Shellfish Bastard

I received the strangest piece of mail yesterday.  It was a check from a hospital that went bankrupt a long time ago.  Evidently, I am being reimbursed for overpayment of an emergency room visit back in 2002.  Since starting this blog, I’ve been thinking about all the weird things that have happened to me while running, but I totally forgot this episode.  So now am I not only sixty dollars richer, a new idea for a post just fell right into my lap.  It made me feel like a winner at the game of life, a sentiment that lasted right up until my cat pooped on the living room floor this morning.

I had eaten dinner with my roommate, N, at a trendy Thai restaurant that evening almost eleven years ago.  Back then I was a Pescetarian but called myself a Vegetarian Who Ate Fish, a distinction that I would self-righteously turn up my nose at these days.  I justified it by saying that fish are stupid creatures that deserved to be eaten, but I guess following that logic I should eat my cat as well.  I have since reformed my thinking, not in small part because of what transpired that night.

I ordered the shrimp pad thai, a dish I’ve probably eaten hundreds of times before.  We lollygagged for a while before she left to go back home while I went to my then boyfriend/now husband’s apartment to go for a late night run.  A and I had been dating for just under six months but we were already running together, although doing so after dinner was pretty unorthodox.

I arrived only semi-digested, but we headed out since it was getting really late.  I, of course, was dragging.  About one mile in, as we were running up a pretty steep incline, I felt a sharp, acidic pain traveling up through my sternum.  I wondered if this was heartburn, something I’ve heard about but never really experienced.  I didn’t say anything because I was already holding us back, so I pushed on up the hill and the sensation went away.

We ran for almost a mile more when I realized I felt really strange.  My hands were hot and my fingertips started swelling.  Soon they started to look like cartoon hands where the tips are drawn a bit fatter than the fingers.  I held them up to A and said, “Look at my hands!” but it was dark and it was late and he couldn’t really see anything.  He encouraged me to keep going.

We ran a few blocks more along a golf course when my lips started to swell.  This has happened a few times when I was a child, and finally it dawned on me that I was having some sort of allergic reaction.  I stopped and told A that I was getting fat lips.  He squinted in the dark.  We walked back toward the more commercial part of the street where the streetlights were brighter.  At this point the swelling moved past my lips and onto my whole head.  It felt like my face was floating away.  When A saw me under the light, he finally realized the situation was pretty bad, probably worse than I thought it was.

I suggested we use a nearby pay phone to call N to pick us up.  In retrospect, I guess we should have called 9-1-1, however I was still cognizant enough to worry about how astronomical an ambulance bill would be.  A made what turned out to be a thirty-dollar collect call to my home.  Unfortunately, N and I were both still relatively new to the city and she couldn't get a clear idea of where we were.  A tried his best to tell her using landmarks like the Kentucky Fried Chicken, but these were those prehistoric days before iPhones and Google maps.

A contemplated running back to his place and driving back to get me, but I don’t think he wanted to leave me alone on the street in the middle of the night.  We found a bench outside a closed restaurant and waited.  At this point I had developed such severe stomach cramping that I was writhing in pain.  In my delirium, I remember thinking, “I don’t mind the face thing so much, I just wish I didn’t have diarrhea!”  I was too dumb to understand that my abdominal pain probably wasn’t really bowel-related.

It felt like we waited forever.  It’s normally a twenty-minute ride when the driver knows where she’s going, but given our bad directions I have no recollection of how long it really took.  Ironically, A remembered days later that there was a fire station a block away.

Finally, N found us.  The first thing out of her mouth when she saw me was, “Oh my god!  Your face is the size of a watermelon!”  I didn't know it was that big.

N floored it to the only hospital we knew of.  They shouldered me into the ER, with N, never shying away from the dramatic, shouting, “Her throat is closing!  Her throat is closing!  She’s dying!”

I don’t really know if my throat was actually closing, but I have never had a shorter wait in the ER before or since.  They whisked me right in.  As the nurse was readying me for the doctor, she laughingly said, “You look just like my dog!  He ate something he wasn’t supposed to last night, too, and his head got all big just like yours.”  I remember thinking as I began to slip out of consciousness that it would have been tragic if the last words I ever heard were that I had the face of a dog.

I remember being put on a steroid drip that made me shake a lot.  I heard later that the doctor told A and N that they could go back and see me one at a time, and there was an awkwardness as to who got to go first.  N was my college roommate and very close friend who I moved across the country with, and A was just my boyfriend of only six months.  A got the call, which I guess worked out alright in the end since we did eventually get married.

They held me in the ER till around four in the morning, at which point my face went down significantly.  The doctor had no doubt that shellfish was my undoing, which I found hard to believe because I had eaten it for twenty-plus years without a single problem.  I got home in the morning, EPI pen in hand.  I finally looked in the mirror for the first time.  I looked like Fat Albert. My face, especially my lips and eyelids, were still pretty swollen, although it was far better than me at my worst.  I can’t imagine what I looked like then.

In the end, of course the doctor was right and I took it as a sign that I should enjoy “pesce-“ no more.  Perhaps my spontaneous shellfish allergy is karma for pinching shrimp off of people’s plates at the Mexican restaurant I used to work at (good lord, I can’t believe I just admitted that).

I don’t remember how much the bill ended up being.  It’s crazy after all these years I’ve gotten reimbursed by the hospital for that visit, especially since that hospital no longer exists.  N and A, I owe you both a twenty spot.