Hospital: Day V

No real news today. Zora didn’t switch hospitals, but she will tomorrow, they say. She’ll be going to (I think) North Shore University Hospital. You can get there by taking LIRR to Great Neck on the Port Washington Branch Line (basically every half hour, about 30 minutes from Penn Station, 20 min. from Woodside). From either train station, take the N25 bus (suburban in frequency). Or it’s about a half hour walk (1.75 miles). Take the bus. There are also, of course, cabs at the train station.

On the plus side, there was a very reassuring phone conversation with my friend, Jenny, the doctor (Sorry I keep saying that. But the Jewish mother in me just loves adding “the doctor”—there’s an old joke about a mother crossing the street with her son and her son gets hit by a car. The mother says, “Somebody help! My son, the doctor, just got hit by a car.”).

Mind you, Jenny is in Boston so it’s not like this is a hands-on diagnosis, but she says she can’t really see a reason why they would be talking about heart valve replacement at this point in time. Mind you she said it with a lot more big words and concepts than I’m telling you here. So we’re still hoping the heart-surgury part is just a false alarm.

Zora herself appears to be functioning just fine. She’s not short of breath or anything like that. And, so I hear, a leaky valve in-and-of-itself is not sufficient cause for replacement. There could be some other reasons it may have to be replaced, but these reasons still seem to be more hypothetical.

It’s nice to talk to a doctor you know and like. Jenny, my friend the doctor, and I have been good friends since high school. In fact, the first time I was ever in New York I was visiting her as a big college freshman at Columbia. Then, the three years after that, I was just jealous as Jenny was still in New York and I was in New Jersey. Why didn’t I go to Columbia? Oh yes, of course, then I wouldn’t have met Zora!

And oh yeah, it turns out that the cardiologist doesn’t have a good bedside manner. The one with the good bedside manner is the infectious disease doctor (we call that the “I.D. doctor,” for short). The cardiologist is the S.O.B. that runs in at midnight, wakes up Zora and says with glee, “You’re going to have heart surgery. Good night.” Anyway, hopefully he’s more enthusiastic than knowledgeable.

Zora also got moved out of the cardiac section. To the same floor. Now she’s in room 500. But that should just be for the night. Still, I guess that’s a step up.

I forgot to bring my camera today. Alas. So I don’t have any pictures of the room change. Or the other visitors. But you get the idea.

More upsetting is that Zora has joined the patient cognoscente and now sports two hospital gowns, one facing forward and one facing back. It’s much more covering, to my dismay.