Some people will read parts of this and think that I am a privileged person who expects the world to revolve around me. Think what you like. I’m still going to say this.

I have been sick. Last Thursday afternoon I suddenly had convulsive shivering that lasted for a couple of hours, after which I was exhausted. My chest felt a little tight, and I felt nauseated, on the verge of throwing up but with my body not quite committing.

Friday I felt a little better, and went about my day fairly normally, although I was still feeling short of breath, a little tired. So I lay down on my bed (a rare event, I usually sleep on the sofa because it’s easier to get into and elevate my legs) and had a three-hour nap, then fell asleep again early in the evening and slept for four hours, woke up for a couple, and then slept for six more. That’s the most sleep I have had in 24 hours for about seven years.

Saturday I was feeling pretty out of it. You’d think I’d be better with all that sleep, but I dragged around all day feeling sicker and sicker. I decided to make an appointment with a Telehealth doctor and got one for early afternoon.

I told the doctor my symptoms, and the minute she heard that my chest felt tight, she said “you need an x-ray, this could be pneumonia! Go to Urgent Care!” I knew that wasn’t possible, for a couple of reasons. One, my head was so out of it that I wouldn’t trust myself to drive, and two, the battery in my car has been dead for about a month now, so I’d have to go out and sit in it and wait for a visit from Triple A before driving anywhere. So I resolved to see how I felt the next day.

Saturday night I woke up about 2 a.m. with the convulsive shivering again, and it lasted for almost four hours. Last time this happened to me, two years ago, it was because I had a severe infection, so this was worrying. Afterwards, I went into an exhausted sleep and woke up mid-morning. I had called my cleaning lady, Nancy, the day before, to see if she could come over and do a few things for me, and she arrived at 11:30 to find me buried in blankets on the sofa. She got things squared away and left, and I fell asleep again. I woke up a while later and realized that I hadn’t eaten anything all day, but didn’t feel well enough to get up and make something. Kirsten was in the Valley, so she went to the market for soup and vitamin water, and came by to deliver it. When she arrived, she couldn’t wake me up for quite a while. She made me a bowl of tomato soup but I could only eat half of it and a bite of bread. After she left, I went back to sleep.

Sunday I woke up hungry after not eating anything but half a bowl of soup the day before, so I called DoorDash and got someone to bring me a breakfast burrito and managed to get that down. At this point I thought maybe the telehealth doctor was right and I DID have pneumonia, so I decided to call for an ambulance and get them to take me to Northridge Hospital. I had had a good experience there two years before and figured that if there was a possibility of pneumonia, they would keep me at least overnight, so over the course of about three hours I dragged around and slowly packed a bag with some clothes, my Kindle, my leg wraps, my phone charger—anything I thought I would need if I had a stay of a day or more.

I made the call, and five minutes later the local station sent a fire truck. Apparently they do that sometimes to suss things out and take your statement for why you called. I should say that when I made the call I said, Listen, I have lipoedema and lymphedema and I weigh about 400 pounds, so you need to send an ambulance crew who lifts weights! The dispatcher laughed, and I said hey, I’m not joking, they need to be prepared. I am barely mobile—I can get myself down onto the porch with the help of my cane, but they’ll have to take it from there.

Anyway, the fire people talked to me, asked lots of questions and wrote down my answers. The ambulance showed up a few minutes later and they got their gurney into position shoved up against my front steps. The plan was for me to get myself down onto the porch, and then they would all help lower me onto the gurney in a seated position and then flatten it out. I was concentrating so hard on the mechanics that I failed to take a close look at the gurney. They lowered me onto it and I stuck. I also screamed, because the lipoedema on my hips and thighs is so sensitive that any kind of pressure causes acute pain, and my whole weight was on them. I yelled, Pick me back up, pick me up! until they pulled on my arms and got me back on the porch. I said, I can’t go on that gurney. I told the dispatcher I weighed 400 pounds and nobody at that weight would fit. And more important, it’s excruciatingly painful for me.

I went back in the house and collapsed on the sofa, trying not to cry, while they discussed things outside. Ultimately they came back in the house and said that they would have to send for another ambulance that has a different style gurney, with no hard rails and a wide width. So a couple of them stayed outside (I thought), and two of firefighters (one was male, one female) stayed indoors with me, chatting while we waited.

There was one pinnacle moment when I could have saved everyone a lot of trouble and me from the catastrophic day I could never have anticipated, and I didn’t take the offer. The female firefighter said that the fire department had a nurse practitioner on staff, and she could be sent over to consult with me and prescribe some medication. I thought about it kind of longingly, because I had no desire whatsoever to go to the hospital, but I ultimately said no, because what if she gave me the wrong medication and whatever it was didn’t clear up? I felt the need to be thoroughly evaluated, based on that telehealth doctor’s opinion. Hint: Don’t ever base anything on a telehealth appointment with a strange doctor. (I don’t mean she was strange, I meant she didn’t know me, ha ha.)

So eventually the other ambulance got there, along with some extra personnel, including a fire captain! I was a little surprised but they seemed to take it for granted he would be there. They put the gurney up against my garage, put a sheet across the bottom of it, and had me step down onto the porch and sit on the gurney. Then four of them simply slid the sheet, dragging me up into position. It was pretty clever.

Without any kind of bars on the sides, it was comfortable but felt incredibly insecure. Even though I was strapped onto it I kept convulsively grasping at the edges of the padding as they moved me into the ambulance. It was extra disconcerting because it was absolutely pouring rain at the time and we were all getting soaked.

Once I was in the ambulance, I saw that there was a grab bar within my reach on the ceiling, and grabbed on as the ambulance took off. It felt like there were no shocks, and my hand was sore by the time I got to the hospital. The whole fire crew followed us over there so they could help get me out of the ambulance and into the emergency room, and we got soaked again during this process. (WHY wouldn’t you put a roof above your drop-off for the emergency room?) They brought me into the back hallway, and all stood around waiting for someone to come and check me in (they needed the gurney back), so I struck up a conversation with the captain. This is when I learned why I had all these crews involved.

There are only three of those wide gurneys available to fire crews in Los Angeles. Three. In all of Los Angeles. That’s 3.8 million people. There’s one in Studio City, one in East L.A., and one in South Central. So while we were waiting at my house, they had sent two guys to Studio City to fetch it and bring it back. The other issue is, because there are so few of these gurneys, the only people trained in how to use them properly (raise, lower, hook on, trigger the three sets of brakes, etc.) were captains. So they also had to send for the captain from a fire station 12 miles in the opposite direction to come over and coach the guys through how to get it to work properly and me into the ambulance safely.

I was outraged by this. OUTRAGED. Between 46 and 68 percent of adults in the United States are considered obese. And then there are people like me. Yes, I will say that I was obese before the lipoedema really kicked in. I weighed about 220 pounds, when I should have weighed somewhere between 160-175. But the rest of it, the extra 180 pounds that I gained in the past six years, was a genetic anomaly—larger-than-normal fat cells that grow in random pockets all over your body (localized in the hips, thighs, butt, behind the knees, all over the legs in general, and also in the arms) and then turn fibrotic. That means “tissue that has become thickened, hardened, or scarred due to the excessive buildup of collagen and other extracellular matrix components.” Or, in this case, rogue fat cells driven by hormonal irregularities.

So, let’s think about how discriminatory it is not to be able to accommodate that percentage of the population with the gurney in their ambulance. I said to the firefighters, What would you have done if the person who had called had had a heart attack or was bleeding out and you had to get them to the hospital right away, but they didn’t fit on your gurney? They all looked at each other and said nothing, and the captain said (this is an approximate quote), This is one of many issues we bring up at every meeting, but everyone keeps telling us there’s no money.

The first item on my agenda once I’m feeling better is to write letters to Mayor Karen Bass, each and every member of the Los Angeles City Council, and the Fire Chief to say that they should be ashamed to be allowing this blatant discriminatory situation to continue and that they need to find funds to remedy this situation immediately. And if you are a larger individual, I welcome your participation in this campaign and, if you contact me, I will give you my letter(s) as a template.

I will also, however, add on how much I was impressed with both the demeanor and the actions of the fire fighters and paramedics (EMTs? not sure). They were calm, patient, and kind, and hung in there with me until they were sure I was safely installed in the ER of Northridge Hospital.

As for the rest of my terrible horrible etc. day, I realized A. how long this is, and B. how tired I am, so I’m going to take a rest and give you the next chapter later on.