(1)
At first, the days were numbered.
They were numbered before the surgery and then after.
Going under is a bit like dying, but you know you will wake
and that you are not entirely alone in this.
You welcome the temporary oblivion that anesthesiology provides.
What if we knew for certain that reincarnation is real?
Would it change our fear of dying?
The days after surgery are marked by progress,
life stripped to its essentials.
The body learns how to function again, how to adapt,
and you are just grateful for any sleep you can get.
You long for things to return to normal, or at least their appearance,
even though you suspect that the new normal and the old may never be reconciled.
The news from Europe and Asia is full of numbers and statistics:
the new virus ravaging through China has made its way to Europe.
I don't turn on the TV in my hospital room.
Instead, I open the All Good Things book on my Kindle.
I enlarge each painting or drawing and drown in each image, appreciating its beauty.
The book is a personal anthology created by Stephen Ellcock –
one of the very few people I follow on social media.
(Every day Stephen posts images that speak volumes;
images that reassure me that not everything is dismal and there is beauty
hidden in the open, just waiting for someone to give it form.)
(2)
Today is the 24th of February 2020.
As I write this, I feel the longing for the present moment – this moment in time.
Last week, I was in the hospital at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.
It was snowing, and February felt as cold as the Februaries of my childhood in Chelyabinsk.
I remember waking up in intensive care after the surgery.
The pain was overwhelming.
If I have to endure this pain all my life, I would rather die, I thought.
There were two men in intensive care in hospital beds like me
and some shadowy nurses. I couldn't see them clearly:
everything doubled in my eyes and made me feel nauseous.
One of the men was moaning.
The other was interrogated by doctors or nurses
who kept on asking him if he had ever had a heart attack.
They just kept on repeating the same questions,
but the man didn't seem to understand them.
Or did I dream this up?
When I woke up, nobody was next to me.
For a moment, I thought I had already died and this combination
of pain, nausea, loneliness, and moaning was hell or purgatory,
or whatever is waiting for us in the forever beyond.
I drifted in and out.
Then there was a nurse next to me.
She kept on repeating the same question over and over again,
"Can you rate the level of your pain on the scale from one to ten?"
At first, I could not understand what she was saying.
How can you measure pain? The enormity of it.
And how would such a scale look?
How would one take all this shapeless pain and put it on a scale?
Wouldn't the pain spill and fill the entire room, overflowing?
I was drowning in pain, and I was asked to measure it?
How do you rate your drowning experience?
Unbearable?
Almost unbearable?
Almost bearable?
When everything doubles in your eyes – does it mean that your pain doubles too?
I found it difficult to speak or to find my tongue.
The nurse put something soothing on my lips.
"How do you rate your pain on the scale between one and ten?" she asked again.
She didn't seem to be annoyed by my silence.
"It is ten," I managed to whisper.
Then I thought again. I was able to withstand it somehow.
It means it could have been worse.
"Maybe nine," I corrected myself.
"I'll give you more painkillers," said the nurse,
and a sickening wave of nausea took me into its current.
"All is doubled," I managed to say;
and heard before being carried into oblivion:
"She has a very low pulse…"
"Still high pain…"
"Too long…"
(Too long...)
(3)
Before the surgery, they strip me naked.
Completely naked. Underwear and all.
I put on a robe that has an opening in the back.
The robe doesn't close well.
I feel like a baby just born into the world, completely defenceless.
There are many people.
They come and introduce themselves:
surgical team, anesthesiologists, nurses.
Each person asks my name and date of birth,
what surgery I am having, and on which side.
They know it, but it's the protocol –
I'm told it's for my own safety.
After continually repeating my name and date of birth
for each new face entering the room, I start to feel strangely removed from myself
as if I'm saying the name of someone else, not my own.
Indeed, this particular combination of letters and syllables feels almost random.
I'm me, but not my name.
But if I'm not my name, then who am I?
I think about it while I lay naked,
waiting for the nurses to roll me into the surgery room.
They roll my bed through corridors so fast I get dizzy and cold.
In the operating room, I notice that I'm the only one not wearing a mask.
I remember: they will put some kind of a breathing apparatus
into my nose and throat after I fall asleep.
They will also put a catheter, make four openings in my ribs
for the instruments and the camera.
And I will not feel or remember any of it.
One of the surgical assistants lifts my robe and, with a marker,
writes something on my belly on the right side,
just around the place they will cut.
Later, I discover next to the angry-looking scars,
two large black letters, TM.
Why TM?
For some reason, I remember this abbreviation from some time ago
when I was learning transcendental meditation.
But transcendental meditation has nothing to do with it,
although perhaps it is also some sort of anesthesiology.
TM stands for Trevor McKenzie, the name of the surgeon.
The letters, written in a sharpie, remain next to the scars for weeks after the surgery.
I feel tattooed or branded, but it doesn't upset me, I find it rather amusing.
Everything is so strange – it must be happening to someone else.
Not me, but to the person whose name and date of birth
I recite mechanically to everyone who enters my hospital room.
The initials of the surgeon's name on my belly feel more like a sculptor’s signature.
Let your initials signify your responsibility, welcoming my future without the tumor.
(I shall be your greatest masterpiece, my surgeon.)
(4)
The time in intensive care with shadowy nurses and moans feels endless –
dark void, unbearable, unending.
The next time I wake up, I'm in the hospital room,
I can see the snow falling through the dark windows,
it's late evening.
Where did this day go?
We came to the hospital early in the morning.
Rafael is in the room.
My lips are so swollen I can't talk.
My lips are blocking my voice.
"All shall be well," repeats Rafael.
I feel empty and light-headed,
so I let my mind fill with this thought.
All shall be… shall… Why shell?
Does it mean all is not well now but will be well in the future?
Does it mean that this thought is a shell?
And if it is a shell, what is the real thought within its protective embrace?
But I'm too tired to open the shell.
(I drift into sleep again.)
(5)
Today is exactly two weeks since my surgery.
Two weeks felt like two months. Or two years.
But not entirely in a bad way.
My previous life feels distant, not quite real.
Yet my life now is even less real in its normalcy, in its un-remarkableness.
The bloody mess is all around, yet nowhere to be seen.
IKEA's designs are maddening.
There are 80 cases of coronavirus in New York now.
(People have stopped consuming Corona beers out of superstition.)
(6)
The scars on my belly do not have stitches or threads, only glue.
The glue is still there after two weeks.
In one of the four scars, it's starting to peel off.
"In a year or so none will be visible," Rafael assures me,
probably concerned over me being concerned over my scarred appearance.
I'm not concerned. The scars make the surgery real.
Without them, it all seems to be a dream within a dream.
Maybe some part of me is forever stuck in the purgatory of Intensive Care,
trying to measure the unmeasurable and weigh the unthinkable,
while someone in monotone keeps on asking about a failed heart?
Can someone attack your heart?
Can your heart attack someone?
Can your heart be broken?
(Even the smallest feather could tip the point.)
(7)
I was ill, I had surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester,
and I had to cancel my upcoming concerts.
Finally, I returned home to pick up my life but found that in the meantime,
the world, too, had fallen ill.
Unlike me, the world is steadily getting worse and not on the mend at all.
People went mad with fear of catching a deadly virus,
and panic is spreading across the borders.
Rafael bought 25 dry army breakfasts that are supposed to last for 25 years.
Then he bought 25 dry army dinners and a massive bottle of water.
"We should probably buy more cat food," he said.
(After all, Aya, our cat, may not want dry army breakfasts for years to come.)
(8)
I wish to make the world around me understandable,
but everything around me, every object, contains something
that refuses to be defined.
I write in order to understand, not vice versa.
But understanding, if any, is fleeting and cunning –
a red fox-demon, a clock with cut-off hands of time.
(I stand empty-handed.)
Thank you, Lera Auerbach, for your affecting honesty and your brilliant, precise, expansive artistry. Yes, life is a dream within a dream. And, yes, this is the most unanswerable question ever concocted: "On a scale of one to ten, how much pain are you in?" On a wittier note, that precious cat will NOT eat those dry army breakfasts. Please stay well and safe. The world sorely needs your compassion and your creative genius.
Posted by: Emily Fragos | March 30, 2021 at 02:42 AM