HOSPITAL DEJA VU

And then an inadvertent fall leads to further injury and a fast slide down the path to another feared hospitalization, including emergency surgery on my left leg to address a growing compartment syndrome.

So here I am again unable to get out of bed or walk on my own. The panic attacks begin hot and loud taking up all the space in the room. If I’m in luck, there’s a nurse who understands me and helps my situation. Just trying to get decent food is a stretch. They actually serve gingerale with high fructose corn syrup.

I was put in two rooms with dying women and kept awake all night with the lights and commotion and screams from procedures. I took on their trauma. Healing is hard to come by under such circumstances.

There does come a time when one has to give up on the body, when the infirmity becomes an oppressive limit to life. To try to live in a constant battle with aging is a fool’s choice. When to let go is the challenge.

Home from hospital and the hits keep coming fast and furious. AC not working, so apartment is oppressively hot. Next day Emma brings an AC and with Simon’s help, installs it. Apartment finally cools off. Angels and solutions mercifully continue to arrive.

Pain in surgical leg increases so I can't put any weight on it. It'a new pain I did not feel in the hospital. Once again can’t stand on it.

So after discharge home on Saturday, back to the ER on Monday. 

Word is it is some kind of fluid collection at the back of the knee. They still need to do ultrasound and I see the ortho team at 9 AM. That means another all-nighter in the ER hallway on a gurney.

Having to tell about decades of trauma sets me off, PTSD kicks in, and I go into anxiety attack mode. Seems like everybody I talk to has to hear at all - over and over and over and over again.

They decide to admit me, and this time get me my own room so I have the luxury of space and quiet and time and a certain amount of control. Wherever I am, I attempt to set up a survival unit with the basics covered, so I can feel as though life function is possible.

Walking with my two canes to the bathroom in spite of terrible pain in the leg. There is a bruise that goes all the way up the thigh to my ass culminating at the knee with a huge hematoma and the entire lower leg is a mass of bruises. Then on the outside of the lower leg there is a new 4 inch long incision wound that looks to be healing - another scar to add to the collection.

These poor legs have been through hell this last 15 years. Seems a constant struggle of injury/surgery/pain/recovery/hope, always ends me up here - on my back with a leg in the air unable to walk.

Have spent the past several months facilitating the careful work of making the home environment safe, hazard-free and conducive to function, determined to age in place and not end up in hospital for my final days. With this recent fall, there is doubt. Something dies inside me when I think about needing to go to another rehab facility. 

Could this spate of challenges be used to shake me out of a certain rigid personal demand for order and ease, testing me out of some dependable reliance on particulars and reminding me life is fleeting and cruel and totally unreliable?

My activation of acceptance has to develop into a more sophisticated demeanor without so much protest and resistance. To witness the existence of evil forces gaining footage in our lives is not the same as giving over to them. There is an inner fight for the good, the kind, the possible that can co-exist in the face of the bad, the mean and the seemingly unacceptable.

I will strive instead to cultivate calm and peace and adjust to circumstances with more grace, a deeper sense of irony and humor - letting go trying to satisfy presumed needs, releasing my natural reflex to act out of knowns. Instead I must embrace the peaceful navigation of constant change, in spite of the increasing limits of aging.

 Keeping in play a demand for quality control at all times does little to advance a case. What you see is what you got - no advantage in demanding more.

 The answer is to work with it.

Even though we are perfect, just as we are, certain functional adjustments are necessary in most cases.