As you know if you’ve been following this blog, I spent 18 days of this past July as a patient at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston. Unfortunately, since I was unconscious or confused most of that time, I remember nothing but isolated minutes of it until the last couple of days there. Maybe that’s just as well.

But…other people’s memories and record-keeping have come to the rescue! My wife Barbara visited me every day, so she has been able to fill me in on the important details. Whenever needed she was a fierce advocate. But that’s not the main thing that this post is about; here I want to salute the heroes who work at the BI. (No names, but you know who you are.) This week I finally got up the motivation to read all the “Open Notes” written every day by various doctors, nurses, and technicians — and there are many of them. I knew all along that I had been well cared for, but I had no idea just how well: in those 18 days there were 141 notes! And none of the notes were perfunctory six-word paragraphs. For instance, here is a typical randomly chosen excerpt from one (less than 20% of one day’s note):

Acute metabolic encephalopathy. 
Presented with confusion, hypoxia, leukocytosis, septic shock. CT with bilateral lung consolidations, sputum culture with legionella, urine legionella antigen positive, blood cultures negative. S/p IVF, pressors, intubated. Currently weaned off pressors, extubated, weaned off supplemental oxygen, leukocytosis improving.

I see now how sick I was and how I was brought back to health by so many people, who well deserve to be called heroes. Thank you for giving me my life back.

Categories: Life