Fish Tale

I was asleep on the couch when my son woke me. “Mommy’s choking on a fishbone.” In the background I hear loud hacking sounds. I go to the kitchen half-conscious and see my wife eating mouthfuls of bread, then spoons of olive oil, gagging desperately to dislodge the bone. 

I pressed her tongue down with a spoon and tried to play hero doctor hoping to see bone to extract it. I couldn’t find the bone. Now she started coughing up blood but said she would wait for urgent care the next morning to avoid the emergency room wait. 

There’s a weird vow echoing in the back of my head. That classic: Do you promise to love, honor, and cherish… in sickness and in health and fish bones too? 

Yes.

I do.

Then I went back to sleep.

⸻

She woke me again around 3-ish. Maybe later. Poked me in the ribs—not lovingly—and said she thought she needed to go to the ER. This was after she’d fallen down a internet search rabbit hole and diagnosed herself with something called an esophageal perforation, which apparently has like a 20% fatality rate unless promptly treated by people wearing white coats and gloves and not an architect with no medical training  in fruit of the loom underwear. I asked if she wanted me to come, not because I didn’t want to (I did) but because our marriage has its own strange rhythm of wounded independence and deferred togetherness and I wasn’t sure if she wanted help or just wanted to be the martyr who braves triage alone. But she said yes.

On the way she reminded me—not without heat, of my shoddy medical companion track record… that I once ate a tuna fish sandwich during the birth of our first son and that I almost missed our second son’s actual crowning moment because I’d gone back to the restaurant to retrieve a missing flan that I had ordered. She did not find this amusing and warned me to behave. 

We cabbed it to Roosevelt Hospital, which I told her is a hospital with the weird claim to fame of being the place John Lennon was taken after being shot. I know this because I know things like this and absolutely no one ever needs to hear them. I did not tell her that the doctor supposedly pumped Lennon’s heart manually for 20 minutes while Yoko Ono screamed down the hallway and “All My Loving” played somewhere over the loudspeakers.

Admissions: metal detector, NYPD cops milling around, the usual ER panorama of disarray—stretchers, track-marked arms, incoherent yelling, that one guy whose bloody face looks like it lost a bet with gravity.

Miracle of miracles: we got in to the treatment area in 10 minutes. 

Now the real waiting began. Vitals, triage, fluorescent lighting that somehow makes everyone’s soul look gray. She sat stiffly on a hospital bed with a Rorschach-shaped stain on the sheet that could’ve been rust or blood or god knows what. I lay down beside her fully clothed and in my winter coat, hood up, looking either homeless or deeply disturbed… my body was contorted and my legs half dangled off the inclined hospital bed so as to avoid the stain on the sheets. I promptly fell asleep again like the world’s worst emotional support animal.

⸻

Woken by a med student. Very young. Possibly not old enough to rent a car. He asked what the pain felt like on a scale of 1 to 10. She said 7. For reference, I’m assuming childbirth is a 10. My own pain threshold, it must be said, is somewhere around 2. I can tolerate stubbing a toe on coffee table and whimpering for an hour. 

This med student peered into her mouth and saw nothing, but mentioned the possibility of a CAT scan to rule out the nightmare scenario of an esophageal rupture, which is the kind of thing that can lead to death via mediastinitis.

They wheeled her off, and I stayed behind in the bed again, now fully resigned to the idea that I might be lying in someone else’s dried trauma. And yet I slept.

They returned. They saw the bone. No perforation. A resident noted her tongue was, quote, “large,” which vindicated my failed attempt to fish out the bone.

Then at 7:30 a.m., in comes the ENT. This guy’s got a portable monitor with a long fiber optic cable, and the kind of bedside confidence that makes you trust him even though he looks 32. He tells her to gargle this anesthetic and not to swallow it, and the way she gargled—loud, comic, primal—made me laugh for the first time all night. She almost choked again just from that. The gargle broke  the whole sterile hush of the place.

Camera goes up the nose. Down the throat. Monitor shows the epiglottis, then blood, then the Bone: long, pointed, impaled vertically in the soft pink folds like a miniature medieval Excalibur sword waiting for the right knight to release it. The ENT  knight retrieves it with tweezers and drops it dramatically into a dish like a magician producing the card you picked.

“What kind of fish?” he asks.

“Dorado,” she says.

⸻

Forty-five more minutes waiting for discharge. Now I became useful. I started flagging down nurses with my trademark polite-desperate energy. I tracked down the elusive discharge RN. Got the papers. Freedom at last. If it weren’t for me we would’ve been sequestered there another 5 hours. 

We walked home in the morning light, which was golden and beautiful. She was exhausted but okay. I was still in my winter coat. The fishbone sat god knows where, possibly now a teaching specimen, or in the trash. A week ago it was swimming in the ocean minding its own business.