Tough Love!

I stopped pushing the little button and  requested to be taken of morphine all together. The light started to shine thru the corners of my drug haze cleaning  out the nightmare of the past 48 hours. Nurses that had hovered for my first 48 hours were nowhere to be found after they removed the catheter. Regular suctioning of the trech that had been installed were the worst! It drummed up images that I had vowed to forget of my mother in her last hours. The helplessness, weakness and total fear as she was not able to breath for even a couple of seconds. Finally, Lew, one of my nurses informed me that I needed to get up and walk. That my road to recovery was going to be walked my me alone. She let me know pretty quickly that she was busy and I too needed to get busy healing myself. (Lew also mentioned that when she had a serious surgery she had not taken pain killers and kept walking halls until her release. OK she knows something!)

My partner Ken walked into the room. My first words of the day (all written on typing paper) was that I needed a walk. I was helped up and walked around "the triangle" a few times. Funny thing is upon returning to bed I felt better that I had in the past couple of days. OK so this stuff works. Keep at it! I bugged everyone entering my room to walk me (as I had to be assisted) The most amazing thing is that I wasn't really in any pain.Ye,  there was discomfort, but not what I'd call actual pain.In my mind it seemed like my tongue should have felt like it was split in two (because it was) and that sounded like a 10 on the pain scale meter. (if you are not familiar with the pain scale meter it's a scale of one to ten of pain levels accompanied by cute little white smiley faces on the starting line and ending up red unhappy faces) As it turned out, this wasn't even as bad as I had imagined a tongue piercing to be).

Finally the night of day 4 I was placed in my own room, just down the hall from the ICU and yes, I walked there! The nurses in my new room ran the gamete of being sweet to completely only doing the bare minimum. I found I really liked the bare minimum nurses the best. They ignored the order for assisted walks and let me do it on my own. Maybe this was nuts but I figured that just around the corner there were wheel chairs and I could always have a seat if I ran our of breath. The rude awaking came when I failed to remember that I was on a liquid diet (thru a feeding tube in my nose) during one of the walks I started to feel warm drops down the back of my legs and realized the error of my ways. I sheepishly wound my wayt back to my room hoping that I wasn't leaving trails)and called for the nurse who was none too pleased but I figured that they wanted to ignore instructions they could help out a little now. I remember that sponge bath particularly well because the scene of Bo Derrick in the film (If you can call it that) being washed and exclaiming "There washing me like a horse"! Amazing what pops into your head, isn't it.

The next day came as a shock. I felt like crap. What? How is this possible? I've been walking! The lesson in day five is that I was on the road to recovery, not there yet. It also appeared that there could be some pot holes in the road as well. It continued on this way until Super Bowl Sunday. Whether it was the staff moral, lack of anything on TV, fhe fact that I'd just completed the best book that I'd in years (The Coffee Shop Chronicles of New Orleans, by David Lummis) and was suffering from post book depression (you known, when you are reading a great book that you love and don't want it to be over. You know that final page is coming up fast, your reading becomes frenzied and BAM! It's over, and even if the ending is a good one, you still want more so much so that you end up reading the afterward,, credits, etc). Ken came and had already left. I was realizing just how long my road back may take and it's wasn't going to be a matter of just days, but months) I just felt drained and then my Dr Oh came in. You're doing good he told me. I'm going to release you tomorrow! WHAT? I feel like crap! I'm happy to be going home, but this wasn't making sense.

And then it occurred to me that nothing of this had made any sense anyway. This is going to be the best year of my life so far, I thought to myself.  As I heal, I'll really get to see what I'm made of. I'm finally being challenged in a way that would never could. I will walk a very different path. I can choose to become more healthy than I'd ever been before. To learn and to love like never before. I had been handed a key and I suddenly understood the light I've witnessed, in the eyes of people who had taken this journey before me!