Yo-Yo Ma and Cats to the Rescue
Some years ago, I came across a bit of advice for writers: take yourself on a writer’s date every so often. Go somewhere in your area where you haven’t been before. Get out of your study, away from your screen, and see what you can see—and experience. My doing so resulted in Waiting for the Queen when I visited the historical site of an 18th century French colony on the banks of the Susquehanna River in northeast Pennsylvania. Other trips culminated in A Soldier’s Book, The Anarchist, and Dead Center. But then, in the busy day-to-day of raising children while trying to find time to be in my study, I set aside that useful advice. Obligations, demands, and the simple mathematics of time—and later the Pandemic—precluded such leisurely and fruitful excursions. That is, until an entirely unplanned and unwanted excursion―to the nearest Emergency Room.
A new experience? Absolutely. My last hospital stay was due to a tonsillectomy back in another lifetime. Out of my comfort zone? Way, way out. For decades I’d been enjoying good health. For decades I’d been hiking, walking, and doing hard physical work. Mine had been a teenager’s attitude of invincibility. Things happened all the time, but to others. I, in contrast, seemed to be protected by some disease/illness-proof shield.
But life found a way to penetrate that shield after all. When struck down, I’d just finished making a pot of lentil soup and was giving it a taste. The next half hour was nothing but excessive, inexplicable vomiting and pain like some huge interior weather front pounding in. This was so unusual I immediately knew it as bad. There wasn’t an iota of denial. “We have to go,” I told my husband. On the way out I grabbed the book I’d been reading, my phone and purse with all the insurance info, a pink plastic basin, and a roll of paper towels. I was thinking appendicitis. I was thinking cancer. I was thinking death. I wasn’t thinking, like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych―in that magnificent short novel The Death of Ivan Ilych― that the syllogism about Caius being a man and therefore mortal couldn’t possibly apply to me. I might have thought that before but definitely not now. I knew mortality when I felt it, and this punch to the gut was definitely it.
During any writer’s date, one’s senses are supposed to be acute because of the freshness of everything, the strangeness. This was indeed strange, but I could hardly keep my head up to observe it all. The city streets were bumpy and jarring, threatening the marginal equilibrium. Lights glittered like near and distant stars in the early dark of mid-November. My brain was in its loop: appendicitis, cancer, death, appendicitis―
For some reason, the usual ER horror story of endless waiting didn’t happen. First came a COVID test while I sat in a wheel chair. That little nasal probe was nothing compared to what was going on, internally, elsewhere. The test was followed by the requisite computer input. Then a momentarily lull, in a small waiting room with socially distanced chairs and on them, a few adults, one holding a child. Although my head wanted to droop over the pink plastic basin, I did raise it enough to notice that the young guy sitting five feet or so in front of me looked utterly relaxed, with a leg sprawled out. On his feet, tan suede work boots perfectly clean and not the least bit scuffed. A city kid, I thought, and even in my agony, I found it amusing, those clean work boots with the yellow-gold laces loosely tied. I knew people out in the country whose work boots might have looked like that just out of the box and for about five minutes, max, afterward. Focusing on those boots got me through several minutes. Such a curious experience—to think you’re dying and yet to be fascinated by some kid’s clean work boots.
Soon, I was whisked away to a temporary hallway ward, such as we used to see in newscasts having to do with COVID. Gurneys were lined up lengthwise along a corridor wall, with curtains blocking much of each bed. Here and there, the soles of sneakers visible―more shoes!―their owners prone and probably also in misery. Someone handed me a large clear plastic container of what appeared to be water. I was to drink it all, emphasis on the all, and then could get a CT scan, in common parlance, a CAT scan. This, too, a brand-new experience. A computerized tomography scan, I’d later learn, uses multi-angled X-ray images to create cross-section pictures of everything in your body. But first, I needed to drink all that liquid, labeled Iodine Contrast. If this were a surreal film, the container would be skyscraper height, and I an ant looking up at it. Nonetheless, I began. Minutes later an inch of gain ended up in the pink basin. I kept trying, but every few sips were immediately lost. This elicited a wave of despair. Then, someone was saying she can’t drink that. We’ll do it without. And then another Speedy Gonzales ride, on the gurney this time, through a maze that finally opened onto an imaging room. There, the CT imaging machine resembled an upright, glowing white donut in a quiet, Star Trek-y room. The imaging tech said the scan would take only two minutes. My spirits rose somewhat. This was progress, and I was still among the living.
The diagnosis? Not appendicitis, not a cancer, but a lowly . . . hernia. Really? What had I done to get one of those? Isn’t that from heavy lifting or something? Actually, I’d been heavy lifting for years. But hernias can also be caused by any kind of strain or by simple aging. Plain old weakening muscle. What no one likes to admit to. But—hernia, and not appendicitis, not cancer. For a few seconds, a jolt of happiness overrode the pain.
Surgery, someone said. Right away. So then, another fast ride to another dim place. But word came that the anesthesiologist had just been called to do an emergency C- section. He’d arrive as soon as possible afterward. “That’s fine,” I said, wondering how long C-sections took.
On a scale of 1 to 10, what was my pain level? someone asked. Nine, I said. Possibly ten. She told me she’d give me something for it Great, okay. A moment later I overheard two nurses talking, a few paces away. How much did you give, 50? And the answer: 75.
So, 75 somethings of, not Ivan Ilyich’s morphine or opium, but our modern day’s substitute, fentanyl. It must have been given by injection, but I don’t recall that. My eyes closed, and I was seeing a dirt road being encroached upon by darkness. It looked like a muted brown painting being blotted out. If death is anything like this—seeing a dirt road and then just zonking out, it won’t be so bad, really.
Sometime the next day, I became aware of existence again. My surgery had taken place in the early morning hours. And now I found myself in a hospital bed, in a semi-private room, intravenous tubes in each arm as well as another, thicker, mystery tube. A curtain to my left blocked out my roommate, an eighty-five-year-old woman I’ll call “Elaine.” I hoped the C-section baby of the previous night was now a resident of the wider world. I—astonishingly—was not only back in that world but in terms of pain, a zero. I did have some weird thing in my nose and attached like a dental appliance to my mouth (a nasogastric tube, I’d learn), and I had no voice but felt like shouting. Instead, I cautiously maneuvered out of the bed, dragging along plastic lines, found my purse in one of the narrow lockers near the door, retrieved my book and phone, then got back in bed. This struck me as an immense achievement.
Heaven, though, ended at the curtain separating my space from Elaine’s, where her TV was on to a sports channel, and she was murmuring how everything hurt and how everyone had left her and she wanted to die. She didn’t understand, she kept saying, why God had done this to her. Job’s question—and of many after him. Fortunately, she had caring nurses and aides who appeared the minute she rang her buzzer, which was frequently. I opened my book—Pat Barker’s The Regeneration Trilogy, about World War I soldiers being treated in England for mental illnesses as a result of their horrific experiences in the trenches. This was hard going, though, given Elaine’s lament, the football game on TV, and, now, too, cascades of Mozartian laughter emanating from the ward’s central area, just beyond our open door, where a young woman at the desk was finding anything and everything said to her a riot. Her laugh would start with an “ah,” swing upward in staccato notes, and then bounce melodiously down the scale. Only to rise again in the next moment. And the next…and the next, on and on. I was amazed. This had to be the happiest person in the universe, including all species known and unknown. Imagine getting paid to come in to work and just . . . laugh all day. As I was to find out, the Laugh in fact continued throughout the duration of this person’s shift. After a while, I closed my book and, wanting to avoid dueling channels, turned my TV on to Elaine’s. A printed message on the monitor said that we should be considerate and use headphones. When a nurse or aide zipped in to attend to Elaine, I asked for some.
Elaine seemed to enjoy conversing with the aides. Like a character in a Chekov story, she’d tell and retell what had happened. She, too had been at a kitchen stove when the bad thing happened. She’d been making pierogi and was just carrying a pot of water to the stove and must have slipped, breaking her shoulder. Her husband hadn’t heard her calling for over three hours. He had a “dead” ear, she explained, after he’d had a stroke. But who was “everyone” who had left her? In the course of the day, it came clear: her children, her grown children. They all had left her by moving to distant states. Telephone calls came, though. A granddaughter in one of those distant states was in labor and had been for twenty-four hours. I was surprised by how calm Elaine sounded on those calls, even laughing a bit. Not saying she wanted to die. Not asking why they had left her. And to her nurse and aides she conveyed news of the birth-in-progress.
I thought of our daughter, who’d moved to a far-away state several months earlier, and how it felt like a huge absence. Reflecting on that caused sadness to eat away a little of the euphoria. What is it about families? So many don’t get along, especially now in this Time of Division. And yet, how important they are. Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich at first didn’t much care for his own family, as he lay dying (of something having to do with his appendix), because, it seemed, they were ignoring or dismissing what was happening to him while trying to carry on as usual. It wasn’t until his young son grabs his hand and kisses it, near the end, that he realizes how much his torment is causing the boy to suffer. And his wife. Out of sorrow for them, he decides to let go, release himself. His pain doesn’t abate, but his fear of death does. In its place, light. In Russian novels, suffering and love are often the means of redemption. And where else but in families are the bonds, the feelings, so elemental? The sad truth may be, though, that distance—and time—can cause those bonds to thin and atrophy. Weaken―like muscle.
Having put aside my novel, I watched my silent TV while listening to Elaine’s. One of my alma maters, the University of Michigan, was playing Penn State. All motion and flow and gladiator types being rammed and thrown around by other gladiator-types as if those demi-gods were all but impervious to injury and death. Michigan was leading, and I wondered if Elaine were watching or dozing or just had it on for the flash and roar of life. Maybe it was comforting somehow: a simulacrum telling her she wasn’t alone.
I texted my husband, who wasn’t allowed to visit because of COVID, and told him how I was actually watching a football game because my roommate had that channel on. He replied that he was bringing my iPad and chargers over and would have them sent up. Maybe I could watch a couple of Master Classes. A while later, a brown grocery bag arrived: iPad, chargers, ear buds, his hearing protectors used for lawn mowing, and a bag of Lindor Truffles I couldn’t eat because food wasn’t allowed. With all this bounty, my cramped little space was beginning to seem almost homey. And that, an antidote to the scary, massive blood flow each time I used the portable commode at the side of the bed. It was a Saturday, and my doctor apparently wasn’t making his rounds, so I couldn’t ask him what was going on. He was probably sleeping, after having called my husband at four in the morning to tell him the surgery had gone well. My nurse for the day was noncommittal, but her expression hinted that she, too, was a little concerned.
After the lockdown months of 2019 and then the limited, creeping-out-of-the-burrow excursions of 2020 and 2021, this was quite the field trip. Mortality, loneliness, and family its major themes. But wait, there’s more. The next segment, “Yo-Yo Ma and Cats to the Rescue” will conclude this little narrative of one writer’s unwanted yet perfect writer’s date.
(To be continued.)
