I’ve been one of those guys who just doesn’t get really sick. I’ll have the occasional flu or upper respiratory infection, sprain or cavity. The sort of minor ache or ailment that requires the minimal amount of medical care—take two aspirin and call me in the morning.
But after the first treatment didn’t work and the second came with complications, and I found myself catheterized, on a steel table in the emergency room with a 103.5 fever and the doctor on duty saying “you’re staying in the hospital,” I realized that with middle age had arrived middle aged discontents, illness and medical procedures a big part of them.
My family was traumatized, my workplace amazingly understanding, some friends engaged and concerned while others unaware of my travails (I didn’t post the gnarly details to Facebook—you’re welcome). I'm blessed to have a good health insurance plan.
But inside my head things reached a point where I wondered what the next complication might be, whether a fever that turned into a night in the hospital and spread into a six-day stay would morph into something more menacing.
Then it did. Back in the hospital for an outpatient procedure days later I unexpectedly aspirated under general anesthesia, only to awaken 16 hours later, hands tied down to the bed rails and tubes down my throat to my lungs and stomach. It was the sort of living horror movie I only imagined in those disengaged moments when the lawyer explains the medical power of attorney and living will documents before you sign.
All in all, my doctor said I was lucky to come out of it with two days in the ICU and a bad sore throat and congested lungs; I could’ve had a tracheotomy and been on a ventilator. Laying there with multiple tubes in and out of my body it was hard to feel lucky.
But the anesthesiologist had been quick on the draw, my doctor was able to extract the malevolent renal calculus, and though greatly weakened, I was on my way back to my workaday week, the simple joys of my family, and the entitled curmudgeonliness Patch lets me display here from time to time.
So it came to be this week I had a final procedure and was cleared by my doctor with the happy news that he didn’t want to see me for six months. I’m regaining strength, and I’m happy for the little things. My child’s hug, a wife who can freak out a little less, a walk outside in the evening air, four in the morning passing without someone waking me up to draw blood—these are a few of my favorite things, to paraphrase Hammerstein.
That which does not kill us makes us stronger. Nietzsche wrote that, and I’m trying to make it fit my current situation, although I’m still weak enough that I can’t quite yet play practice goalie for my daughter’s pre-practice soccer workouts. My fears about growing old and invasive medical procedures have been realized.
It won’t make the next round, should it come, any easier. But I certainly will have a higher threshold for pain, embarrassment, frustration and rage. And I think I’ll try to not sweat the minor aggravations as much.
As I lay in the hospital in the evening gloaming one night, machines going ping and beep around me and nurse-angels drifting by my bed to hang another bag of antibiotics or shoot another syringe of sweet narcotic into my lines to kill the pain, I wondered if things would ever return to normal for me and if I would appreciate them more if they did.
They are, and I’m trying.
