure you can figure that one on your own. I will not touch anything in a public restroom. Having a vertical advantage I will often grab the top of a door, where most cannot reach, or will often wait for someone else to open the door then use my foot to hold it open.
Immuno-suppression sucks, but it beats the alternative. I always tell people I am on the right side of the dirt and plan on keeping it that. I hated having to wear a mask when in the hospital. Since most hospitals are living, breathing germ factories they are also the worst place on the planet for a new transplant. When in the hospital I used to walk up the masked ones and ask what organ they got. Most would ask how I knew and I would point to yellow mask they were wearing then tell them I recieved a heart. With suppression if you spike a fever it means an instant trip to the ER. Fevers can be an early warning sign to rejection. Any sustained or spiked fever warrrants a call to the on-call heart failure cardiologist who will determine whether it's a run to the ER or crawling back into bed. Once, I spiked a fever and was sent packing down to Stanfords ER for what turned out to be "Hell-Night."
I get there and check in like everyone else, they just know I am coming after being notified by the cardilogist. As I sit there giving my information to the lady behind the counter she notifies a nurse that I have arrived and said nurse notifies her I had been there for over an hour. So I calmly turn to the nurse to notifiy her that I "just arrived" and had not teleported prior to my current arrival. Thus began 18hrs of sheer stupidity. It started off normally, blood draw and a chest x-ray then give an oral report of what is wrong or how I am feeling...yada, yada, yada. Being a transplant gets you a few perks in the ER, like a private room if available so as to keep the sick people away from you, but on this night once I got into my "suite" everyone seemed to have forgotten about me. I spoke with an ER doc around 4:00am. notified him that my fever had been gone for over 2 hrs. Regurgatated all the info from earlier to this doc then had one of the oddest conversations with a Stanford ER doctor...ever.
"So, you have had a tranplant?" 
"yes" 
"a heart transplant?" 
"yes" 
"and where did you have this transplant?" 
"here" 
"you had your transplant at Stanford" ( all I am thinking at this point is I got Dr. Phuckin Idiot ) 
"yes, one floor up and down the hall"  (trying to supress the sarcasm)
"okay, do you have a cardiologist?"  (duh)
"yes, Dr. Hunt" 
"ummmmmm, this Dr. Hunter" (now Dr. Phuckin Idiot cannot hear)
"DR.HUNT, SHARON HUNT (i am now speaking slow for I think he rode a little bus to med school)
"yes, Dr. Hunt, is she a cardiologist?" (no, she is my fucking proctologist)
"yes"
"here at Stanford" (so now I am about to lose it for all that I can think is that she probably wrote some of the books Dr. Phuckin Idiot had to read to get thru med-school, that she is a world renowned cardiologist, from Stanford, and Dr. Phuckin Idiot does not know her. AND to top it all off I cannot take my eyes off of these stupid ass shoes this guy is wearing. they look like some kind of 70's era italian rejects that he picked up at a garage sale.)
DEEEEP BREATH
"Yes, Dr. Hunt is a cardiologist here at Stanford
"okay, uuuummm we are waiting for your labs to come back"
"they drew the labs 5hrs ago"
"oh, well we will look into where they are"
"I have to pee, really bad"
"so when did your fever start?
"yesterday, I have to pee really bad, can I use the restroom or do you want a urine sample"
"that's a good idea, we'll get you a urinal"
so 10 minutes later I get a urinal and fill it and start buzzing the nurse for another one. She arrives and tells me she left one next to the bed and I point to the one on the floor and tell her I need another one, which leaves her astonished that someone could fill a 1 liter urinal and still have to go.
They say Shit rolls down hill and it did on this night, then morning, then afternoon. I had not been seen for about 8hrs when I got up and walked outside to call Melanie to let her know I was leaving. On my way out the door I pass a cardiologist I know and we exchange pleasantries. Unbeknownst to me he was coming down to see where I was because they were waiting for me in the Cath-Lab upstairs for over four hours and were getting no answer from the ER. I eventually end up getting a routine biopsy in the Cath-Lab, which is a welcome sight since these people know me. I go to recovery and am waiting to be released when Mark, a nurse I have had in the past tells me the Doctor who took over my case now wants to "admit me" to "release me."(WTF?????) Had it not been for Mark I would have walked out the door. The one and only debacle I ever encountered at Stanford and it was one for the ages. I need some chicken soup, my throat hurts.