Quarantined!

So, yesterday I was quarantined for two hours at the local hospital. Uh-huh. You heard me. Quarantined. As in, Isolated. In a small, dark, back room off the ER, behind two gurney-sized swinging doors that were not to be opened under any circumstances, stripped down to a hospital gown and wearing a face mask.

The Isolation Room, by the way, was dirty. There was a bin of medical waste sitting about three feet from the bed, propping the door to the bathroom open. It was full of used urine bags and clear tubing where various and sundry bodily fluids once flowed. The bathroom hadn’t been cleaned. There was a camera behind a bubble in the ceiling.

I learned in the first 10 minutes of sitting there that their HVAC venting system was broken. They turned it on in order to keep my air isolated from their air. Instead of blowing my Isolated Air back on me, it blew it out under the door into their hallway, which they discovered by sticking a piece of paper on the floor under the door. It gusted over to their feet. During their frantic phone calls to the maintenance folks, I learned that I was the first person to be quarantined here in quite some time. I also learned that it was more likely that the maintenance man was going to show up and fix the ventilation ASAP than the doctor was going to show up to fix me. Ahem.

I’ve had a sore throat for several weeks. I decided to have it swabbed for strep just to make sure. I’ve never had strep in my life, although I have nasty sore throats every time I get sick. But I was trying to be pro-active. I was also trying (assuming) it would take about 20 minutes to have an RN poke a culture stick down my throat, and I’d be on the way home with the little girl (who stayed in the car with R.) for her nap. I forgot one crucial little fact: I live in bohunkville, USA. As in white. As in small. As in provincial.

I went to the “fast track” urgent care service at the ER because my primary-care doctor (whom I generally love) is on hiatus this summer. She told her patients in March just to go to Urgent Care if we had any problems this summer, and she’d see us in September. Um, yeah. That usually means a problem will find me.

The trouble started with one little word that I happened to drop in my initial interview with the triage unit: China. “Um, when did my sore throat start? Ah, about five weeks ago when I was in China adopting my daughter.” Masks got whipped out faster than you could spell lickidy split. The dude dropped the word SARS. Then no one ever spoke it to me again. When the nurse finally swabbed me, for instance, she told me she had to do it twice because the doctor wanted to check for “something else,” other than the strep. Um, okay.

By the way, except for my relentless sore throat, I Am Fine. I am not running a fever, NOT coughing, sneezing, wheezing, chortling, spewing, hacking, drooling, or guffawing (well, maybe I’m guffawing…it was a pretty guffawable experience). I also do not have a single chronic health concern (apart from infertility) that would warrant extra precaution. I am healthy as a horse. To their chagrin, apparently. These people clearly wanted An Excuse.

The triage dude shows up in the ER with big eyes up above his face mask, and drills me, “were you ever in the Guangdong Province?” (he’s obviously been furiously checking the computer). I told him the two cities I was in (he can look up the freaking province, I decided) and that we stayed in five-star hotels. I told him the adoption process is streamlined and Westernized (unfortunately so), and we weren’t wandering around the Chinese hillsides or loitering in packed subway cars. I have more vaccines in my system than a three-month old.

When the first nurse came into the Isolation Room, she peeked around Door #2 like I was The Thing That Shall Not Be Named. She adopts Sympathetic Nurse Face and says, “Oh, how are you feeling, dear?”, as if I’m going to be dying any minute. Clearly, someone, somewhere out in The Non-Isolated World, had whispered something to her…”SARS-girl is in Quarantine…who wants to be the one to go check on her?” “I feel great, actually” I say from behind The Face Mask. She edges a few steps closer. I tell her the story of adopting. She wants to know why I adopted. I tell her the story of infertility. She returns to looking at me like The Thing That Shall Not Be Named. I am feeling smaller and smaller. Did I do something really wrong?

After she leaves, I get pissed. I immediately get out of the hospital gown and put my bra and shirt back on. I mean, there is NO REASON I need to be naked to have my throat swabbed for strep. I also decide I’ll give them half-an-hour, then I’m walking out. Quarantine, my ass. Aren’t people allowed to have a common cold anymore?

Trust me, I understand that rules are rules. And panic is also panic. I decided that health professionals over-react in direct proportion to how often they get out of their own self-contained little universes and see the world. What I mean is that my treatment at my community hospital yesterday bordered on being culturally insensitive and even offensive. They didn’t react to me, the patient they had in front of them, exhibiting a certain symptom and not any others; having just participated in an international adoption. They reacted to a word. What was evidently a very scary word to them: China.

By the way, I don’t have strep. I have a virus. I was sent home with instructions to drink fluids and take Vitamin C. Um, yeah.