The big difference between being sick and being in recovery, besides the obvious physical changes, is that when you’re sick all you do is think about the past. Birthday parties, graduation, passing THE BAR, trips you took, people you loved, the dreams you had…pretty much anything but the crippling the pain and ominous anxiety of your illness or the healthy future you barely dare to hope for.
You drown in your memories. This post from April, pretty much captures my mood all Spring.
I think that’s where the phenomenon of “your life flashing before your eyes,” originates.
But when you’re recovering, the past is the last thing on your mind. There’s nothing but the future. The what I’ll do whens. What I’ll do when the hole in my foot heals, or when I get off my twelve pills a day regimen. Before I got sick is replaced with when I get better.
The odd thing is, it’s infinitely more terrifying.
I had surgery…surgeries really…over the course of three months in late Summer and early Fall.
The days before I went in for my operations, I drove around Brooklyn, spent time with my family and friends, went to church, rode the ferris wheel till I was dizzy, dined at my favorite restaurants, played insane amounts of poker and Scrabble – essentially gorged myself on the chicken soup for Dawn Summers’ soul. And then the night before I was admitted, I emptied out my powder pink Addidas duffel bag- the one I spent forty dollars on two years ago because obviously the reason I wasn’t going to the gym was because I didn’t have a cool gym bag.
I packed four full suits of clothes, my Scrabble workbook, two pairs of pajamas, the 1000 page fantasy novel I’ve been reading for almost a year, a hardcover book about Australia, my ipod Nano, a spiral notebook, an unopened box of black pens, underwear, socks, a portable DVD player and season four of the Simpsons. I cleaned off the polish on all my nails, removed my jewelry, except the gold crucifix around my neck and I climbed into my own bed. I recited old prayers from memory until dawn. I had tried to get the first surgery slot of the day, but I ended up being assigned the second slot – which is all the worse because you’re still up at the crack of dawn and checking into the hospital by nine, but you get to sit around in flimsy hospital attire for the entirety of that number one slot’s procedure.
I forgot to fill out my health care proxy form, probably because I knew that regardless of what I wrote on that form, God help the medical staff if they failed to do everything in their power to keep Joyce Summers’ only child alive.
I sat in the waiting room, signing promises that I had not eaten in three days and liability waivers in triplicate.
The admitting nurse called my name and I grabbed my clipboard and pink duffel bag and headed inside. If I had a different sort of parent, here, I suppose, is where we would hug. As it is, I got a nervous “stop dragging your coat on the floor,” before I disappeared behind the automatic faux oak doors.
The admitting nurse weighed me, asked my height and confirmed my allergies. I went through a spate of questioning, including the bizarre “what is your sexual orientation?”
“We had an incident once where we were operating on what we though was a woman and then we discovered on the table it was a man,” she explained apologetically.
She handed me a stack of my very own paper wardrobe, complete with paper panties.
Now, I’m not quite a never nude. There was my birth and showers, obviously, and wild crazy dance parties for one that no one ever really needs to know about, but for the most part, I like clothes, the more the better. The longer the sleeves, the thicker the fabric, the more layers, the comfier I am. Though, I do like pajamas. What a funny word. Hey, it’s also a Scrabble bingo. Pajamas.
She asked me if I had a bag to check.
I pointed to the Addidas bag.
She picked it up and promptly dropped it to the ground.
“Girl, what do you have in there? I don’t think that’s going to fit in the lockers.”
She told me I’d have to leave it with my mom and went out to the waiting room to find her. My mother spent forty years working in a hospital before she retired last year, so when the nurse came back they were busily chatting. I caught a piece of the conversation which was something like “patients think they’re moving in here.”
My mother took the bag from me and the nurse suggested she also take my chain, rather than have me store it in the locker. I then went into the dressing room to suffer the indignity of paper underwear.
I went into the room of other similarly situated poor bastards, where they took my blood pressure, did last minute tests and I swore yet again that I hadn’t eaten in days. I was then told that the patient scheduled ahead of me was canceled and that my surgery was being moved up.
I was ushered to a hospital bed and an IV was strapped to the top of my left hand and I was having a rare procedure, so a gaggle—herein defined as six nine year olds in ill fitting white coats— introduced themselves to me and asked for my permission to watch.
“Uh, sure.”
A fellow asked me to be part of a study. The anesthesiologist came by to reconfirm measurements and start the drip. Then, my surgeon, who I’d only met once, came by to “say hello.”
Which, I still think is odd.
I was wheeled down a hall and transferred to the OR, which looks nothing like the cool spacious sets on Grey’ Anatomy. This was a tiny room, just large enough for an operating table and a huge fluorescent lamp hanging from the ceiling…think more police interrogation rooms on Law & Order. I was asked to climb from the wheeling gurney to the stationary table in the middle of the room. In short order I was adding the indignity of half crawling, half being lifted in paper clothes from one bed to another. And that is the last thing I remember.
I didn’t wake up from the anesthesia that day. I was put on a respirator and moved to ICU. Something, though it still remains unclear what, had gone wrong. I did eventually wake up, of course. My mother was there, a small comfort when hooked up to machines and being instructed not to talk. I didn’t feel anything at all though. I was taken to my room about ten hours later. I shared a room with the daughter of an African diplomat who was dying from a disease that I figured was cancer of some kind. I gathered she had been there for about a month. I was her twenty-first roommate. My mother spent the next couple of days trying to get my room changed after she and African diplomat’s wife got into an altercation over the heat. I was freezing half the time and her kid was sweating the other half. Precipitated by whichever mother got a hold of the orderly.
My arms were still hooked up to IV and morphine drips and apnea machines. I couldn’t leave the hospital bed. I spent the days suffering the indignity of watching a 20 inch crap TV with basic cable. Essentially a recipe for all you watch Law and Order episodes.
We had lights out at around 11, so if I couldn’t sleep, I listened to my ipod and tried to shut out the whirrs and beeps of a hospital corridor at night.
I had evidently developed some kind of elevated blood sugar condition because I was finger tested within an inch of my life every few hours and given insulin shots. After a couple of days they came to remove the catheter and the morphine drips…thankfully not in that order.
That began the great bathroom watch of ’07.
Having to give daily reports of my…er… functions…quickly reformed my definition of indignities and suddenly that TV was a veritable luxury.
The time passed quickly. I would talk to my friends on the phone or text. I did not however, open that duffel bag once after taking my pajamas out on the second day. I did not read. I did not study. I did not watch The Simpsons.
I was treated extremely well by the staff. Some combination of fear and love of my mother, I suspect. A few of my floor nurses still call the house and one of them desperately wants me to meet her son.
After my last operation was complete in mid October and I left the hospital for what I hope would be the last time until Tom Brady Jr. is born, I started to think about the future for the first time in a long time.
I’ve been healing well, barring the minor setbacks that are to be expected when one lets Fisch “cook.”
I have near full function in my right foot and the pins and cast have come off my right foot. I have to change the dressings on my wounds and elevate my leg as often as possible, do physical therapy and wear sneakers that Jordan says look like clown nurse shoes, but I now have two relatively normal feet, relatively normal digestion, super strength and x-ray vision.
And time.
I suppose.
What will I do with my life? What will I do when I grow up? What does the future hold?
I don’t know yet, but hopefully, when I’m better, I’ll find out.
