The Change
My mind rushes forward, dumping thoughts, turning them over, falling over itself but was trapped in a body that won’t act on command, backfired on signals.
2018
First I’m dragging my left foot, my left eye becomes a blur, next my speech slurs, stutters, stops altogether. My eye gains a film. Not the kind you’d rub off, the kind that sticks, no matter how hard you rub. The film was like polyester fabric, like wearing a permanent veil.
Last Wednesday, I walked, had decent vision, spoke in full sentences. Last Wednesday was productive. This Wednesday I failed at all three.
Summers in Texas make me restless, cranky. I break out in rashes. I take frigid showers, lay under the ceiling fan across my bed, push my head into the freezer, holding it there until my husband pulls me out.
This Wednesday, the hospital feels malleable, cool in the center of the city. Inside the halls, I walk, dragging my left foot behind me, numb, paralyzed at the ankle. The heavy curtains in my room are closed to keep the light out. On my walks with physical therapy, I wait for a nurse to come to the side of my bed. He asks me to stand to remain in place. We are waiting for my blood to move up to my brain, waiting for my heart to catch up with the motion of standing. We then hook arms like bosom buddies, walk together out the door, into the beige corridor.
The hall is flooded with fluorescent light blinding my first steps. My left eye feels like a golf ball, just pushed into my skull, odd, itchy, out of place. The brain lesion behind my eye thrums my nerve signals with strange, painful sensations like the keys of an untuned piano.
Later, groups of doctors begin passing through my new room. On day two, one doctor says optic neuritis; on day three another doctor says multiple sclerosis. It turns out the doctor on day three was right.
One tech advised drinking water and taking rest. Hydration, a basic recommendation for the common cold, are generic words said by hospital staff. Parrots would be as effective in repeating the same. Water, rest, soup, pillows, and vitals. This is the healing regimen religiously practiced inside the hospital.
The tech rolls through for vitals each hour, twenty-four hours a day. The tech’s comings and goings are dehumanizing. The tech doesn’t touch me for my pulse. A glowing red sensor sends the pulse to the machine next to the bed. The tech records my heartbeat on her clipboard, she pushes up my cheesecloth gown around my arm, wraps the blood pressure cuff around, ripping the Velcro, re-wrapping, ripping and re-wrapping until the cuff fits the circumference of my arm in the way the tech desires. The cuff presses against my skin, a cheap man’s massage.
I find many diversions on my hospital walks. I refuse to use a walker, holding on instead to the railings. I felt a walker would make my diagnosis permanent, make the nurses think I wasn’t trying, make guests glance at me with pity, condescension, or ignore me altogether (those were my favorite, honest types). I couldn’t eat this kind of judgment. The drugs weren’t strong enough to kill my pride, crush all my neurosis. I’d only received one shot of that special drug when I first came in, and the glow had worn off long ago.
To walk, I take one step forward with my working leg, then drag the dead leg forward to simulate a gait, a gait akin to a dog clipped by a car.
Walking down the beige hall, peering into other patient rooms, I glimpse playing cards tossed across sliding meal tables. Vacant, drugged expressions of hospital guests staring at television screens, their faces lit by projections. Families in cramped rooms speak rapidly, eating huddled, fearful of silences, not allowing a hush to settle, families not talking at all, gathered to form a long horseshoe around the electric bed, sitting stiff as though in a church pew.
Techs typing into their phones next to ringing alert buttons. Doctors text their wives about sex while scanning reports. Information displayed no information. Coffee stations with coffee for sustenance, used well and often. Magazines everyone touches, but no one reads. A janitor always ignored, shocked when our shoulders make physical contact. Not much different than life on the outside of the hospital, but with free needles.
A nurse comes in. She smiles, I smile. I don’t feel like smiling, but morals require a smile.
“How are you feeling this morning?” the nurse says.
“Fine, I’m fine,” I lie.
Lies are greeted with kindness I find. Truthful answers earn stiff smiles, avoidance, quick task completion or leaving altogether. Truth is not the right answer.
“Does that feel better now?” asks the nurse.
“Yes, (a lie) yes, a hot sheet does feel better.”
The nurse moves my belongings off of the feeding table, along with a comb, a paperback, a metal cup of lukewarm coffee.
A priest knocks on the half-shut door. He comes in and asks me if I called for comfort. He walks over to a chair, pulls his slacks up, shifting his pants, preparing to sit. The black neckpiece must be tight I think, but he doesn’t pull on it. Half-way through his squat into a plastic-lined lounger, he realizes he’s in the wrong room. The priest stands erect, moves across the room to the door, waves goodbye, taking his comfort next door from what I overhear through the thin walls.
Staring at the stained ceiling tiles, my mind courses down the valley of a drug-induced coaster ride. I question how long a person can go without moving. How still I can be without slipping into insanity, without wishing for death. The first day has been restful, sleeping off and on, riding along the waves of morphine. The next days have been harder, longer. I want to roam, wander, but my weak hips, jelly legs forbid it. My mind rushes forward, dumping thoughts, turning them over, falling over itself but was trapped in a body that won’t act on command, backfired on signals. My brain is enclosed in a body unresponsive.
Virtual reality headsets should be provided to bedridden patients. Money spent on bedpans and piles of warm sheets is better used on VR sets, modes of escape outside the steel catch bars of this electronic coffin. My feelings, base and afflicted, could shift inside a virtual library allowing me to walk amongst a stack of books, pulling enticing bindings off the shelves.
Coordinated hunts are made by techs for spots on the brain. The diagnosis focused on identifying those places. Places of space containing insufficiencies debated and decided in areas where I was not admitted. Standards were followed, proofs ordered, results compiled. Waiting happened. Diversions resulted.
Inside my brain white circles on black and white films were identified. Expensive machines take expensive images cutting the brain in sections, sections finer than tissue paper. The spots are the source of the cannots, the physical tasks you completed last week but this early afternoon cannot.
“I’m not coping with becoming a burden,” I mumble. “I’m feeling disgusted when my leg shakes. Disgust with how it must feel to watch, I think. Do you have something for this?” I ask.
“Yes,” says the doctor, eyes fixed to the computer screen, her back faces me, standing with her weight shifted to one leg as she typed. “Yes, I have something for the depression you have as a result of your condition.”
I don’t speak now, tears flow.
Crying I avoid, but these tears are the type that just flow, pushing them down, trying to pinch my skin, my eyes following a fly on the wall, none of this works with these tears. They well up like a broken water main. I harshly wipe my face with a towel. Why the tears, suck it up, don’t let her turn around and see them, my mind says.
“You don’t have depression generally, not generally”, she repeats. “You just have circumstantial depression,” she says, “due to the circumstances of your disease.”
I tell her I also had what they called postpartum depression.
She disregards my comment. Maybe that depression is only dealt with by obstetricians, I think.
“I was given pills for that too, just short term you know, just a little while.”
Her head nods, acknowledging.
My sense of guilt is tangible like dust on a shelf. Maybe the depression is a problem, I think, then shove the thought away.
“We will start you on the smallest dose, then build up from there, if we need to.”
I’m not listening, she’s not either. Bright heat pushes against the sealed windows. Inside my room is dark and chilled. I peer over the window-ledge.
There’s a bigger problem with the birds. Here at the hospital courtyard, there is feces everywhere. The birds flock to the trees in the yard during the heat of the day, using the fountain for bathing, drinking, preening. The chairs around the courtyard are plastered in white droppings leaving patients and visitors no place to sit, smoke, read, rest, or be outside of the hospital. The gardener knows this task is not part of gardening but pursues it each day. The gardener, a man, short with thin legs, shoos the birds en masse each day at 1:00 p.m., running in circles around the courtyard fountain with an upended rake, chasing the birds out of the trees, out of the courtyard.
The birds calling grows louder, one, four, ten fly up into the air, gathering into a giant circle, looping over the yard once, twice, then flying off, across the busy street to a row of poplars, where they land, rest. After four minutes the birds’ clatter peaks. They lift up into the air, forming the same circle, and glide back to the fruit trees surrounding the hospital courtyard.
The gardener has gone inside.
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