hex_m_hell

I have a shoe box full of cards from all over the world. If you wrote to me while I was in the hospital, I still have your letter. I read each of them. They were all really wonderful. I'm sorry I didn't write back. I was a little distracted at the time. Perhaps I still am. Consider this the thank you I never sent.

When I came down from intensive care the first time they were all set up in my room. There were some flowers. There was also a giant card signed by a bunch of local comrades. I still have that somewhere too. I've considered donating it to the labor history department of UW as a thank you to Anna Mari, with a few of the pictures we took for her in the hospital later.

One of the letters has one corners is cut off, but all the rest are as they were when I opened them.

The days in the hospital all blurred together. At the beginning it was easy to keep things clear. I was in the OR. My partner came to see me as soon as I could be seen. I think I was in Intensive Care for about a week. My tattoo was pretty well stapled together. I was impressed. Everyone thought I was healing really well. I do tend to heal well. My tattoo artist, the one who did the chest piece that got the bullet hole and all cut up in surgery, had said at one point while working on it, “you heal like Wolverine.” I do heal pretty quickly.

So after that first week or so, when they told me I would probably go home soon, I was a little surprised but not incredulous.

I came into that room full of cards, flowers, my loving partner, friends. I was hopeful, that first time out of the IC. We all were. We read the cards together. Everything was pretty good. But I did have a pain in my lower abdomen. I asked for a heat pack or something, and they brought me one. My partner and friends had left the room for a little bit. I don't remember the details. A nurse, I believe, came in and talked to me a bit. I mentioned the pain and she smelled my wound, then told me they were going to take me to imaging. After she flagged folks down she said something along the lines of, “No, take him straight to the OR.”

The pain got worse and everything became a blur. I remember leaving the room, but I don't remember what happened next. My partner filled me in later.

In that box there's also a note that I wrote. I think it was about the first night. They always keep you in the IC after that type of surgery, as I understand it. Being so badly injured, time really blurred. I was asleep, then awake, it was day then night. They came in every few hours to check on me, take blood, change my fluids. Every day or two they pulled my IV and gave me new one. Every few hours, I'd sleep for a bit and someone would come in, poke me a bunch of times, then go. Sometimes they'd move me around and change the sheets.

I remember it being dark, but honestly I have no idea. I wasn't fully awake at the beginning. I don't remember much very clearly at all, except the quiet and then the screaming, then the heavy sound of the zipper. It felt like she was crying for hours. The screams of agony, of despair, are not something you can describe. They started loud, loud enough to keep me fully awake, loud enough she must have lost her voice the next day.

It can't have been an expected death. Perhaps a parent dying early, perhaps a partner, or a child. Everything in her screamed at that first moment in response to the soft mumbling voice down the hall. Over time her screams became an exhausted whimper.

I heard another voice. “Yes. Yes.”

There was the juxtaposition between the business of death – this happened, that happened, sign here, what arrangements need to be made for the body – and the emotional experience of it. I imagined it to be a relative, perhaps a sister, taking care of this business and occasionally comforting her sibling. When the business was done there was some walking around, but the crying, slowly becoming quieter, stayed in the same place. The light came on so I could hit the button for more pain killers. In the first few days after surgeries, the pain was always right there. I hit the button and fell slowly back asleep. I think this was my first night in the hospital, so it was almost a week until I would spend my brief time back in the general care area.

When my partner came back to the room I'd just been rapidly evacuated from, they were already cleaning it. All the cards had been thrown into a biohazard bag. She was barely able to save them. There was an orange liquid coming out of one of the tubes in my body. We later talked about how my partner had to empty my guava juice pouch every day for some time after I got out of the hospital. One of the cards had been thrown on some gauze or something with some of this orange liquid and had soaked some up into the corner. She cut it off. The others were fine.

There was a carelessness and callousness to the business of the hospital. The room was empty, so it was cleaned for the next person. The humanity of the situation was irrelevant to maximizing the efficiency of bed usage. Capitalism does this too us all the time, but there are few times it feels so intensely visceral.

We weren't married at the time, and I was under a protective order because of all the death threats I'd been getting, so they wouldn't tell my partner where I was. She just came in and I was gone. I don't remember what they told her but I had to ask for her to be informed.

She told me that she screamed, and may have punched a hole in a wall.

I didn't die that time. In the following few weeks there were several times I didn't die. When I came back my wound was open.

There was another surgery where they gave me ketamine and little to no pain killers. so I woke up hallucinating that I was crevice, that I had been sliced up and was having lemon poured over the pieces of my body – all of which I could still feel. The tube was still down my throat, so I couldn't scream. I thought I was convinced I was being kidnaped as I came back. I signed into my mother-in-law's hand as best as I could remember, “help me.”

I think that surgery was from the other time I almost died, when my vision went orange and I collapsed onto the hospital floor. I tried to scream for help, but could only whisper, as I slowly bled out inside my body.

I would have never heard the screaming from my partner, but I know what it would sound like. Through all the craziness and chaos, those moments still come to me. I can't quite place the room. It's almost as if I remember myself floating in a void surrounded by those operating room curtains. I can remember, if I think on it a moment, the plastic grinding of the infuser. I remember beeping, but I don't remember if it was the EKG or if I'm just remembering the default hospital sound from a show or a movie. So much is blurry, far away, chaotic and confusing. The commotion is still amorphous, dreamlike. But the quiet, the screaming, the zipper, that all remains crystal clear.

This was the first reminder of where I actually was. I imagined myself in a place where people recover, where people heal. But this was also a place where people die. Recovery is not linear. I would be reminded of this many more times in the following few weeks, and year. All of the interventions, the x-rays, the plastic in my body, these were all dangerous. I'm still wary to take ibuprofen because of the strain on my kidneys and liver. Each intervention was weighed against my risk of immediate death. Each one could carve years off my life.

These treatments, these interventions, they would never leave me the person I was before. Trauma like mine doesn't work like that. Trauma always takes some of your life. Sometimes it ends your life right there, other times you can heal and have a long life before you fall into the hole left by those missing years.

Part of me has never left that place, floating in that curtained void, where I was both healing and near death.