You can bear witness to some pretty scary shit in hospitals. I’ve seen someone who looked completely emaciated, covered chin to pelvis in multi-colored vomit that didn’t make it into the toilet they had been screaming into for twenty minutes. I’ve seen someone crashed out from an overdose, laid up against the wall looking completely dead and gone. I’ve seen multiple people die in a way that taking them to an emergency room wouldn’t do anything but run up an insurance bill for a dead guy’s family. By far though, the thing that has stuck with me the most from my time spent in hospitals was a guy named Tom, who I never actually saw.
It’s the summer of 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic is starting to wind down in New York, though the portable morgue still sat outside the emergency room at Mount Sinai Queens, less than a block from where I lived at the time. I had been in this emergency room a couple of times before. Once when I burned all the skin off my hand on a hot stainless steel pan that had been in the oven, and another time when I thought I was having a heart attack. Turns out it was just a really bad panic attack. ER staff fucking hates it when you do that, and I had the wonderful pleasure of having the attending doctor’s hand shoved up my ass on that occasion. I like to think that was her way of saying “don’t waste our time with this bullshit again.”
Well, I did. This time, I was doubled over with writhing stomach pain and the associated panic disorder-induced anxiety. My left arm was going numb. I felt like I was bleeding internally. I was shitting blood and my spit was the consistency of laundry detergent. I was supposed to see a showing of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (one of my favorites) at the Lincoln Center with my then-girlfriend that evening. I’d come to find out a few weeks later that this girl in particular couldn’t have given less of a shit about me, which is funny seeing as it should have hit me on this day when she wouldn’t even accompany me to the ER because she’d rather text me about how this somehow ruined her day. Must be nice to live in your own world.
I just had a seat on this particular day. I was hooked up to a saline drip, and the nurse would come by every so often to take blood, give me antacids, or take me for a CT scan. On my left was a sheet, and on the other side of that sheet was a guy named Tom. He sounded like a nebbish, old, New York jew. Frankly, kind of annoying. The type of guy who never shuts up even though he means well. He just has to bring up old stories or ask about relatives he hasn’t heard from in 30 years, or ask about the status of what is happening to him about every 15 seconds or so.
I know this because for 3 hours, that’s what I listened to him do. His cousin, a middle-aged woman named Virginia, was sitting there with him. She could not have been more disinterested in his predicament. One word answers, or even just an exasperated “I don’t know, Tom” would sneer out of her mouth at every single thing he said. I started off on her side, but by the end of it I was firmly in Tom’s camp, as annoying as even I found him.
This was great entertainment for me. He’d go on about movies, or what he saw on the news the other day, or what he had for breakfast that morning. It started to get comical, like he was doing a bit on purpose just to annoy the shit out of his cousin. Rapping off pointless dogshit at machine gun speed, rattling around a hailstorm of monotony that would put Jerry Seinfled to shame. I am absolutely loving this the longer it goes on. I thought I had a lot of dumb shit rolling around in my noggin, but honestly I have nothing on this guy.
Eventually, Tom got to talking about what was going on with him. He’d had a bump forming on his head for quite some time. That afternoon, he’d been playing in the backyard of some Queens row home with his young nephew, and it had split open and started bleeding. You might think that this was the source of his inability to control his mouth, but the tone in Virginia’s voice told me this was a lifelong affliction for him that far pre-dated the noggin bleed.
A few minutes later, a doctor came to inform Tom that he would need to be kept overnight for testing, and they would be moving him to a room. You see, that bump on his head had turned out the be a pretty large brain tumor, and the doctor was saying it was looking like it would be necrotic. The survival rate of a necrotic brain tumor is like 13%. More than likely, Tom was going to die.
If his speech pattern was going a hundred miles per hour beforehand, the nitrous kicked on when he got this news. He was questioning how this could happen, and what he was going to do. He asked Virginia what she was going to do, if she would stay with him. “No Tom” came out of her mouth in that same sneering, Syosset, Long Island bitchy tone. If you know, you can hear it loud and clear. She told Tom that she was leaving, and that another family member would be there to check on him tomorrow.
This man juts found out he’s going to die of brain cancer, and his cousin couldn’t have given less of a fuck. She was probably happy about it. As annoying as this guy was, she had zero empathy for the blow that was just delivered to him, the same way that my then-girlfriend couldn’t have given less of a shit about my physical pain in that moment. If she had been in the hospital, I would have been there by her side making sure she was getting taken care of. Here I was, alone, 1500 miles from where I grew up, with nobody else to call but the one person who made it clear that she didn’t want to be there. Better yet, she was mad at me for my body ruining a movie that came out 25 years prior. We could have watched it literally whenever.
Virginia got up and left, and I’ll never forget seeing her backside lift up a gigantic Dooney and Burke bag on her way out. She barely said goodbye to her probably dying cousin before practically sprinting out the door. Whatever small obligation she had to be there with Tom was over, and she was ecstatic. Tom went silent after that. It was the first time I’d heard him not say anything for 3 hours. I wanted to reach over, pull the curtain back and talk to him, but I didn’t. Maybe I’m just as bad as Virginia for that.
I got discharged not long after that. Turns out, it was just somaticized anxiety that had been causing my issues. Blood work and lipid panel were fine, CT scan was clear, no stomach ulcers. My issues would continue until my shitty relationship ended, I quit a very stressful unfulfilling job, and ruined another relationship that was actually very good a few years alters. I just had more work to do on my body. Turns out psyllium husk, not being a booze hound, and lifting weights consitently will cure most anxiety. Who knew?
Tom, if you’re out there, I hope you pulled through. I hope you’re part of that 13% that defies the odds and comes out the other side of a necrotic brain tumor with a new lease on life. More importantly, I hope you annoy the ever-loving shit out of your cousin Virginia for the rest of her god forsaken life. I’ve been pulling for you ever since then.
The fragility of human life is always on display in the emergency room, and of all the horrific things I’ve seen in there, none will compare to the absolute pinnacle of selfishness that I heard play out next to me on that day. It has become a lens with which I view and evaluate people who I let into my own life. If they can’t show up and pretend to care, why should I?