Stayin’ Alive: The Devil Is in the Details

My mother used to say that if I kept getting cuts and scrapes from falling out of trees or cracking up my bike that one of these days I was going to get blood poisoning and die. But she never warned me about getting it in a doctor’s office.

I didn’t even know what blood poisoning was as a kid, although I suspected it had something to do with the devil. To my mother, everything did. Satan was never very far away from 98th Avenue.

It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I came face to face with septicemia, the medical term for what my mother warned me about. I wasn’t climbing trees or riding a bike when it came about. I was lying on a table in a urologist’s office having my prostate gland poked.

The prostate was fine, but a couple of days later my temperature shot up to 101 and I began shaking so violently that I was afraid I might jar something loose. My wife, Cinelli, called the doctor and--presto!--I was in Tarzana Hospital. They knew right away it was blood poisoning and started pumping antibiotics into me.

The entire episode seemed to amaze my urologist, who said this sort of thing happens in one out of every 500 cases of those who had prostate biopsies. He looked at me as though he’d like to take me back to the lab for experimentation, but I don’t think the Hippocratic oath allows for human lab rats.

What puzzled him was that he’d given me antibiotics before and after the test and I still got blood poisoning. My mother was probably right. It was the devil. He’d come all the way down from Oakland to do me in.

I don’t know how much of this you actually want to know, but since everyone loves hearing about someone else’s travail as a way of affirming their own good health, I’ll go on. However, feel free to leave and tend the baby or mix a martini, since you’re not going to miss anything vital.

Speaking of which, I had an unnerving experience after two days in the hospital. It was about 2 o’clock in the morning when I suddenly awoke to see a figure looming over me. A voice said, “I’ve come for your vitals.”

Light from the hallway was seeping into my darkened room, and the figure’s skin was dark so it looked as though it was an apparition with no face. When the figure said it wanted my vitals, I took that to mean it was sent from hell to rip out my heart and brain and maybe my soul. That’s what too much religion does to you as a kid.

The apparition turned out to be a nurse who had come to take my blood pressure and temperature. I was glad she was there because my fever had spiked and I was getting those convulsive chills that caused me to flop about the bed like a fish on a boat deck.

I was wheeled into the intensive care unit and plugged into machines that monitored every bodily function one can imagine. A cardiologist came in because my heart rate had shot up, and I was in kind of a dream state before I was out of it all together. I read later that blood poisoning can lead to septic shock that has a death rate exceeding 50%. I’m glad I didn’t know it at the time, because I’m susceptible to suggestion and probably would’ve died just to please the statistician.

I didn’t die, but I think I was close. No, I didn’t go floating down a tunnel with a warm light at the end and my mother shaking her finger and saying, “See, I told you so!” But, and this is the truth, I did see John Travolta in the white suit he wore in “Saturday Night Fever,” striking the dance pose that adorned all the posters.

I guess I was hallucinating due to the loosened synaptic connections caused by the violent shaking, but why Travolta, with his dewy grin and his cute little butt? Well, it was cute back then, I guess, but I don’t imagine it’s that cute anymore. I’m not sure why I saw him and not, say, Jessica Lange, who played the angel in “All That Jazz,” but I have no control over near-death experiences.

I made Cinelli promise that if I should die, I didn’t want her trying to reach me through James Van Praagh, the guy on television who claims to talk to the dead. Just watching his show could bore her to death, and then we’d both be in the sweet beyond, arguing over which cloud to occupy.

I made it out of the hospital OK, where they took exceptionally good care of me, even when I was getting well and demanding. The nurses managed to smile no matter what, as though cosmetic surgery had implanted smiles permanently on their faces as a condition of obtaining nursing credentials.

I’ve been home recovering for a couple of weeks, lounging around in my silk pajamas like Hugh Hefner, except I didn’t have any centerfolds hanging all over me. I’m not sure I’m up to centerfolds anyhow. But I did have you, writing and calling and e-mailing, saying come back, old dog, come back to the city, with your growl and your wagging tail and your funny ways.

Yes. I’ve been away too long.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.