Home from the hospital is a good place to be, especially if your husband comes to fetch you with your favorite stuffed toy, a freaky-looking-purple-and-green-monster-like-guy named Calvin, held under one arm and a large bunch of purple and green tulips held under his other arm, all sealed with a smile and a kiss.
And the hospital stay itself? In a sense, hospitals are like drugs or, rather, like Life Itself....it's partly up to the patient or the person to determine whether it iwll be a low or a high. For me, hospitals are always a "high". For me, hospitals are a "high", because, hey, you're already "there". No rush to the E.R. No worrying where your next dose of pain medication is gonna be. It's right there, attached to your very own IV, stuck into your very own arm. Push the little black button every eight and a half minutes and you're sweeeeet. You want ice cream? You got it. You want pudding? A cheese sandwich? Jello? Spaghetti and meatballs? No problemo! And, if you're me, no problemo if the food is only halfway good, either, because.....I DON'T CARE! Just as long as somebody else is making it and somebody else is bringing it (at my command) I'm good. And the nurses are all, for the most part, good souls who warm up instantly if given half a chance.
The anesthesiologist was a well-tanned, silver headed dude who bragged to Alan and me that he was "only sixty-two years of age" (subtext: and SEE HOW GREAT I LOOK!) ....the nurse pointed out to him Alan and my ages, which prompted him to hem and haw and, in general, stuff his "bragging rights" back into his thorax and keep them them there for the Next Couple, because, yes, folks, WE looked SO much younger than he.
But he was fun. A zany guy, but fun, if you are into competence-with-zaniness, which I totally am. "Kay," he began his explanation of how he was going to anesthetize me, "I'm going to take you to a tropical beach. I'm going to turn on a little music, bring you a few nice Mai Tai's plus a couple of other sweet, thick drinks, and six Cabana Boys. Will six be all right?"
"Only if they all look like my husband," I said, whereupon the anesthesiologist exclaimed to Alan, "Oh, MAN! Where did you GET this one! How lucky can you GET! She actually wants all her Cabana Boys to look like YOU!"
Alan grinned. "Well, " he smiled his great big warm smile, "Who ELSE would she want them to look like?"
My thoughts entirely.
Oh, but back to the nurses. Because I'm certain I won the Nurse-Lottery, my nurses were SO great. It was as if they were sitting right outside my door just waiting.....just sitting with baited breath......just....WAITING.....for me to push that "Red Nurse Button" and give them something to do. Need help getting up to pee? Well, little lady, HERE WE ARE! Need help finding your book on group psychology? HERE YOU GO! More water? WHAT A GREAT REQUEST, you NEED more WATER! WHAT'S THIS WE HEAR? You are suddenly starting to itch from the inside out and you think it's this newest pain medication? Let us call your doctor IMMEDIATELY and SEE WHAT WE CAN DO!
So fine. So very, very, very, very fine.
And the physician, the physician-surgeon-doctor, what did he have to do with all this? Well, he performed a Diagnostic Laproscopy on me, saw nothing much, took a few pictures, and backed out with....My Appendix! Yes, folks, he went in and Took My Appendix Down! Because, with those sneakky appendix[es} (??) ....well, you just never know.
You just never know. And the doctor was/ still is..... a friend, so I think he really felt the need to Do SOMETHING. Thank God some of us still have anextraneous organ or two to do something WITH. So here I am, with a hard, swollen, aching belly, now punctuated with three or four tiny holes, as I have been pecked with a long-beaked woodpecker, and a glossy sheet of pictures which the surgeon called "beautiful". "You have beautiful insides, Kay," he said, tracing the red-melonish colored organs with his finger.
Really? Really! Well, that's.......good to know. Because it all looks like so much mush to me.
I didn't sleep, but not because I wasn't given enough drugs, enough quietude, enough darkness. I didn't sleep because the lady next to me, who was, by the way, in MUCH worse shape me, so I forgive her (NOW).... had a tendency to want to call people (who WERE these people she was calling and why were they UP at the hours she was calling them?) starting out about 2 AM and ending up at about 4 AM. She'd make a call, start out nice and sort of shy and friendly and end up calling them all "assholes". Turned out everybody she knew was, sad to say, an asshole. At least during the wee wee hours of the morning. I chocked these calls up to this woman's personal way of dealing with her anxiety. I did push the Red Nurse Button several times during this entire nighttime experience and they were able to give me warmer sheets, ice cream, an extra extra IV pain med, retrieve my television button (hey, if she was going to take me on her "Asshole Cruise", I was going to take HER on a "TV Home Shopping Cruise").
Fair's fair.
We both fell asleep for two hours between 4 and 6 A.M.
I really think you need to have a style in which you spend your time in the hospital. If you have something as strenuous as heart surgery or an aneurism, of course, you have to give it a few days before you can develope and then polish your style. But if you are in for something minor, you need to decide what kind of stay you want, and then go for it. Me, I always want to go for the best, most affectionate, most humorous stay possible. I want to fall in love with all my nurses, women and men, and I want to stay in love with myself, as well. I want to give up the idea of myself as a "Serious Being", unless I have to stand up for myself in some sort of important-advocate role. I want to be amused and I want to be amusing.
"You wanted justice and there was none - - only love," said Archibald MacLeish, in his play J.B.
So here I am at my home on Bainbridge Island, with Alan by my side. Last night we watched an old Dick Cavette show with Mr. Cavette interviewing a thirty-year-old John Lennon and his new wife, Yoko OhNo (sorry, sp). Tonight we'll watch Woody Allen's lovely movie "Sweet and Lowdown" with Sean Penn playing Emmett Ray, the second greatest jazz guitarist in all the world. Watching Lennon last night, Alan and I both concluded how awfully difficult a thing fame must be. Alan, one of Bruce Springstein's best friends when they were young, said that fame had been very tough for the young - as well as for the older - Mr. Springstein.
I don't know why I have launched myself out of the hospital and into this discussion about fame except to say that taking one's Self seriously is a thorny, thorny patch and that hospitals can be seen as microcosms of The Social Order at Large, which is why affection and humor seem to me to be the best way of burying the cultural hatchets of strata, ego and judgement.
I'll (nearly) close off by quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson and his "Three Wants", which I like to include whenever I feel the soil is at all ready, so here they come: "There are three wants which can never be satisfied: that of the rich wanting more, that of the sick, wanting something different, and that of the traveler, who says, "anywhere but here."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hospitals are big and cumbersome and clumsy places and people make fun of them all the time, but I wouldn't want to be anywhere different, not any time, not anywhere, if or when I was sick. Give me the worst hospital ever, and I know I will find one person with a pair of loving eyes and a beating heart and two hands to begin the mortal process of what we all mostly need when we are failing: the touch of the wounded healer.
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