ally

November 1, 2019

And then I woke up, and I was in the post-op recovery room.
Disoriented, loopy, giggly, not yet in pain --- a small boon.
There was the nurse, and there was JD. How long had he been there?
After some indeterminate time, I was wheeled...somewhere.
Yet more anonymous halls. Yet more competent nurses.
Language was not yet wholly available to me, no verses
yet to be had, despite the heady sensation of the opiate
coursing through me; only giggles, however inappropriate,
every time we went over a bump or up a ramp.
And then I was in my room.
            Me. A bed. My IV. A lamp.
Square. Spacious. A bathroom I could not yet walk to.
Hourly vitals. Friendly staff wandering through to talk to.
And a button in my hand.
That button, which you were instructed to press
every seven minutes. A morphine drip, or dilaudid, at a guess.
Every seven minutes, a bit of nightmare dripped into your veins.
Every seven minutes, more entrails, more gears, more chains
coursing through your mind.
There was pain, too, and the drip did indeed lessen that.
Still, the pain grew less, and soon I switched meds to combat
that ebbing tide. Tylenol. Hydrocodone. The button was removed.
Pills. Pills. Every four hours: pills. I complain, but improved
nonetheless. Antibiotics. Stool softeners. Painkillers.
The nurses wandering in and out became my tillers:
They steered my days, steered my pain, steered my diet.
We talked. We laughed. We shared private jokes in the quiet
of the night over BP cuffs. They helped with bedpan duty,
thankless though it was. Another patient would cry, flutey,
and they'd hurry off. I remember none of their names.
Every now and then, when he made it down to Portland, James
would visit, perhaps spend the night.
Your laptop unweildy, you spent most of your time on your phone.
Even when no one was there, you were never quite alone.
Hours on Taps. Hours on Telegram. Five long days on your back,
and you, a side sleeper! Anything and everything to distract
from that fact.
It wasn't all monotony. The surgeon came in to check on me.
They removed my dressing, and then my packing, setting me free,
stepwise, from confinement. The last day was the biggest of all:
The packing, catheter, and drains were removed. I tried to crawl
from bed, found myself on the verge of collapse. I showered
and saw my body changed. They measured my urine. Nurses glowered
at how little. They threatened to put the catheter back.
Embarrassed, I defecated, then tried again. Now on track,
I was finally discharged. It was then that I finally saw,
from my wheelchair, the hitherto only hinted at hall
outside my door. It was somehow still unreal to me.
Or perhaps I was simply to eager to finally be free
from the room.
Undiluted sunlight while you waited on JD to get the car
hurt your eyes. You could still barely stand, afraid to jar
your new body in your dizziness. Almost more overwhelming
than the hours before the surgery was you helming
your dissociating self.
All the way to the B&B, crossing that street, getting settled,
I was nothing. I was not myself. I was soft, bepetaled.
I was new. I was raw. Cliché, sure, but I was a flower
newly sprouted. Under anaesthesia, I ceased to tower
over the earth and instead became one with it. Or my dream
finally became reality and I had become a tree, the theme
of growth omnipresent within me. It was too much, too much.
So I slept. I waited for Robin to join me, just to clutch
at things familiar. Something to anchor past me to the present.
I had become a tree, had grown, and sure, it was pleasant,
but all the same, I still needed something to keep me grounded.
I needed to not be completely unmoored, to not be unbounded.
But it was done.
It was done. It was complete. You'd started taking action,
and kept on taking steps until you were there, beyond abstraction.
This was concrete. This was real. This was true. You were true.
You weren't false before, but all the same, now that you were new,
you were more true now