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I alternated between reading and chatting with Lisa for most of the hours I spent sitting next to her hospital bed tonight. For the last hour or so before surgery, she finally fell asleep. Given how little sleep she's managed to get over the last nearly twenty-four hours since her first admission, I was glad of that.
This post is from about 2 this morning, when I couldn't get a connection to LJ from the hospital.
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I've mostly continued to read until a few minutes ago when the doctors and staff finally wheeled her bed into the OR. There was a span, though, that I spent thinking about my various experiences with hospitals. I've been in with my dad when he had heart surgery last year, and with my grandfather when he was dying. I was there with my mother a few months ago when she was having chest paints and wanted to be safe. I was there with neighbor B when she fell and broke her ribs. There's been a lot of hospital lately. And before that, I was with my ex after we were rear-ended in an auto accident, and there was another time with my dad I remember years back when something serious was happening, but I don't remember details other than that he was worried about the possibility of dying.
But the last time I was in a hospital as a patient facing surgery was quite a long time ago. I think it was when I broke my wrist falling from my bicycle some twelve or thirteen years ago. My memories of the whole thing are a bit fuzzy, as are those of my other hospital stay, when I was in elementary school and had my tonsils removed. I remember the mask for the anesthesia, the strange smell of the gas, and being told to count backward. I also remember the ice, or maybe ice cream, they gave me afterward. I don't remember much of anything of the second stay one except sleeping on a stair landing at home because I couldn't manage the stairs, and taking one of the Vicodin pills I'd been prescribed and not taking any more because I really disliked them, or perhaps the idea of them.
But I have little recollection of the actual experience of being in a hospital, as a patient. And that makes me feel a little unsure about how to be there for another person who's being admitted for surgery.
I would be scared and anxious and wouldn't want to be alone. So I stayed with Lisa. I chatted with her when she wanted to talk, read my book when she didn't, and held her hand or touched her chest. I think if I were in that position, it's what would make me feel better.
But I also can't help but think about those liberal arts, college-studenty things like whether one can really be anything but alone in your own mind in situations like this. I would be scared and anxious, and I would dearly appreciate the companionship of others. And if they told me that everything was going to be fine, I'd know it was a sincere expression and be grateful for it. But I also see those things as phenomena external to my lived experience. They would help form significant aspects of that experience in invaluable ways, but they wouldn't change the fundamental nature of being put under and being operated on. That is its own unsharable series of moments that I would experience uniquely and alone. It's easy to be companionable, or say things will be alright, when you're outside of that experience.
But this is true of all of our experiences. If we're alone in our moments of fear and pain, then surely we're just as alone in our moments of joy and pleasure. And we are, and we are not. I think like so many things, it depends on the lens we're looking through. The nature of our lived experience is the same from one moment to the next. They can be seen in terms of the uncrossable barrier of the individual, or in the terms of the complex and beautiful ways that individuals bridge the unbridgable, shaping one another's experiences. I think negative contexts lend themselves toward the more pessimistic end of the individual/collective scale of understanding existence, whereas positive contexts are more easily seen optimistically. "Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone."
It makes me think Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, and of the death curse laid on Harry Dresden by one of the mages he killed: "Die alone." As Harry later reasoned, are we not always alone within our own consciousness? I would add to that by wondering whether, if we can agree that aloneness is a perpetual state, whether that state, then, has any meaning. Can there be a down without an up?
I should probably stop trying to be quite so philosophical on quite so little sleep.
I guess what I'm getting at is that, as I thought about these things tonight, I at first wondered whether and how someone could really help me feel not alone if I was in a hospital bed, tubes coming out of me, waiting to be put under general anesthesia. And I think the answer is that it's basically up to me. Me and my ability to suspend overly analytical brain-parts and immerse myself in togetherness with those who care about me. Which is what I hope I've been able to provide to my Lisa through my part in and influence on this experience she's living.
This post is from about 2 this morning, when I couldn't get a connection to LJ from the hospital.
-------
I've mostly continued to read until a few minutes ago when the doctors and staff finally wheeled her bed into the OR. There was a span, though, that I spent thinking about my various experiences with hospitals. I've been in with my dad when he had heart surgery last year, and with my grandfather when he was dying. I was there with my mother a few months ago when she was having chest paints and wanted to be safe. I was there with neighbor B when she fell and broke her ribs. There's been a lot of hospital lately. And before that, I was with my ex after we were rear-ended in an auto accident, and there was another time with my dad I remember years back when something serious was happening, but I don't remember details other than that he was worried about the possibility of dying.
But the last time I was in a hospital as a patient facing surgery was quite a long time ago. I think it was when I broke my wrist falling from my bicycle some twelve or thirteen years ago. My memories of the whole thing are a bit fuzzy, as are those of my other hospital stay, when I was in elementary school and had my tonsils removed. I remember the mask for the anesthesia, the strange smell of the gas, and being told to count backward. I also remember the ice, or maybe ice cream, they gave me afterward. I don't remember much of anything of the second stay one except sleeping on a stair landing at home because I couldn't manage the stairs, and taking one of the Vicodin pills I'd been prescribed and not taking any more because I really disliked them, or perhaps the idea of them.
But I have little recollection of the actual experience of being in a hospital, as a patient. And that makes me feel a little unsure about how to be there for another person who's being admitted for surgery.
I would be scared and anxious and wouldn't want to be alone. So I stayed with Lisa. I chatted with her when she wanted to talk, read my book when she didn't, and held her hand or touched her chest. I think if I were in that position, it's what would make me feel better.
But I also can't help but think about those liberal arts, college-studenty things like whether one can really be anything but alone in your own mind in situations like this. I would be scared and anxious, and I would dearly appreciate the companionship of others. And if they told me that everything was going to be fine, I'd know it was a sincere expression and be grateful for it. But I also see those things as phenomena external to my lived experience. They would help form significant aspects of that experience in invaluable ways, but they wouldn't change the fundamental nature of being put under and being operated on. That is its own unsharable series of moments that I would experience uniquely and alone. It's easy to be companionable, or say things will be alright, when you're outside of that experience.
But this is true of all of our experiences. If we're alone in our moments of fear and pain, then surely we're just as alone in our moments of joy and pleasure. And we are, and we are not. I think like so many things, it depends on the lens we're looking through. The nature of our lived experience is the same from one moment to the next. They can be seen in terms of the uncrossable barrier of the individual, or in the terms of the complex and beautiful ways that individuals bridge the unbridgable, shaping one another's experiences. I think negative contexts lend themselves toward the more pessimistic end of the individual/collective scale of understanding existence, whereas positive contexts are more easily seen optimistically. "Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone."
It makes me think Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, and of the death curse laid on Harry Dresden by one of the mages he killed: "Die alone." As Harry later reasoned, are we not always alone within our own consciousness? I would add to that by wondering whether, if we can agree that aloneness is a perpetual state, whether that state, then, has any meaning. Can there be a down without an up?
I should probably stop trying to be quite so philosophical on quite so little sleep.
I guess what I'm getting at is that, as I thought about these things tonight, I at first wondered whether and how someone could really help me feel not alone if I was in a hospital bed, tubes coming out of me, waiting to be put under general anesthesia. And I think the answer is that it's basically up to me. Me and my ability to suspend overly analytical brain-parts and immerse myself in togetherness with those who care about me. Which is what I hope I've been able to provide to my Lisa through my part in and influence on this experience she's living.
