SEIDMAN SAYS: How I spent my summer vacation
Regular visitors to this column may have noticed my absence over the past two weeks. An editor’s note in the Herald-Tribune's print edition advised that I was on vacation. And I was . . . sort of.
I’d been anticipating the trip to Montana, my former home, for months. Over my 10-day stay – the longest vacation I'd allowed myself since moving to Florida 12 years ago – I’d planned for reunions with old friends, a Fourth of July rodeo, lots of mountain hiking and river kayaking and food and fellowship in abundance.
On June 30, I boarded my flight from Sarasota vibrating with anticipation. When the plane touched down in Bozeman, I was surprised by a wave of teary emotion that washed over me: this was where I married (and divorced); where my son was born; where I started my first (and only) business, a ballet studio; and where some of the most difficult and rewarding years of my life were spent.
Montana in July is next to heaven. Wildflowers carpet the mountains, creeks swollen with snow melt rush with a startling clarity and temperatures are a welcome relief from Florida’s stifling steam. It was just two weeks after the massive flooding that damaged Yellowstone Park – thankfully my sister’s home in the heavily hit Red Lodge was spared – and crews were hard at work restoring bridges and clearing rocks and mud so as not to lose the summer tourist season.
Two days in Bozeman made for a fantastic start: I joyously reunited with friends I hadn’t seen in decades. I drove past former residences (still standing but worth 10 times what I paid for them) and the dance studio (reduced to rubble). And I took “easy” hikes to adjust for the altitude.
Then, on the third day, when my sister came to pick me up, I started experiencing a persistent back pain that escalated during our two-hour drive to Red Lodge. By evening, it was excruciating. At 3:30 a.m., feverish and vomiting, I reluctantly texted a cryptic message from the guest cabin next to her house where I was staying: “I think I need to go to the ER.”
After blood tests and a CT scan, the doctors suspected a kidney stone and sent me home. When I returned no better the next day, they transferred me to Billings, which was an hour-long trip to the primary hospital in a rural state (and a medical facility that also draws patients from neighboring Wyoming, North Dakota and Idaho). I was admitted and ensconced in the OCU – the “overflow capacity unit” – where the “rooms” were curtained partitions barely big enough for a hospital bed.
There I remained for the next five days, growing sicker and weaker as other patients came and went. A young man with a hugely bandaged hand, wheeled in on stretcher looking comatose was, half an hour later, wolfing down a cheeseburger bigger than his amplified fist. Gladys next door kept asking for Pepsi when told they only had Coke, and kept begging to have her oxygen turned higher.
An inscrutable man with a penetrating stare wandered the ward, telling fantastical stories to the nurses. I learned Thomas was a homeless Vietnam vet with short-term memory issues who’d been waiting a week for a bed at the VA. Not a single staff member treated him with anything but patience and kindness, even when reassuring him, for the sixth time, that, yes, the VA did have chocolate chip cookies. (“How big?” Thomas asked.)
I saw a different hospitalist every day, most of whom stood stone-faced with their arms across their chests postulating theories and were never seen again. Finally my angel of a nurse, Tasha, connected me with a doctor who actually drew up a chair and listened. He could see I was going downhill fast and agreed to release me for outpatient treatment; unfortunately, he also discontinued the antibiotics I had been prescribed prophylactically.
Two days later, I was readmitted to the smaller, but newish hospital in Red Lodge. A handsome young man in the ER stuck out his hand and said, “Hi, I’m Billy.” My sister and I came to refer to him as “Doctor Dreamy” and it was he who confirmed a blood infection and ordered the MRI that finally brought a diagnosis: a dangerous abscess in my epidural spinal canal, of unknown origin.
As the doctors debated surgery and started me on daily IV antibiotics, I bonded with my nurse, Baylee, a team roper who raises the kind of roping cattle that my family also breeds. She had lost her mother to the aftereffects of COVID last year at a “young” 62; now she was organizing an extended family reunion in Hawaii.
“Life is short,” Baylee said. “Nothing matters but health, family and embracing every day.”
As I write, I’m looking out the window at a doe and faun munching the thick grass 50 feet away. A week of treatment is gradually taking effect. Yesterday I took an easy two-hour hike and enjoyed the intense flavors of food, as if tasting it for the first time. I’m working long distance with doctors in Sarasota to arrange for the weeks of treatment I will need once I can return.
It would be easy to curse the odds or the gods, or to embrace my anxiety about the medical bills that lie ahead. Instead, this unforeseen detour has clarified my priorities and renewed my gratitude – for the healthy body I take for granted; for the dedication of devoted and overburdened nurses and doctors; and, most of all, for my family, who loved me back to life.
It wasn’t the vacation I wanted, but maybe it was the vacation I needed.
Contact columnist Carrie Seidman at carrie.seidman@gmail.com or 505-238-0392.
This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Carrie Seidman: 'I think I need to go to the ER'
