New Year’s Eve…, In the Hospital

Look What I’ve Done to My Family.

I didn’t know the extent of my medications while I was in the hospital, all I did know was that I got a side dish with every meal.  And, since I was not really keeping count I had no idea that the dosage of trazodone at night (for insomnia and impulsiveness) was being increased.  Why I was up at night, why I was roaming around, to me, came from an overwhelming desire to be somewhere else.  I wasn’t comfortable in the hospital room, I wanted to leave.  I thought I told them this, but every day I was still dreaming, still in the hospital and I didn’t know how many different ways to explain my need.  So my body must have reacted in its own way.  It was searching, searching for a way out. 

Of course it could have just been that a body can only rest so much.  With the medications in play I was sleeping way before prime time was over.  This is why by the wee hours of the morning I would get out of bed, sit on my chair and watch whatever was on the television.  I do not know if the man lying beside me in the room watched too.  I remember his eyes were open but what he saw I do not know.  The eyes didn’t follow me per se as I bustled about the room, or passed his bed on my way to the hall.  But they were open, and they were staring.  I tried asking him once what he wanted to watch but when he didn’t answer there was nowhere for me to go with that, so I watched what I wanted, it was after all, my TV.  If he wanted something else he could watch his own.  One time I asked one of those night clerks when they once again caught be in the hall about this but the answer evaded me.  All I remember from that episode was more medicine for me and someone dividing the room in half by pulling the curtain.

Between Christmas and the New Year I know I had a visitor.  Karen came.  She was an old family friend from when I was very young.  Her father and mine served together in Korea and our families shared a lot of memories.  I cannot recollect exactly when she came, but it was during this holiday season. 

I was very happy to have a visitor but very sad to be seen in my condition.  Something else became very obvious to me during this visit.  My ability to communicate was more severely limited than I would have imagined, if I actually spent time thinking about it.  Funny thing though, my ability to interpret data was not.  It became very clear to me from that moment onwards that everyone I interacted with fell into two camps; those who interacted with me in a manner I had experienced before my accident (even if I had trouble talking) and those who stayed back, watched me, and took notes. 

Later I would learn of all those who sent cards, set prayers for me in motion, or mentioned me in their religious services.  These people, coupled with all those who helped me on December 11, 2007, are truly great gifts to the human condition.  But when I was recovering in the hospital my attention became fixed on my immediate surroundings.  And at this time most people I spoke with fell into the second category, those who stayed back, watched me, and took notes.  Since I was very well acquainted with scientific observation I did not like in the least others observing me like white-coated scientists.  Later I would indirectly hear their pronouncements on my condition.  The concept of being continually under observation led to my retreat into a defensive state of mind.  If people treated me like a laboratory animal instead of a human being, it made it difficult for me to relax around them, or, quite frankly, to be friendly.  The differentiation of people based on their mental competencies had come home to roost.  It made me very mad.

 Eventually New Year’s Eve arrived.  My wife and children came.  I was happy to see them but sad that they would have to spend a holiday in a hospital.  While they came to see me, I cried for them.  It was beginning to sink in and I was saddened by what I had done to my family.  I tried to get them to leave before visiting hours were over so they could get home (we lived about an hour and a half away, depending on traffic) but I was told they were spending the night.  Not in the hospital but in a nearby motel. 

New Year’s Eve in a motel watching television with clear memories of Prometheus wishing to be unbound is not the best of all possible worlds, but the fact that they were there amazed me.  But thinking of them, in their situation, only made me stretch harder.  If I was the problem, if I caused their lives to change, inexorably I feared, then I had to escape, to get out and find a way to fix what I had molded, and I would to this, right after a quick nap, copious amounts of medicine may not be the tastiest of courses, but it was the one item you were forced to eat at mealtime. 

For a long, long time, even after I was weaned off of most medications, when I slept I had no dreams.  The trouble was getting to sleep though the discomfort.  But when sleep did come, it came like a blink.  I was asleep, and then I was awake.  On New Year’s Eve, like every night in the hopital I began my sleep early, and as usual, by midnight or thereabouts I was awake again, nervous, and in need…, of something.  All memory of where I was had to be reconstructed.  I did feel again the need, the need to do something, but the odds against me remembering what that need was seemed to be hopeless. 

New Year’s came and my family returned bringing extensions with them.  My sister-in-law and her husband had driven up from Philadelphia, and brought dinner.   If anyone else was there I do not know, but dinner was there and I was given permission to eat some of it.  It was at this point in time that I began to realize exactly why I wanted to escape; the food was terrible in the hospital.  I had found a rock on which to base my case, and remember it basically at every meal.

What’s a Little Anomia Between Friends?

I Wish I could Tell you What I Feel.

For some reason I liked my new hair style, very short on one side and long and full on the other.  Of course every morning when I washed up the left ear sticking out the way it did, with all of the scar tissue around it, usually set me back a moment.  And then there was the other scar, the one that began just above the temple and seemed to recede towards the back of my head.  I could not follow the entire course of that disfigurement because even though the hair was short it seemed to cover the extent of the scar line.  Of course when I ‘got dressed’ a few other new blemishes peeked out at me.   It took a long while for me to piece it all together and no matter how hard I tried, while in the hospital, I couldn’t do it.

I was in an accident and that was obvious even if I didn’t remember it.  The helicopter ride to the trauma center I also had no recollection of and so it was hard to fathom what had happened.  The number and severity of each lesion was very difficult to keep track of even if, when presented with a spoon and fork, I could not open my mouth wide to eat.  The broken ribs didn’t bother me, until it was time to sit or go to bed, and I couldn’t get comfortable.  Of course the shattered T3 vertebrae probably had something to do with that problem too.  But not being able to yawn and take a deep, deep breath was the recurrent reminder of something amiss.  When asked I could never remember what hurt in any particular order and had to be walked through the visible signs before responding with a status report. 

The one thing which did stand out and gave me real concern had nothing to do with my ‘physical’ ailments it had more to do with the ‘location’ of the accident.  Throughout the year leading up to that terrible scene I distinctly remember a premonition, a portent of things to come.  I had this dream, in my recollection, very often.  In it I was reminded to not drive a particular path at a particular time of day.  It was always the same path and the warning included a defined intersection.  It would come to me in my dreams, or sometimes as I got in my car before driving to work in the morning.  This is how I remember receiving these flashes of information. 

The last remembered incident of the dream was on Thanksgiving morning about two weeks before the fatal day.  I knew the route I would drive the family to visit relatives would take us past the intersection I had been repeatedly warned about.  In the dream that morning I was given the ‘all clear’ indication for our Thanksgiving ride.  But, it also let me know that trouble was not far ahead.  I never spoke with anyone about these dreams.  And now, years later, I have to ask myself if they were premonitions of things to come or reflections of the past while the brain began to reconnect.  Either way, in the hospital I knew of them and the only thing I could do was wonder why I drove on a particular road at a particular time of day.  After all, I had been warned.

 Of course the mental trouble could have been more pharmaceutical in nature.  I know now I was on various medicines in the hospital, though of course I don’t remember much at the time.  These pills were taken with the meals brought to my room.  I am sure the attendants told me what they were for at the time but, if the information went in one ear, well, if it went in the left ear where it probably got stuck in the residual tried blood that I had to clean out every morning. 

Upon transfer from Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital to Johnson Rehabilitation Institute I was on a program that included protonix for GI prophylaxis, metoprolol for hypertension, and trazodone at night for insomnia and impulsiveness.  The insomnia was a big problem so the trazodone was periodically increase (I learned later).  Of course I was on Keppra for seizures twice a day (this one would continue for a long, long time) while other seizure medications were being phased out.  Complaints of left chest soreness got me started on anti-inflammatory agents.  A low sodium diet was used to help with hypertension and Colace and senna were part of the bowel regimen, after all, you don’t want to have a constipated patient on your hands now do you.  I wonder, could my problem with understanding, remembering, being in the present, any of these things be due to the plethora of drugs in my system?  I would like to believe this to be the case, but now, years later, and still unable to remember in the short term arena of life, I know better.

I was admitted to the brain trauma unit (BTU) at Johnson Rehabilitation for a reason and along with the drugs the daily routine included physical, occupational and speech therapy, along with recreational therapy.  I wonder if that was to teach me how to play nice with others?  Whether I got along well with others or not, what I was really bad at was speaking, or better put – Anomia, which is: A problem with word finding.  I had an impaired recall of words with no impairment of comprehension or the capacity to repeat the words.   In other words, the incoming seemed to work, the outgoing was having problems.

I had no idea there was a word for this condition.  It basically hits the nail on the head though.  My mind raced faster than it ever did before searching the universe around me in multiple dimensions I had never experienced before but…, what ever was happening in my stream of consciousness could not find the right road to descend from the heights.  I could not translate thoughts to words.  But then again, who cared, all they showed me at the BTU was pictures of things that I needed to identify.  I knew what they were, why did I have to tell them?  I was too busy trying to figure out how metaphysical relationships themselves existed in the physical world around us.  What a waste of time it was talking about how many words began with the letter ‘A’.

Of course I didn’t know how hard it would be to leave the hospital if I didn’t stop, listen and speak to them on a level that they could understand.

When Can I Go Home?

Christmas was over, and I had settled into a routine of sorts, only I have no idea what that was.  I do have more memories of this week in the hospital but as before, they are disjointed.  I do know I was taken in a group to the exercise area which was down the elevator and through a few turns in a long hallway.  I do not think I could find my way there alone but all I had to do was follow the leader.  So, in a sense we got to play a game to get to the treadmills. 

I had a roommate but he didn’t speak to me.  In fact he never got out of bed.  I was to learn later that his condition could have been mine if not for the grace of God and the helping hands of so many along the way.  I passed him a hundred times a day as I came in and out of our room.  His wife came to visit him every day, and his children, who were teenagers, like mine, came often.  Something about him and his family saddened me and frightened me.  I did not want to…

I was given tests while I was in the hospital, neuropsychological tests, though I did not know what they were at the time.  Now, years later I have gotten the nerve up to read the reports, and I must say that what they observed of my mental abilities is much different from what I was observing and thinking.  For me, everything was so clear.  Every night as I watched on television the cable news networks and listened to the editorial opinions from both the left and right leaning pundits I personally felt that the world’s problems were quite easy to define, and if one boiled down the thousands of different aspects of our human condition, the answers were not hard embrace.  But, like in my neuropsychological tests, I was unable to articulate my point(s) of view let alone to anyone who could act upon my recommendations. 

As much as I wanted to contribute to solving the problems we as a species on the planet earth were exposed to, there was no way to do that from within the confines of a neurologic ward.  I wanted out.  I think I began to ask my wife ‘when’ every time she came to visit and the only answer to this query was ‘soon’. 

            “Soon,” I asked, “when is soon?”
            “When they say you are better,” is as close to an answer that I can remember, though this may have been my interpretation.  Always hard to tell what I remember and what I wanted to hear.
            Perhaps this is why I started being nicer to everyone in the hospital, so they would think I was ‘better’.