In Shock Page 8

  On particularly bad days, I’d beg him to turn everyone away.

  “Don’t worry, honey. I will be a pit bull.” And he would. Alienating family and friends alike.

  There was the rare visitor who was capable of just sitting in stunned silence with me. Those who explained later they just needed to see me, to have independent confirmation that I was alive. They would enter and leave quietly, silently proving that they needed no more than to share that physical space with a breathing version of me.

  I declined phone calls, even as cell phones were held up to my ear. I’d shake my head no.

  It wasn’t that I wanted to be alone, or that I was ungrateful for the support. It was just that there was no longer such a thing as an effortless word. To speak I had to time my breath so that it passed through my vocal cords during an exhalation. This meant contracting my abdomen despite the staples, and aggravating the fiery pool of blood beneath my diaphragm. My difficulty breathing was a constant now due to the fluid compressing my lung. Assuming I was willing to endure the pain and shortness of breath, I then had to actually find the words. They darted just out of reach, like children in a game of tag. The more I grasped for them, the more aggressively they dispersed.

  “What do you need from home?” my mom asked me. “I’ll bring it in the morning.”

  I made a gesture for a pen. I would write a list. Far easier than speaking.

  I held the pen, suspended over the paper, and the three of us stared at the page waiting for words to emerge. I realized I was unsure I had retained the ability to write. I wondered if there was some validated standard for how long was it acceptable to contemplate a word before it was labeled problematic. I suspected the limit was somewhat less than the long minutes that had already elapsed.

  “I don’t need anything,” I declared, putting the pen down.

  “Just tell me what you need,” my mom offered.

  I looked at her and realized I couldn’t do that either. I just didn’t know what I was trying to say. There were large pieces of me that were still submerged. I had been a person who loved words. I had rolled them like ball bearings in my head, until the ideal choice fell through the perfect miniature hole. I had been bright and articulate. I had not yet reclaimed enough of my identity to recognize myself. I began to cry.

  “Why are you crying? Just describe what you need.”

  I could picture what I was trying to say. I saw them clearly, sitting at the bottom of my closet, but they were lost to me. I had surfaced only to be left hollow. What other core pieces of myself were to remain permanently submerged?

  Then the word appeared, fully formed. Shoes. It was more than a word. It was imbued with all the context and subtext of a long-term relationship.

  “Shoes,” I whispered. “I want my shoes.” I exhaled deeply.

  She nodded. She understood that though I didn’t know yet if I had been approved for physical therapy, I wanted to be prepared.

  “I think they will help me to walk,” I added. I silently hoped she wouldn’t ask for direction as to which pair.

  “Sure. I’ll bring the brown flat ones, I think they’ll fit.”

  I was grateful to not have to explain.

  * * *

  The odd thing about being completely terrified is that it cannot be maintained as a constant state. Though I certainly tried. The body primes itself with hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, readying it for some defensive action. When no true threat or cause for action is identified, the body’s interest in remaining on high alert wanes. I became tired of being scared. Tired of imagining every worst-case scenario, running imagined contingency plans. As days passed without my worst fears coming true, I began to feel that perhaps all the anxious worry was, in fact, actually useless. After all, it wasn’t really preparing me for anything, except to die. And if I did die, well, that would be how the story ended. I divested from any outcome. I stopped believing worry could change anything. I learned to wait and see. More often than not, the following day brought with it some small but tangible measure of improvement.

  I had been looking forward to physical therapy. Having been entirely bed-bound for weeks, I was sore and miserable with weak, wasted muscles. The doctors knew I’d have to regain my strength slowly and weren’t expecting much from me. They requested some basic range-of-motion exercises to keep my joints from stiffening. In my mind, the fact that the doctors ordered it at all meant that they believed I had potential for recovery. I wanted to prove to them they were right to believe in me. I would push myself and accomplish more than anyone expected.

  The physical therapist was young and fit in a way that suggested she drove straight to a rock wall to practice climbing after work. She was so completely, unobjectionably pretty that I could have easily set her up with any one of my single male friends. Her disposition was so brightly optimistic, I felt she wouldn’t become easily discouraged with me. She asked a few questions aimed at identifying our goal for the day.

  “So, tell me a little about what you were able to do prior to being sick?” she asked.

  I told her I had been practicing a form of Vinyasa yoga most days. And immediately thought, Oh my God, that was a million years ago.

  “When were you last able to walk?” she asked.

  It was the day I got sick. I remembered I had walked into the backseat of the car and entered a wheelchair when I got out at the emergency room entrance. That was the last time I had walked.

  “I think I want to try to do the stairs,” I confessed to her, avoiding her question entirely.

  “Stairs, huh? OK, well, let’s see where you’re at. Why don’t you first try to swing your legs over to this side of the bed?”

  I placed my palms beside me on the bed and attempted to bend my knees. I found I couldn’t rely on my abdomen to pull my legs in, and I had to manually grab the back of each thigh and slowly pull it toward me. Any movement that compressed my abdomen tugged on the sharp staples and aggravated the pain of both the long incision and the blood collection. I accepted the pain as inevitable, and dug deep for untapped pockets of strength. I inched my heels across the width of the bed until one slid off.

  “Good,” she said. “Now, try to bring the next one over.”

  Soon I had both legs dangling off the bed. I was breathless.

  “This is hard, I know. Take a break. We’ll stop soon.”

  Clearly she was just saying that to encourage me to keep going. I couldn’t imagine we’d stop, as we had yet to accomplish anything.

  “Let’s try to get these socks on.” She handed me a pair with traction stripes on the bottom. The bright yellow color, I knew, silently alerted nurses and physicians that I had been deemed a “fall risk.”

  I reluctantly took them from her and attempted to reach my feet. I could angle forward maybe thirty degrees, but no farther, which meant my hands couldn’t reach below my knees.

  “Here, take this.” She handed me a long stick with an S-shaped hook at the end.

  I stared at her quizzically.

  “It’s a hook. We’ll use it to help you get your socks on. You want to be independent, don’t you?”

  Not especially, actually. I was beginning to think she was not as angelic as I had initially believed. I silently wished she would let someone else put my socks on, so that I could get on to the real task at hand of climbing the stairs. I was still unaware of the extent of my disability.

  She demonstrated how to load the sock onto the hook at the end of the stick and then deploy it. After a few failed attempts, I had my right sock nearly entirely on my foot. I longed for a time when I was blissfully ignorant of the existence of sock-hooks.

  The left went a bit smoother, though it still took far longer than I could believe possible. I looked up at her with pride and anticipation of my next task.

  “Good, OK. So tomorrow we will try standing.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Well, we don’t want to wear you out. You’ve been at this for over an hour, so that�
��s enough for one day. Let me help you get back into bed.”

  Over an hour.

  Once situated, I realized she had wisely allowed for how difficult and time consuming getting me back into bed would be as well. “Thank you?” I offered, feeling defeated.

  “You bet!” She nodded and slid through the ICU door as it closed behind her. “See you tomorrow!” she called out over her shoulder.

  I sat sore and exhausted, staring at the stupid yellow socks on my feet. I tried to integrate what had just happened into who I believed myself to be. I was apparently now a person who took over an hour to put on socks using a sock-hook. And I was a person who found it incredibly difficult. I shook my head. I didn’t recognize myself. I tried to access the last time I had found something so physically difficult to accomplish. It was a yoga position, flying pigeon pose, that required upper-body strength to balance the weight of the body as the legs lifted to the side. I’d never had much upper-body strength. But I chipped away at it, each day, until eventually it appeared effortless.

  How had I done that? And more important, what could the person who had managed to do that teach me as I sat, unable to stand?

  I had to learn to soften; I had to learn to accept my body’s limitations. I had to value humility and choose to surrender when my first inclination was to force. I had to work each day toward a goal that seemed unreachable at times. I had to believe I could become a person who could meet herself in flying pigeon pose. I realized that the only difference now was my starting point. I was in pain, I was defeated, I couldn’t stand, much less walk, but I still had agency. An agency that allowed that I could inhabit my broken body with a reverence for what it was capable of in the past and what it was able to do in this moment. I could honor its difficulty engaging in what I was attempting to do as entirely right and fair. This was where my body was now. I would choose to relabel discomfort as transformation. I’d regain my strength, slowly. I would recognize and celebrate small victories. Today I was a person who could put my socks on by myself.

  I felt oddly grateful.

  * * *

  All at once, my kidneys started working again. The dormant little beans woke up and got to work ridding my body of liters and liters of excess fluid. I lost five pounds in a day, sometimes more. As my tissues consolidated, it became easier to move. I had peaked somewhere around two hundred pounds on a five-foot-two-inch frame. If someone saved me the effort and put my socks on for me, I could stand and walk a few unassisted feet, until the tether of the oxygen hose suggested I return. I would awkwardly veer to the left, and sometimes into the wall, a result of the stroke in the part of my brain responsible for balance. And though I learned over time to resist the pull and straighten my gait, doing so required a tremendous amount of reinterpreting of sensory input. In the light, I managed all right, but if I attempted to walk in the dark, I was guaranteed a bruised left shoulder. Even now, it creeps into my days. Randy smiles knowingly whenever the car repair shop calls and tells him that they couldn’t identify any issue with my car’s alignment. I’ve learned to shrug and say, “OK, fine. I won’t take it in again. I was just convinced this time it really was pulling to the left.” I can’t go down escalators easily; my vision just won’t converge the separate images from each eye into a cohesive whole when looking down. I stand at the top, as people pile up behind me, thinking I’ll step on at any moment.

  Back then, there was one ambitious day when the nurses and physical therapists conspired and had the respiratory therapist bring an oxygen tank, which they placed in a sturdy, heavy wheelchair.

  “Here you go,” they said. “Hold the handles like this, and see how far you can go. If you get tired, you can always just sit down in the chair.”

  I must have looked terrified.

  “I’ll come with you, don’t worry,” Randy said.

  I grasped the black plastic handles and leaned forward, redistributing some of my weight onto the chair. I pushed forward and took a first tentative step. It led graciously, without rolling away. It was heavy and secure. Randy put a second gown on me so I’d be covered, a clear indication he believed I would go far enough to encounter other people. I took a few more slow steps and was suddenly in the hallway. I turned a corner. I was walking. I was outside of the room for the first time in weeks.

  I felt confident enough to look up, rather than watch my feet. I met the gaze of a surgeon I recognized and his face went white.

  “Wow,” he said.

  I assumed he was impressed by my progress, as he rightly should have been.

  “I-I thought you were dead,” he stammered.

  I cocked my head to the side, paused for a moment, and silently walked past him.

  I’d learn with time to recognize that characteristic I-just-saw-a-ghost look. Physicians and nurses who had encountered me early in my hospitalization, stopping in their tracks, truly shocked to see me alive. I found it insulting at first. It felt as if they were passing judgment on my strength and resilience without knowing me. But I came to regard it as a compliment—a tacit expression of how sick I had been, and how unimaginable it was that I was actually still here.

  I followed the signs to the waiting room, surprising everyone.

  I began to imagine I might one day leave the hospital. I began asking questions, trying to define the road markers and hurdles between the ICU and home.

  “Whoa, there are a lot of steps between here and there,” my attending physician began. His desire for an impossibly safe discharge signaled to me the presence of a ghost in the room. Some regret of some past mistake was there, influencing our conversation. “We’d need to repeat the CT scan, to be sure the bleeding stopped. I’d like to see your blood count be stable for at least three days without transfusion. I’d like to see you consistently be steady when you walk. I’d like to see you weaned from oxygen. You are needing a lot of electrolyte replacements, that has to decrease in frequency…”

  He sensed his anxiety was evident and attempted to justify his statements to me. “Remember, you have a large blood collection within a very fragile, stretched liver capsule. Have you thought about what will it mean to drive in a car? To hit a bump? What if another car hits you? What if it ruptures and you are thirty minutes away from the hospital?”

  “Well, I’m not going to live here. So order the CT scan. I have only needed oxygen if I’m walking and not at rest,” I countered, attempting to orient him to the true risk rather than the imagined fears. It was as if I had transferred all of my anxiety onto him. “I’ll get labs drawn every day at the satellite hospital near home if you want me to,” I offered. And so began negotiations.

  One doctor, the generous obstetrician who would later endure my tirade about the floundering, self-doubting resident, understood. “Tell you what,” he said. “I know it is hard being stuck here. I’ll write an order that you can go down to I-3. We’ll find an unoccupied room. They have nice big bathrooms there, with built-in shower chairs. You can try to take a proper shower. Take some of the sticky glue off from all the monitor leads and tape. How about that?”

  I thought it sounded as good as a Popsicle in the summer.

  He failed to mention I-3 also had mirrors.

  I hadn’t seen myself in weeks. I stood naked in front of the mirror. My skin was a Day-Glo yellow, a by-product of the liver failure. My breasts were engorged and veiny in a way that reminded me I was supposedly postpartum. My abdomen was protuberant and discolored by large, ugly blue streaks that ran the entire width of my body. The staples were yellow and crusted, with dried blood at each puncture site. Sticky glue strips were everywhere, with lint and hair stuck to them. My arms and neck bore fist-sized yellowish-purple bruises. My inner thighs were a dark blue-black from the tracking blood. I looked myself in the eye and felt overwhelmed with self-pity.

  I felt sorry for myself that I’d been through all of this and there was no baby to even show for it. I felt sorry for how long and hard I knew my recovery would be. I felt angry that my body loo
ked as though it had birthed a baby, and people would unknowingly ask me about the baby, but the baby was dead, and I’d have to tell them that, and then they’d feel bad about asking, and then I’d feel bad that they felt bad. I felt angry that the pregnancy had nearly killed me. I felt overwhelmed by the knowledge that a diagnosis of HELLP syndrome meant it would never be safe for me to become pregnant again. This was almost certainly the closest I would ever be to delivering a baby, and this baby was dead. I felt ashamed that I failed so miserably at being pregnant. I hated everyone.

  “How’s it going in there?” Randy asked from outside the door.

  “Fine,” I answered and moved out of view of the mirror. “I look terrible,” I admitted through the closed door and tears.

  “Not to me you don’t. You’re alive,” he said, his voice steady and reassuring. Then, after a breath: “If you had died, I promise you, I’d still be on the floor.”

  His unwillingness to identify with me was a kind of deliberate non-empathy. But his assurance in that moment was exactly what I needed. I didn’t need my shame and disgust reflected back to me, I needed to see myself through his eyes. His love and perspective graciously eased the pain, and left only a self-pitying sadness.

  I sighed and sat in the shower, allowing the water to dilute my tears.

  * * *

  The repeat CT scan required being transported down three floors and halfway across the hospital. Transport arrived while my nurse was occupied in another room, and so I was taken without my usual pain medications. I thought it would be fine. A test of how I would handle bumps in the actual road, without such strong medications to dull the pain. It was awful. Each small bump over a ridge or an elevator ledge sent a piercing stab through my abdomen. I arrived in radiology pale and panting.

  A nurse took the chart and thanked the transporter. Finding a small plastic hospital wristband inside, she asked cheerily, “Oh! What did you have? A boy or a girl?”