Tags
AllyMcBeal, babushka, covid-19, hospitals, hyperemesis, ICU, medical, nurse, nursing, pandemic, PTSD, ptyalism, spirits
P.S. I don’t usually write Post Scripts (see Bedhead) but then again, I’m not usually swept up in a global pandemic. So, here goes:
I am better. I am! Thank you all for your kind words and wishes.
But since it’s my blog, I get to be honest, and gripe a bit, too. For am I gadding about, filled with gumption and ‘in good spirits’ yet?
No, no I am not.
This is partly because I am still coughing quite a bit, which no one appreciates these days. Also my neck throbs, a feeling so persistent I fear my lungs and neck shall never be unsore again. Add to that, I now live with three bored-out-of-their-mind teenagers, which is a blog post unto itself. There are more squabbles and dishes than I ever thought possible. But mostly the reason I’m not great, yet, is because I suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, medically speaking. As such, a global pandemic in name alone, paired alongside my strange sickness over these last few months, has brought my PTSD flaring to the surface, like a bad rash that’s enveloped every inch of you, even the inside of your ears and that weird, frog-like, stretchy skin connecting your thumb to its opposable digits.
Historically speaking, I’ve been ill plenty, stuck in the hospital many times, yet never, ever while I was there was I ‘in good spirits’. How any of the world’s leading news outlets can define Boris Johnson’s recent stay in the ICU, quoting that exact phrase with faux-seriousness, is beyond me. It’s as if all politicians and new outlets are resigned – nay relishing – fanciful lying now, even the BBC!
I write this because my stance is, was, and will continue to be – no one is ‘in good spirits‘ in an ICU, and rarely in the hospital proper. The two terms – hospitalized/good spirits – cancel each other out.
As an example I offer one of my own hospital stays, wherein I was suffering from a twin pregnancy; several concurrent kidney stones; ptyalism (wherein you cannot swallow), and hyperemesis, my case debilitating enough that a PIC line was inserted through my arm so I could theoretically absorb 8 hours of intraveinous fluids at home, if at some point I made it home. I also, charmingly, lacked control over my bowels and couldn’t eat by mouth, whereby I offered the world little more than a larvael presence, lying atop the bed, drooling from both ends.
It was at this bleak moment that my care team decided I needed a ‘mental health counselor’ to rouse me to rally, hopeful to restore my mental vigor into something approaching ‘good spirits’.
An order was duly placed, and at long last a ‘professional’ appeared. She entered, adjusting her short, tight pencil skirt and white button-up blouse confidant as Ally McBeal herself. Drawing close, this twenty-something girl clutched her clipboard, trying not to visibly back away from my pungeant persona. Perched like a songbird on the very edge of the bedside chair, she raised her clipboard high enough to block the vision of thick, copious spit frothing from my mouth onto the bedsheets, at last chirping, ‘How might I help you today, Mrs. Kirk?’.
She actually did refer to me as Mrs. Kirk. As if it were the 1940’s and I but a miserly madam, laid up with a heap of lady hysteria. Well…perhaps you can picture my rage.
Or perhaps you genuinely fail to fathom why I was bothered at all, what with a lovely, young ingenue leaning over me, eager to listen and learn.
I’ll merely reiterate – I was incensed. How dare they send in this girl, this waifling, who’d as yet stumbled only between a classroom and upscale-bar, to help me! Utilizing a hail-mary surge of strength I clutched the bed railing, rising enough to spit-growl, “Get out! Get the hell out of my room!”
When the powers that be sought a professional to counsel me in my time of need, they should have offered a Russian Babushka, damn it, the old woman waddling into my room with her lopsided, droopy breasts cradled atop her rounded stomach, still mountainous as bread after all these years. She’d have known enough to forgo the chair entirely, squatting instead to recall the birth of her own twins there in the snow, alongside three ragggedy kidney stones, barely bigger than barley seeds. Watery-eyed, she’d remember wrapping the cantankerous lot of ’em within a woolen sweater pulled from her own back, bundling the bodily-offerings deep inside a cavernous bag full of freshly dug potatoes, before trudging back to the Dacha so as to prepare the evening meal herself.
Perhaps she might have roused my spirits…a bit!
All of which is to say, being in the hospital, by definition, means you’re no longer able to just ‘grin and bear it’. You’re not capable of ‘beating this thing through willpower.’ (White mans’ bullshit, truly). And you’re certainly not in good spirits unless they’ve hooked you up to morphine, demerol, or both, and even then you’re far too miserable to appreciate it.
My mother was a nurse, back in the 1950’s and 60’s, and it’s fair to say she’s still haunted by those hospital halls and weeping walls. One night one of her patients illicitly lit a cigarette while in his hospital bed, sitting up, seemingly ‘in good spirits’, whereupon he burst into flame. Running in, Nurse Mary had to try to save him. Imagine – your patient on fire! Throwing herself on top of him to smother the flames, he died despite her heroism, there beneath her, for which she was promptly reprimanded. And that, my friends, is a bad, sad, maddening day of work, one that no amount of pay will ever shake away.
Hospitals are hellish places that function purely on the hope that you will get out of there, soon. As such, if you are a person who has been admitted into the hospital for something severe, chronic, or unexpectedly, tragically horrible, I believe you walk around the rest of your days heaving a great, big, inaudible sigh that at least you are not there. And that feeling – that dread, that knowledge, that memory – is what I call Post Traumatic Stress. I know my mother has it. I believe I do, too. And millions and millions of your fellow citizens bear it already, or will soon experience it, way worse than we do.
So let’s loosen our grip on this national, maddening mantra of ‘wellness’ and ‘fortitude’. Those mindsets are coping mechanisms, surely, but with thousands upon thousands of people going in and hopefully coming out of hospitals these days, all who are in one way or another attempting to bear and beat this truly terrible virus, let’s not demand ‘good spirits’ on top of that, nor talk about this in terms of willpower. Sigh.
For once, let’s call a lie a lie. If you are able to return to your home, keep your home, hell- have a home! – after this pandemic is over, and can still shakily pour yourself a stiff tumbler of scotch, then we’ll talk about ‘good spirits’, ok?