Krishna is in the hospital – at Hahnemann in Philadelphia – for a five-day treatment program for reflex sympathetic dystrophy (RSD). The procedure was planned, but it has been extremely hectic – at one point yesterday, it was even cancelled for about 40 minutes because a key doctor became ill.

 

Neither my wife nor I handle hospitals with equanimity. Back in 1989 when I was still editing the Socialist Review, we went down the California coast to celebrate our first pregnancy, only to have Krishna suffer an ectopic in the middle of the night, followed by ambulances to our B&B in the forest and a hurried procedure to halt the bleeding & save her life. In the process of trying to rescue a fallopian tube, the surgeon failed to halt internal bleeding, but didn’t realize it. I asked for a second opinion when – literally – the surgeon & anesthesiologist got into a shoving, shouting match outside of her recovery room. A second surgeon redid the first one’s work & Krishna was saved, although the event set in process the long path that would lead to our finally having high-tech twins three years later. Even that was a close call – Krishna came down with an extremely rare disorder right at the end of the pregnancy that kills 70 percent of the women & 80 percent of the babies, and we got through that only by the skin of our teeth. Thanks to a computerized contraction monitor that is no longer covered by most insurance plans.

 

So we’re both as nervous as cats (or worse) at anything to do with hospitals. At different moments yesterday, each of us relived some of that first trauma from almost 15 years ago and the whole event left me exhausted beyond imagination by the time I got to bed at 11 last night (which is to say, two hours early). If I seem more distracted & flaky this week, you’ll know why.