I awoke in a parched, druggy haze, sunlight crashing through the blinds like a scene out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Hospital.  I was in a hospital.  OK.  I squinted and rubbed the crust from the corners of my eyes, vaguely noticing there was an IV tube in my arm.  Flowers and balloons filled the room.  How did all this get here so quickly?  Get well cards were already tacked onto a corkboard strip just beyond a very uncomfortable-looking beige pleather hospital chair.  My Mom’s clunky purse slouched against the wall on the floor and her sweater lay in a clump on the rolling table near my bed.  Her purses were a force of nature, always and forever.  They probably averaged 13 pounds – half of which was comprised of Bic lighters, loose change and rolls of Lifesavers.  If she ever needed to, she could have bashed an assailant senseless with her purse.  I thought I caught a whiff of Vetiver.  That meant my father was around.  Or had been recently.  I remembered yesterday walking down toward Macy’s at the Short Hills Mall, shopping for clothes to head off to my freshman year at Lafayette College.

I reached down toward my abdomen and could feel dozens of staples pressing hard like a zipper against a sweaty gauze pad, my belly distended and sore.  I reached further down and realized a catheter had been inserted, the tube taped to my leg, and the whole genital department was also very sore.  The stubble of coarse hair growing back seemingly everywhere on my lower body.  Razor.  Yes.  I remembered that guy shaving me.  Got it.  The prior night was coming together in my brain.  I was piecing this together like a puzzle.  Dude with a massive afro shaving me dry with a Bic disposable razor.  Feeling each follicle tug and then snap off.  Bags of ice under my armpits and between my thighs because I was at 105 degrees when my father laid me on a gurney at Overlook Hospital.  They don’t like to cut you when your temperature is over 100 degrees, I later learned.  What’s happening to me?  “Hey homes, just relax.  They think your appendix burst.  I am shaving you for surgery,” said the gigantic, shadowed afro in the darkened room.  The repetitive drag of the razor went from my nipples to my knees.

There was a doctor in the room looking at my chart, making some notes.  I would later learn he was the young gun on the surgical team, resident, intern or whatever you call them, but at that moment, he was the first person in a white coat I had seen in what felt like hours.  But it hadn’t been hours – I had been in the ICU for several days.  He didn’t acknowledge me even though I was awake and rummaging around under my white gauzy blanket, getting my bearings. Clearing my throat, making sounds, wanting to be noticed, manifesting him to interact.  He just stared at my chart, looked at the monitors and took more notes.  My mouth was like an abandoned kiln in some West Texas landfill, dusty and desolate.

He looked like a Ken Doll had sprung to life, this surgeon-in-training.  Tall with sandy blonde hair – something of a Laird Hamilton look.  Surely first in his class at the prestigious University of No Bedside Manner Medical School.  My tongue was dry and swollen, but I tried to break the silence in a feeble, wispy voice that sounded unlike my own.  “So, it was my appendix, Doc?” I mumbled curiously, just hoping to start a conversation.  I call every doctor Doc, probably from all the Looney Tunes cartoons growing up.  As the moments elapsed, my brain had started a more thorough inventory of my whole-body pain, which was increasing like someone was steadily turning up the volume on a stereo.  I was needing more pain meds in my now-conscious state.  After a long moment, his reply was cold, rote and devastating.  “Actually, no.  It wasn’t your appendix.  We opened you up and found your small intestine had perforated.  You have something called Crohn’s Disease.  It’s an autoimmune disease.  There’s no known cure, and you will likely need to have additional surgeries and probably end up with a colostomy.”  He spoke without looking away from the clipboard, and then he walked out of the room.  Patients to see, charts to read, hard news to blurt out like some raised-wrong, tactless goon.  Possibly book smart but lacking any people skills.

He dropped that information onto a freshly minted 18-year-old like he was ordering a coffee down in the cafeteria, and all I could manage to do was cry.  I didn’t know what a colostomy was, but the word may as well have been a spear plunged into my chest.  Mom walked in beaming, so happy to see me awake after what I later realized was 72 hours.  I could instantly smell the cigarette smoke on her, Parliaments in those days or maybe still Kools.  She quickly realized that I was hyperventilating and turned from happy mother to concerned protector.  My heart rate was beeping faster and faster on some machine.  I stammered to her and our family doctor, Anthony Coppola, about what that doctor just said, wanting to know if it was true, bellowing through snot and tears, “what the hell is a colostomy?” In an instant Dr. Coppola was out the door.  “Doctor, a moment please,” I heard Dr. Coppola quip through my blubbering as the heavy wooden door closed behind him.

The surgeon must have still been nearby because I could hear Dr. Coppola tearing him a new one.  “You won’t enter that room again.  Look at that room number.  Now look at me.  Tell your boss what I said.  Anyone but you will do the rounds for the Schaible boy.  Try going around me and see what happens to you.  You don’t speak to that boy again.”  Berating him in his trademark, gravelly voice.  In the meantime, I cried and tried to breathe.  The pain in my gut felt like an open campfire being raked with a pitchfork.  I was too upset to take any pleasure in Dr. Coppola’s confrontation with the man who had just gutted me.  The nurses probably hated him and maybe were silently cheering the treatment he was getting from the salty pediatrician who’d delivered me and who had overprescribed the penicillin and who always told it like it was.  Nothing was right in the world.  Something routine had gone horribly wrong.  I wasn’t prepared for this news, and I was about to pop.  A nurse came in and had a brief exchange with my mother, RN to RN code words were exchanged, followed by a nod to each other and a reassuring hand on my mother’s arm.  I paused my blubbering when the nurse approached, and I stared blankly at the needle as she injected something into my IV tube.  And that was that.  Welcome to Wonderland, population: Me.

Dr. Coppola, an iconic physician and caring man, could have easily been a regular on The Sopranos.  I wondered later if he had perhaps whispered some un-Hippocratic things under his breath while he was browbeating the young surgeon.  “Just so we’re clear, you touch that door handle again, and I will break your fingers.  I’m glad we had this talk.  Now say, ‘Thank you, Doctor’ in a clear and friendly tone, so the nurses have nothing to gossip about, then turn and get out my sight.”

The pain was brutal.  Those first nights – the first ones out of the ICU – were agonizing.  Air in my intestines, being poked and pricked and prodded and tested.  Some young nurse fumbling while pulling out that catheter – sweet mother of God.  Healing from that kind of exploratory bowel surgery is almost worse than the pain preceding it.  Two days later they wanted to get me moving, sitting up and standing and walking.  It was difficult, but I finally took some steps, leaning heavily on my cold metal IV stand with one hand, almost riding it like a scooter.  These were the dark times.  The next day my pity party was in full swing, my brain addled with meds, confused and mostly sobbing, not even trying to put on a brave face for visitors.  I was a wreck, and I wanted to be alone.  Nobody could tell me anything about anything, as far as Crohn’s Disease was concerned.  Not even a pamphlet to read.  I would press the button, ask for more pain meds, hear the nurse say, “not just yet,” and repeat.  “Too soon, sorry.  I can ask the doctor about some Tylenol. The next shift starts in 2 hours, and my replacement will be in with it.”   Most of my visitors were friends heading off to college, a string of reminders that this rite of passage was right on track for everyone else.  Jonathan.  The Marias.  Linda.  My brothers.  A cousin or two.  Some that I don’t recall because of the fog of drugs, or the sporadic gift of sleep brought on by the drugs.

One day I limped down the hall and past some other kids’ rooms, my hand gripping the unsteady IV stand.  My mother and Dr. Coppola had pulled some strings to have me admitted to the pediatric ward.  Normally, an 18-year-old would be in the general population (read: scary adult) hospital ward, but my people knew the overall care would be better in pediatrics, and I presumably wouldn’t have a random adult roommate with some terrible prognosis watching Giraldo at high volume.  I strolled past a room where a boy with some unimaginable ailment had lost an arm and looked terrible.  He was enclosed in some type of clear oxygen tent.  I recall him also having a patch or bandage across one of his eyes.  Or where one of his eyes used to be.   Some aggressive cancer maybe?  I have no idea, but it looked grim.  The tent reminded me of the Boy in the Bubble, that movie starring John Travolta.  He was laughing with a friend or sibling – they were playing Chutes & Ladders on his bed – and in that moment, even though I had no clue what Crohn’s Disease really was or what it meant for me, I told myself that compared to that kid in the tent, I had no big troubles.  That boy surely had a death sentence, maybe weeks or months left on the planet, and he was seeing the upside of life and was brimming with grace.  I, on the other hand, had some mysterious chronic illness, this autoimmune thing, and shame on me for sitting around weeping about it.  That was when I had my big reset moment.  Right there, hunched over in my greasy hair, collapsed veins and my wretched urine-stained gown.  It was so profound and vivid.  I get goosebumps every time I recall that moment.  Pausing in my funky socks, a disheveled and pathetic bystander of life, it hit me like a lightning bolt, and lifted the fog.  I felt so many things at once.  Humbled.  Embarrassed.  Ashamed.  Exhausted.  Elated.  My life may never be the same again, I might need to steel myself against a rising tide of pain and dietary restrictions, but I would soon check out of this place and probably never return.  I never learned the doctor’s name, the one with zero bedside manner, but it didn’t really matter.  I trusted that Dr. Copolla set him straight and likely kept an eye on him until he retired a few years later.  He delivered babies, and he also delivered a lesson to a cocky young doctor on my behalf that hopefully stayed with him and made him less of a walking stereotype.  I wish I could have thanked Dr. Copolla for looking out for me, and that boy down the hall for jump-starting me, but I never saw either of them again.  In the same hospital where I was born 18 years earlier, I was born yet again.

Scott Schaible grew up in Livingston, New Jersey, a town memorialized in the iconic HBO series The Sopranos. He graduated without distinction from Newark Academy and Lafayette College, and then served as a special assistant to a US Senator before moving to Denver, Colorado in the 1990s. He opened a communications agency, and raised three children like they were still in Jersey, teaching them that lines were meant to be cut, rules were more like suggestions, and nobody messes with you without some payback.