In Shock Page 10

  “So, which house did we end up buying?” I asked, eager to abandon my existential thought-experiment.

  “We got the one that you really loved.” He beamed with pride.

  “Oh, wow. Great.” I forced enthusiasm. I had absolutely no idea which house he was talking about.

  We pulled up to the front, and I stared at it. I was afraid to ask questions, knowing I might disclose my total lack of attachment to this particular house.

  “It’s pretty,” I admitted. It was a light gray, with white trim, and a black door. There were two white birch trees in the front yard and neatly trimmed hedgerows of English yews and dwarf boxwoods leading to the front door. The boxwoods wouldn’t survive the polar vortex, but the heartier yews did.

  “Do you want to go inside? I have the keys,” he said proudly as he held them up.

  “No.” I knew immediately looking at the slope of the driveway and grade of the front walkway that it would be impossible for me to make it to the door.

  “Was there another one that I liked too?” I asked, as a memory of a façade of a house different than the one before me entered my mind. I immediately wished I hadn’t asked, remembering that he thought he had saved me from a second great loss.

  “Yes, the one in the subdivision next door. We were down to those two and this was your favorite,” he declared confidently.

  I had a distinct feeling he’d bought the wrong house, but would never tell him that. And it was an easy secret to keep, since I didn’t really trust my own memory.

  “Thank you, for doing all of this,” I said instead. And with that he launched into a tirade of how difficult the bank had been, requiring one document after another, and how he had taken his frustration with my illness out on the loan officer one day, declaring he wouldn’t provide a single other piece of documentation. He told them they could either give us the house or not, based on what they already had, but he was through faxing documents for their review.

  I watched his animated rant from the passenger seat impassively. What an odd thing to be so upset about, I thought.

  Years later, we casually drove past the other house, each declaring, “I’m so glad we didn’t buy that house,” though for different reasons. He disliked the lot size and choice of flooring. I simply couldn’t picture our lives taking place in that other house after years of living in what proved to so clearly be the right one.

  It was there in that gray house that I would definitively and truly heal after the initial weeks spent in my childhood home. The gray house would itself becoming an agent of my healing. It transformed graciously alongside me for years, finding ways to supply what I needed. When I found refuge in painting, Randy constructed an art room in our basement. The wood-hued floors were enlivened by paint splatter, and the large apron sink happily accommodated all manner of mess. When I couldn’t sleep I painted what haunted me, and making the suffering visible defused it somehow. When I found writing allowed me to externalize my pain, we designed a welcoming study, with ironic stuffed animal taxidermy and overlapping Persian rugs to retain warmth. It was there that I would spend hours transforming illness into relic, in effect separating it from my lived life. This thing happened at this time, and this is what it felt like; now it’s over, and here, you can hold it. We can both look at it together. The brightly lit sunroom served as a reminder of the gift and magic of each morning, so we covered the walls in a whimsical toile wallpaper that upon close inspection revealed gnomes napping within topiaries. It was the house we brought our son home to, just before Christmas. The tree in the living room cheery with ornaments, all surrounding a small stuffed Santa at the center.

  * * *

  Some days, if I slept well and timed my medication throughout the night so that I didn’t wake in pain, I had ambitions. Grand plans to accomplish something that felt out of reach the day before. One morning in mid-August, I sat on my childhood front porch contemplating the mailbox. It was the kind of summer day that was hot almost before the sun had come up. The kind that made the skin of your thighs stick to the chair and warm puddles of sweat seep from invisible pores behind your knees. The sensory deprivation—a result of being confined to a sick bed in a single room for so long—made the green of the leaves garish. The sun, climbing over the trees in the east, brandished an impossible brightness. I was determined to walk all the way to the mailbox.

  The flatness of the concrete camouflaged a near minefield of divots and ridges. I steadied myself. Walking outside required intense concentration. First, it necessitated overriding a dysfunctional message from my central nervous system that lied about my body’s actual position in space. If I accepted the message as truth, I would veer to the left. I had still been walking into a fair number of walls. You are not falling to the right so you don’t have to overcorrect to the left, I consciously reminded myself, attempting to short-circuit the involuntary data feed. You are centered, walk straight.

  My first few steps were solid, but then a bird darted into my field of vision and I stumbled backward. Its erratic flight made reassuring my brain that I was stationary impossible, as my mind irrationally tried to tether my position in space to that of the bird. Like sitting in a parking lot, and suddenly having the sensation of movement because the car next to you has reversed. I had to reconcile my position with the movement of everything around me.

  Deep breath, take two. I spread my arms into a T, as some childhood memory of negotiating balance beams surfaced. I fixed my gaze on the mailbox and sent my left leg forward. After three or four steps I had some forward momentum, and could almost reimagine walking as the involuntary act it had once been. That thought, of all of my past abilities I had taken for granted, made me almost unbearably sad. But I couldn’t afford to have tears obscuring my vision. I shook off the thought and marched ahead, determined to get the mail. Halfway down the driveway, I had to shift attention to my breathing. The pocket of fluid had taken up permanent residence in the space my right lung had been accustomed to expanding into. My breathing rate quickened to make up for the shallow depth of each inhalation. The heat in the air made it difficult to draw in my breath. The air felt stagnant, as if it carried no fresh oxygen at all. My heart raced with the effort, and I lowered my arms, unable to hold them up for balance as I had hoped. It was too much effort to bear their weight against gravity. I paused to recover.

  Take three. Slower this time, as my thigh muscles were starting to tremble, suggesting they were willing to buckle my knees if I didn’t acknowledge their fatigue. A few more steps and I could hold onto the mailbox and rest. A passing neighbor waved, and I was forced to mentally acknowledge I probably had an audience for this pathetic show. I cringed, which when combined with my squinting eyes, I hoped could be construed as a smile. A few more steps. I shuffled and dragged my feet when necessary. Once in arm’s reach of the mailbox, I looked back toward the house. I hadn’t accounted for the walk back in my risk calculation. I decided to wait.

  I took out the mail and sat at the base of the mailbox. The mail was secondary to the primary act of walking, but I sorted through the cards and catalogs and came across a hospital bill. A warm flush spread up my face as I opened it, and a pressure silenced my hearing as if I were ascending in flight. It was a bill for the attempted resuscitation of the baby. I stared at it and shoved it back in the envelope. I contemplated crawling back to the house but, remembering I had neighbors, stood and deliberately and slowly retraced each step.

  I was met in the kitchen with congratulatory hugs, and was told, “I bet that felt amazing.”

  I set the mail on the table, and replied haltingly, “You know, walking is hard.” Then added, “For me.”

  Randy took on the task of reconciling the bill with the lack of a baby. The billing department explained that the bill was generated when we had failed to enroll her in our insurance plan. No one could explain at what exact juncture we should have called our insurance company, seeing as how she’d never technically been alive. The bill was appallingly
timed, arriving coincidentally on the baby’s due date, an event horizon I was trying hard not to note existed, there being no baby to expect. It took four phone calls to settle the charges. A trivial oversight, by a department ostensibly not involved in patient care, had the potential to bring me to my knees.

  The bill felt like a dispatch from a parallel universe. Reminding me of that due date, the possibilities. It was so close, that life with us in the new house I’d yet to live in, with the neatly trimmed hedges and the baby. It was happening in some ghost universe, one where I wasn’t in pain. There, the rocker would be used to nurse the baby during quiet nights, not to keep me from drowning. And though the bill reminded me I couldn’t be part of it, it seemed also to notify me that I was close enough to it that I could watch it unfold. I could almost wave at it from where I stood.

  * * *

  I learned that everyone had expectations for the trajectory of my recovery. Work colleagues, family and doctors all seemed to share a conviction that I should be improving noticeably every day. Their projections were based mostly on nothing, just vague notions that they thought I’d “be better by now.” I didn’t know how to try harder to recover. I felt trapped in a body that was traumatized and broken. It seemed better suited to fracture than to bend. The large hematoma, too dangerous to drain, insisted on being very slowly reabsorbed by my body, over a period of twelve months. The pain lasted longer than that, but my willingness to medicate the pain with the mind-dulling narcotics I’d been prescribed wouldn’t last the summer.

  The plan had been to wean me off the narcotics slowly. I was given a schedule, with written instructions on how to come off of them safely. I would cut back on the dose in small increments, allowing the opiate receptors in my brain to acclimate to the absence of drug. I would take a reduced dose of long-acting morphine in the morning and attempt to push through to evening, sometimes skipping the midday dose. That the root cause of the pain, the balloon of blood compressing my organs, hadn’t changed was an inconvenient truth. I wanted off. Pain relief required sacrificing clarity of thought, alertness and energy. And though I never achieved a state of being pain-free, my eyes were always heavy-lidded and my thoughts slow. There were whispers of judgments, fears of attendant addiction. My days had devolved into a dull monotony of pain, pill, sleep, wake, pain, pill, sleep. I was praying for a doorway back into the life I wanted.

  Egress came in the form of a side effect. I had taken my evening dose of oxycodone and closed my eyes. I felt an immediate sinking sensation, as if falling through a dream. I felt certain I would die. I opened my eyes and turned on the bedside lamp. I could plainly see I was fine. I was in my bedroom, there was a glass of water on the bedside table, with my glasses and pill bottles. I reread the label and double-checked the dosage. It was a quarter of what I had been taking, and while maybe it bordered on insufficient, it was by no means dangerous. I chalked it up to being overly tired and resolved to sleep. I closed my eyes again, this time leaving the light on in childish deference to the power of light over unknowable monsters.

  An immediate, crushing sense of doom flooded in. I knew if I slept I would die. It was as if my body, on a cellular level, had some awareness of a threat I couldn’t appreciate. I resolved to stay awake until morning and sort it out in the light of day.

  I was not aware of this dysphoric reaction to opiates, though it had been described in the medical literature. It seems the body is wired not only to control subconscious processes like breathing and heart rate, but also to receptively interpret them. The opiates slowed my breathing and heart rate just enough that my body’s monitoring sensors became wary. The data were interpreted to mean that soon I might not breathe at all and that my heart could stop. A panic order was issued, which basically stated, “ALERT. Impending doom, details not otherwise specified.” And so it went. My only recourse, then, was to stop the medications.

  So that’s what I did. Propelling me swiftly into withdrawal.

  I didn’t recognize it as withdrawal; rather, I believed I had contracted some virulent strain of the flu. It was only in retrospect days later that I could align the timeline to my symptoms and understand.

  After seventy-two hours without medication, I began shaking with chills, and my muscles ached with a bone-deep soreness. My stomach churned and excreted an acidic taste that I knew heralded vomiting. I headed for the bathroom. My skin was covered in goose bumps. As I leaned over the toilet, rivulets of sweat poured off me. I gagged and coughed with pain as my stomach involuntarily contracted, expelling its contents in spasms of bile and blood. My heart raced. When I could stand, I patted down my face with cold washcloths. I crawled to the couch and positioned a bucket near my head.

  Though I had no psychological dependence on the medications, my body had become habituated to them. I had become physiologically dependent. I realized this with a start two days into the “flu.” I walked to the medicine cabinet and took out the oxycodone prescription. I held the amber bottle as if it were precious, knowing that I could put a stop to the cold sweats, the pain, the nausea, the shaking chills. The pills rattled against each other like Tic Tacs. I set the bottle down and stared at it. I studied the label, looking for some acknowledgment of corruption. I knew I never wanted to feel this sick again. I estimated that I was probably through the worst of it, and worried that by satiating the need, I would only restart the clock. If my answer in this moment was more medication, another bout of acute withdrawal would always be in my future. I set the small bottle back on the shelf, warily.

  The bottle took on a magnetism far greater than its actual physical size should have allowed. It was the center, and I was in orbit around it. I knew how far away from the bottle I was at any given time. And if I dared to venture out, I felt the tug of its tether. Are you sure you can get by without anything? it taunted me. Why don’t you put me in your pocket just in case things get really bad? it suggested. You don’t have to suffer like this, it reminded me. Each minute I had to reassert, No, I don’t want to take anything. The next minute: Still no, I won’t. You might as well stop because I won’t listen. You won’t win.

  The power of those miniature, compressed disks of white powder shouldn’t have shocked me. I had seen addiction ravage the lives of people far stronger than me. What shocked me was that the narrative of dependency could nearly supersede my agency. I did not want to take anything. The drugs made me miserable. But somewhere deep in my brain, the chemical had formed bonds, attaching to a group of neurons, triggering an intense reward sensation that demanded to be fulfilled, again and again. Those cells dominated all the others and brazenly wrote the script of my thoughts. To interject an opposing thought was nearly impossible amid the constant single-minded chatter. “Just take one. You’re supposed to take them.” They would say anything.

  I had had enough. I took the bottle out of the cabinet, heart racing. I opened it and looked inside, half expecting the pills to talk to me. I poured them into my cupped hand, appreciating the dissonance between their physical weight and their gravity. I walked to the bathroom, tipped my hand and let them cascade into the toilet. I felt their torment over not being able to control me as I flushed them away. And then they were quiet. Proximity proved necessary for them to have any influence over me. Would that everyone could be that lucky.

  After a week or two, I got used to the constant droning hum of discomfort. It became the background noise of my day, rarely loud enough to drown out my thoughts, mostly a distraction. I learned I could find strength in the pain, or push it aside and shun it. I could ignore it or I could focus on it entirely, until I bored of it.

  I found that the pain was one thing to contend with, but totally separate from it and equally important was the message I told myself about what the pain itself meant. My experience of the pain depended upon what I agreed to attend to. If a sharp stab came on suddenly, and I felt fearful that it indicated some impending disaster, I became overwhelmed with anxiety, my breath would quicken and, as if on cue, the pai
n would accentuate and take on a significance and urgency. It could take hours to exit that loop. If I instead reframed the sensation as just another aspect of my healing, and messaged myself that breathing through the feeling was necessary for my recovery, it would pass meekly, robbed of its power.

  I learned to look at the pain, rather than hide from it. When I refused to look at it honestly, it grew like a shadow in a childhood bedroom. My pain seemed able to sense fear; fear was the fuel it burned in order to run through me. To disarm it, to look at the pain honestly, took time. I had to learn to inhabit my body. It’s a difficult thing to sit with pain and just be. To sit beside it, acknowledge it and be whole in its presence. To experience pain in that way, I had to constantly remind myself that it wasn’t me. It was just a sensation. I was bigger than the pain and I could withstand it, it wouldn’t kill me. I would survive it. I was stronger than the pain. I saw that I had the power to either create closed circuits of panic or build myself exit ramps. I found a way to be safe in my own body.

  I learned that what was true of pain was true of most feelings. I didn’t have to just submit to them, I was actually central to their construction. I could build a story of sadness and read it to myself, or I could choose not to. I could choose to honestly examine whether I was using the loss as a tether for feelings I didn’t know how to part with. I could redefine my identity and claim my desired emotional state. I could choose not to feel guilty for not feeling everything all at once, at the precise moment it was expected of me, because the feelings would continue to come, for years. And with each go-round I better understood how we could peacefully coexist.

  I began to feel grateful for each small success. So it seemed right and good that my first elective excursion out should be to church. Whatever had saved me—modern medicine, luck or prayer—deserved to be honored. I would kneel in supplication at an altar and praise everyone and everything who theoretically could have been involved.