I like Bishop

Hospital personnel were in and out of my room all night. Several times to check the heart monitor connections, in several places on my torso; apparently the signal at the nurse’s station was intermittent. And even when the monitor was working, there was concern about my heart rate numbers. My resting/sleeping rate was in the mid-forties, which I guess is low, and it occasionally dropped into the thirties. Renee stuck her head in the door after getting a reading of 36 and said, “Just seeing if you’re still breathing.”

The visits multiplied after four, maybe because of a shift change, I don’t know, and by six I had given up and embraced wakefulness.

Dr. Kamei visited at 8:30 for another long talk. He said, “We’re all going to die, the question is how we live.” I think this was supposed to be a sort of pep talk, but I wasn’t feeling down. My chest did still hurt, and I was disappointed to be off the trail so soon, but on the other hand the days ahead seemed to have potential, though of what sort I didn’t yet know. The doctor said that all signs indicated I was in good health, and he might not even bother with further tests if I was a little younger, or if I didn’t hope to do more hiking….

He talked of himself too, told me he was “a people person,” which is why he works so much. We took up the subject of higher education too, because of my work, and he told me his daughter had graduated from USC, and now she worked as an administrative assistant somewhere in L.A.—“I really don’t know what it is she does”—and when she’s home she likes to fish. He told me he was on the local high school board, and he had a friend who taught third grade, which “has to be the perfect job.”

He had planned on doing a series of heart tests, including injecting me with some solution or dye, but he decided these more invasive tests were unnecessary, that we would settle for a treadmill stress test, later in the morning.

My new nurse, in the morning, was Heleen, a tall thin woman in her early forties, her pale red and gray hair pulled back tight. She quizzed me, as had so many others, but she was a nurse interested in diagnostic questions, as well as matters of my comfort (most focus on the latter). I asked about my pulse rate, and she gave me a longish and useful explanation….

I engaged with yet another woman, Wendy, the hospital’s liaison person, a nurse too, but she wore a purple dress because she wasn’t caring directly for patients. She found me info about the local bus and rental car options, gave me a map of town and explained how to get to the library and a good coffee shop; later we chatted about her husband, a deputy sheriff, and her three young children, and the good life in Bishop. She’d grown up in town, but went off to Santa Barbara for school and a decade of what she called “the wild life” before returning and settling down.

For the stress test, I was taken, by wheelchair, to a trailer outside the hospital, where I lay down on a table and two other women attached a series of electric (?) lines to various spots on my torso (after shaving some patches for the sticker things). When Dr. Kamei appeared I stepped onto a treadmill, my first experience with such a device…. My lines were plugged into a machine, and I began to walk…. The speed increased every three minutes, and each time the cuff on my upper arm automatically inflated to check my blood pressure…. Dr. Kamei talked all the while, describing what was happening and what they were looking for, but also veering off on other topics, such as the restaurant scene in Bishop….

By the third or fourth speed increase I was moving at a slow jog. I reached 90% of my heart’s capacity, the goal, and the doctor said, “Okay, you can stop any time now, but try to keep going as long as you can, or as long as you want to….”  I cried uncle at 94%.... All indications were that my heart was strong and healthy. “As I expected,” the doctor said.

In the end he decided that the chest pain was the result of something called costochondritis, which as far as I could tell was an imperfectly understood condition. The sternum and ribs are inflamed? Subsequently pain radiates across the chest? Probably from the stress of carrying a heavy pack, and the elevation may have contributed too….

I didn’t need to stay at the hospital any longer, but the discharge procedure took a few more hours to complete. I’d been denied breakfast, pre-stress test, so when I got back to the room Heleen brought me eggs and potatoes and toast. I was halfway through the meal when she came back and said, “This might sound a little odd, and don’t feel like you have to say yes, but you could come stay at my house with my husband and I, up in Starlite. We have an extra room.” Heleen and I had been talking on and off through the morning, about hiking, about living in Bishop, living in Minnesota, so the offer didn’t come out of nowhere. But I was still surprised. I hesitated…. I had planned on getting a motel room…. But clearly this offer was more interesting, not to mention more economical. I said, yes, thank you.

After signing numerous forms, I was finally discharged in the early afternoon. Heleen was in the middle of a twelve-hour shift, but she signed out and we drove a half mile down to Main Street, to Perry Motors, where her old Nissan pick-up was ready, after some minor repairs. I drove the pick-up, and followed her to the public library. The plan had been that I would drive the truck back to the hospital and walk back to the library, but Heleen said, “Why don’t you just keep the truck, that way you can look around town if you want to…. And if you want to go up to the house, the key’s on the ring and I can tell you how to get there….”

I’d met Heleen about six hours previous, and now I had her automobile, and the run of her house if I wanted it. I opted to stay in town, and wait for her to get off. “Okay,” she said, “but you can change your mind if you want….”

The afternoon was hot, up near 100 degrees, but inside the small, 50s-era library the air was frosty. I checked email and searched transportation options, bus and plane and rental car…. In the adjacent children’s section, a woman spoke in a loud patronizing voice to her five-year-old: “No, spiders are not scary. We have talked about this. All creatures have a place, they are all good.”

On Main Street I ate a bean burrito in the empty El Ranchita Restaurant, interrupting the cook’s own lunch which he was eating sitting at the counter watching Mexican television…. I walked up and down the scorching main street, a stretch of U.S. 395 with big motel and restaurant signs, remnants of a pre-Interstate glory…. And ended up at the city park, where I found a patch of grass in a shady spot between the public pool building, a softball field bordered by an irrigation canal, and a concrete skateboard and bmx bike park. I lay and read and dozed off to the sounds of a swim coach calling out encouragement—“Good job, Jessica! Good job, Courtney!”

Yesterday in Lone Pine I was worried that I had some sort of serious heart problem that would change my life…. A day later, lazing about in the long, hot afternoon, I wondered, what was the big deal….  Now I was out of the hospital and apparently well, walking around on my own again. But it felt odd to be off the trail and out of the mountains, to be adrift in Bishop without a vehicle of my own, without yet a plan of how to proceed or where to go or how to get there…. But I did have a place for the night, and come evening I would learn more about it, and about my hosts.