Dukkha, Dukkha, Goose

“The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, or not to anticipate troubles, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly”

-Buddha

Recently, my mother came to visit.  In an effort to impress her, I decided to clean my room.  It was a normal Thursday like any other, I’d gone to work, gone for a run, dinner, shower.  I was sitting on my bed, preparing to clean when all of a sudden I was overcome by sharp and terrible pain in my lower stomach.  It lasted only a few seconds and went away.  That was strange, I thought, and went back to what I was doing.  A couple of minutes passed and there it was again.  I was still convinced I could clean my room, so for a while it went like this: Clean, clean, clean, immobilized by debilitating mystery pain, clean clean, clean, on the floor whimpering like a child, clean, clean, wait a second, I think something is wrong.  Maybe I should go to the hospital.

I drove myself.  By the time I made it into the emergency room, the pains were sharper and closer together.  I want to say it was the worst pain I’ve felt in my life, but if not it ranks.  The nurse who took my information was very nonplussed about the whole thing despite that fact that as I answered her age, height, and address questions, I was hunched forward with a death grip on my chair and crying.  She then sent me to wait in the waiting area, where the other people waiting kept their distance and regarded me out of the corner of their eye as though I might soon explode.  Eventually, I was summoned to a counter for another round of questioning.  This guy at least seemed concerned, but he also made me sign something like FIFTEEN electronic signatures.  Somewhere around signature 7, I mustered through my tears, “are you kidding?”
“Just a couple more ma’am”.
I don’t even know what they were for.  How ridiculous.  I was sent back to the waiting area.  The first nurse walked by.
“Ma’am, I really need a doctor.”
She said I had to wait, see another nurse first.  At this point, I became aware of a pain in my hands and realized I’d been holding on so hard to the perforated metal seat I was in, it was starting to cut through the flesh of my palms.  Finally the third nurse called me in, asked all the same questions, and sent me in to see the doctor.  Because of my medical history, they sent me over to the OBGYN, who performed a really painful examination, had me pee in a cup, and sent me to wait for an x-ray.  Somewhere during that time, I also became violently nauseous.  At this point, things start to get a little hazy, in part because I just felt so miserable and in part because it was getting quite late.  Here are some moments I remember:

-The nurse comes in and gives me some water.  Tells me all the tests came back fine and I’m fine and I could go home.  I asked her if she were serious.  She was.  I said something was obviously wrong and I was not going home unless they gave me a “get back into the hospital free” card that allowed me to bypass check-in.  She said I was free to stay a little longer and “hang out” if I wanted.  I said thanks, I’d do that.

-Over the course of a few hours, I threw up all but my vitalest of organs.  The nurse comes by and looks into my bucket with a mix of concern and contempt and asks, “Why didn’t you tell me it was that color?”

-I’m sent for a CAT scan and when I come out they administer morphine and insert an NG tube down my throat, which is really really tortuously uncomfortable and I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re looking for fun things to do.  I pass out.

When I woke up, I was in a very busy room and connected to an oxygen tank.  The nurse who wanted to send me home was standing over me, looking nervous.  Several other people were standing further away but with the same look of apprehensive relief.  “You really had us worried for a minute there.  Your oxygen levels dropped really low.  Something showed up on the CAT, they’re going to admit you.”
“I have the resting heart rate of an olympic athlete.” I reply.  At the time, it seemed medically relevant.  Or maybe I was just bragging.  More morphine, please.

Mom came as planned but instead of meeting in the city somewhere for mani-pedis, she took a taxi straight to the hospital.  My sister came in too from D.C. and we all just had a grand ole time.  Like ya do.

All told, I was in the hospital for 5 days, what a buzz kill.  So what was it?  Their best guess (that’s right, they still can’t say with 100% certainty) is that it was scar tissue from my surgery four years ago that had worked its way to somewhere it shouldn’t have been, and after dredging the contents of my stomach, managed to work its way back to a place that was acceptable.  Which is great, because if it hadn’t have done so on its own, that would have been another surgery.  Which of course ultimately leads to more scar tissue.  Which ultimately leads to more surgery.  There isn’t ever really an “ultimate” is there?  Do you see what we do to ourselves in the name of getting better?

This is too broad a statement, but sometimes I see the entire medical field as one big misguided extension of humanity’s fears and anxieties about death; our inability to see past the immediate pain of our present condition.  And yet here I was, checking myself in.  I talk a lot of smack about what would happen if cancer made a comeback somewhere in my nodes, my marrow, my corporeal structure.  I’m pretty convinced I wouldn’t want to go through chemo again–for a number of reasons, but a very important one is that it’s just no fun to live with that kind of threat hanging over you.  And if cancer is the sort of thing that just pops up every couple of years, every time is does so, every time I “fight” and “win”, it ironically gains that much more power over my everyday reality where I’m “cancer-free” because I know it could return at any time.  There is no ultimate.  But knowing what kind of nearly unbearable physical pain would be involved in doing nothing makes it hard to say ‘I wouldn’t pursue treatment’ with a straight face.  This will be incendiary, but people talk about fighting a disease like that is the most difficult, noble, or most formidable course of action…I don’t necessarily agree.  I think our definition of winning needs to be rethought.  I think that the very notion of winning at all is perhaps a false start; that the desire to win in and of itself is detrimental in the bigger picture.

This post is kind of a downer.  And I’m not going to do you the favor of ending on a high note, except to say that this is not the ultimate post.  Next week, I would like to talk about uncertainty, and I think this is a pretty good segue to that.  Ok fine, I’ll also give you this:  According to Buddhism, there are Four Noble Truths, the first of which is acknowledging that suffering exists.