The Year I Forgot To Remember
I missed an anniversary on Friday and it was a good thing.
Over the weekend, I was reaching with my right arm up to a cupboard above the stove and over my head and I was in that moment overwhelmed again with gratitude that I have a fully functioning limb, a limb which could easily have been lost in 2004 as a result of my skirmish with a microscopic intruder. Fifteen years and some battle scars and a shoulder replacement later, I can still feel thankful.
On June 7 that year, I was being operated on to halt the spread of necrotizing fasciitis (“flesh-eating bacteria” in its more Stephen King iteration), a quite rare Group A strep infection in my right arm.
You can find medical language about it like this.
“The infection involves necrosis of the subcutaneous tissue and fascia was first described by Wilson in the 1950s.
NF is a disease characterized by a rapidly progressing destruction of tissue and systemic toxicity, and delayed treatment can lead to an infection with a high mortality rate.
Emergency surgical debridement and broad-spectrum antibiotic therapy remain the most appropriate treatments to reduce the mortality rate of NF. Delayed recognition and treatment can cause the disease to progress and increases the risk of poor outcomes, so it is very important to diagnose the disease at an early stage and treat rapidly.”
The writing is dull as ditchwater, but roughly translates to “get your ass to the hospital right now or you’re dead.” It’s the fastest-moving bacterial infection known to medical science and there was no time to wait, once it had been diagnosed for certain. The morbidity is very high, the tissue damage can be extensive (“catastrophic” was the word one of the surgeons used) and I was very fortunate to get through it with only some serious scars (from the surgery on my arm and the skin taken from my leg for the graft) which conferred definite bragging rights.
I was diagnosed with PTSD afterwards and was living at times in mortal, though irrational, terror of getting it again. I took Paxil for a year and that helped me to take a step back from the ledge when I started to feel hysterical or nearly so.
In any case, for several years I knew the anniversary was coming long before its arrival on the calendar and I needed to talk and talk and talk and relive it and retell it over and over. Until one spring, I’ve forgotten which one, I realized it had gone by without any fanfare or angst. A big win, that, and a milestone.
Perhaps that year was my own River Lethe, the drinking from which, in Greek mythology, caused complete forgetfulness.
There are anniversaries and birthdays and other occasions for the forgetting of which I would not be grateful (I’m thinking wedding, wife’s birthday, kids’ birthdays, the year the Red Sox won their first World Series in 86 years–which was the same year, 2004, as it happens–that sort of stuff), but this is not one such.
I have made long lists of gratitude for what happened, how I survived, how great the hospital staff was at the hospital (Massachusetts General) and lessons learned about the fragility and preciousness of life and its simple pleasures, like the first time I got pushed outside in my wheelchair and got to put my bare feet on cool June grass.
It’s all a touchstone, for sure, and the event has mostly faded to black, as the song goes. Staying in touch with thankfulness for my life is an unintended byproduct that I treasure from my brush with mortality. I mostly forget about how close I came to the long dirt nap.
An African proverb still helps me find meaning in all of it–“A lion chased me up a tree and from there my view was improved greatly.”
I’m also grateful that I forgot once again this year.
