The label decides, My Orchid Arrives, and a brief, scary trip to the ER.

When you don't have a photo to prove you were in hospital, did it even happen?

Last month I ended up in emergency here in San Francisco.

I am OK, but it was pretty scary. In the middle of the night I woke up, walked to the bathroom and passed out, unable to get back up again. Rups called an ambulance, the paramedics arrived (there were about 8 in the house at one point), and a neighbour came over to watch our daughter, who thankfully slept through the whole thing.

It’s taken me a few weeks to recover and process it all. And then we got the hospital bill. $4,500. We have good insurance, so I guess we’re lucky it’s not $45,000?

America.

In the month before the pass out I had been working long hours at home, not going out to save money (no coffees, no dining out), socialising very little, cooking all our meals three times a day, and solo parenting a lot as Rups travelled for work. When I got to hospital I was dehydrated and run down, and they had to pump a few litres of fluid into me. With the help of the nurse and doctor - who in a cute coincidence, were both called Nicole - I began coming around to some realities; first, that I was going to be OK (no cancer, no life-threatening anythings) and second, that I had been minimising my own needs and burnout, and this had probably help land me here. My body was fighting a stomach bug, and I passed out because I was dehydrated and had low blood pressure. I was released around 7 the next morning, bleary-eyed but grateful in Rups’ dressing gown and slippers.

It’s strange how easy it is for me to go stealth with my needs. It’s almost an ego trip: how good can I be? How much suffering can I take? In some ways I imagine I’m adding to an invisible ledger of goodness that will someday come back to me - or maybe more honestly - I can hold over others. But in hospital I experienced the same splitting-of-self that happened when I gave birth in 2021. I observed different selves inside of me, clear and delineated, like looking through a prism and seeing rays of coloured light refracted. And they were all over the place.

One was embarrassed, in denial, thoroughly ashamed of the whole thing. She hated the wires, the cold, the out-of-controlness of it all. She minimised and said things like “I think it’s fine” when it was clearly not. Another was deeply afraid and couldn’t stop bursting into tears, what if I die, that kind of thing. She was making various bargains with god the universe about what she was willing to give up if she made it out unscathed. And then there was another part, secretly gleeful and enjoying all the special attention and drama of it all: people helping me up and out of bed, Rupert sleeping on the floor (chivalry! romance!), Nicole coming in to brief me on what I needed (not having to ascertain for myself), pumping me with fluid (you mean I don’t have to pour myself a glass of water, you just pump it straight in? Excellent).

In the days after this I realised just how useful having a hospital photo is. A single shot of me, thumbs up looking wary in a bunch of serious looking wires would’ve done a lot of the heavy lifting for me.

It took me a week to recover physically, let alone the feeling tearful and sorry for myself, with Rups picking up all house duties. At some point I realised I hadn’t told my mum or my friends back home what had happened, and that I needed to reach out, one by one, not only to the community around me, but back home. Which began to feel like a lot more work than sticking a photo up on the internet.

So what’s been the outcome of the visit aside from the bill?