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.