Two other strange things were going on. My heart was beating in an irregular rhythm, which I am pretty sure has been the case for years, and I had a really low hemoglobin count. They were not going to send me home, so I got a room I would end up staying in for ten days. My ass became so sore I was ready to remove it surgically. I barely got any sleep, especially in the early going, so my mental state was not great. Every so often nurses would take my “vitals” and poke and do other inscrutable things to me. I hate being touched, so that was a particular treat. They did, mercifully, have appropriately large hospital gowns, but it was a very small comfort. There is so much indignity to being helpless.
At this particular hospital, they took vitals at eleven p.m. and three a.m. and seven a.m., so I’m not sure when sleep was supposed to happen. They also took vitals throughout the day. I learned a great deal about hospital routines during those ten days. I basically became an expert. In the next room over was a woman who said, “Hey,” every twenty or so seconds. She liked to pull out her IVs and was a troublemaker. She was elderly and I felt bad for her because I don’t think anyone visited her the entire time. I was not so lucky.
The night of the accident, I had texted my sister-in-law and brother, who lived in Chicago at the time, and said, “DON’T TELL MOM AND DAD,” because I knew my parents would panic. They did, of course, tell Mom and Dad. My parents did, in fact, panic. My brother and his wife rented a car and drove down to see about me. The first day was a blur of pain and confusion. The orthopedic surgeon couldn’t operate because of my low hemoglobin, so I got my first blood transfusion. I marveled at how suddenly someone else’s blood was inside of me. I also enjoyed that the orthopedic surgeon was incredibly attractive, knew it, and had the swagger of a man who is very good at what he does and very well compensated for that work. That was Saturday.
Sunday, I got another blood transfusion, so I carried the blood of at least two other people. Then the surgeon decided to operate because the ankle was unstable. When they rolled me to the operating area, I told the anesthesiologist that she should knock me out extra because I had seen the movie Awake. She shook her head and said, “I hate that damn movie.” I told her I sympathized because movies about writers are uniformly terrible. Nonetheless, I said, “But still, make sure I am super asleep.”
While all this was going on, I was communicating with my person on the phone, via text message. She was freaking out in the calmest way possible. She wanted to be in the hospital with me, but circumstances made that impossible. She was there in every way that mattered and I am still grateful for it.
In the operating room, I don’t remember anything other than the oxygen mask descending upon my face. I woke up in another room to see a lady staring at me and I didn’t want her staring at me so I said, “Stop looking at me.” Then I went blank again. I heard from my brother that the surgery went well but that my ankle was even more broken than the doctor originally thought. A tendon was torn, this and that and the other. I have hardware in my ankle now. I am a cyborg.
My niece, with whom I am very close, eyed me suspiciously after surgery. She was two years old and not a fan of the huge cast on my left leg. She gave me a very reluctant air-kiss and went about her business. She also didn’t like hospital beds. She did, however, like the rolling chair in the corner of my room. When I got back to my room after surgery, my parents had magically appeared, along with my other sister-in-law and niece and my cousin and his partner. I mean, talk about it taking a village. I was reminded, once again, that I am loved.
Over the course of the ten days, I listened to other people snoring very loudly, making growly sounds. The temperature fluctuated wildly. I became constipated. I wanted to shower very badly but couldn’t. Instead, I was bathed by nurses’ aides who had things like dry shampoo and the body-sized equivalents of moist towelettes. I was given a lot of good drugs and I really enjoyed that part. I had to face the severity of my injury and that I would be out of commission for quite some time. I had to cancel a few events and disappoint people, but I was going to be housebound for six weeks. I arranged, with my university, to teach my courses online while I recuperated.
I was well taken care of by the medical staff, but they were not good communicators. I became a throbbing mass of fear, loneliness, and neediness even though I was rarely alone for any amount of time. Everything was out of my control and I love control, so all my trigger points were being pressed at the exact same time.
I was absolutely terrified going into surgery. I realized I have so much life yet to live. I did not want to die. I thought, I don’t want to die, and it was such a strange thought because I’ve never actively wanted to live as much as I did when I had to face my mortality in such a specific way. I began to think of all the things I still wanted to do, the words I had yet to write. I thought about my friends, my family, my person.
I don’t do fear very well. I try to push the people I love away. I worry that I’m not allowed human weakness, that this makes me not good enough.
I was not at my best during the hospital stay because so much was out of my control and the bed was too fucking short and the hospital gown did not make me feel safe and I couldn’t bathe and I couldn’t really move and I wasn’t eating because the hospital food was gross. I am not much of a crier, so I didn’t really break down for several days, until one morning when the doctor told me I wasn’t going home anytime soon.
I tried not to sob. I tried to cry in that neat way that delicate ladies cry in movies but . . . I am not a delicate lady. When a nurse would peer in, I’d rub my eyes and bite my lower lip so I might appear stoic, and then when they looked away, I’d start crying again. I babbled all kinds of sorrowful stuff. It was a low point, one of many.
Everyone was so worried about me when I broke my ankle and it confused me. I have a huge, loving family and a solid circle of friends, but these things were something of an abstraction, something to take for granted, and then all of a sudden, they weren’t. There were people calling me every day and hovering over my hospital bed and sending me things just to cheer me up. There were lots of concerned texts and e-mails, and I had to face something I’ve long pretended wasn’t true, for reasons I don’t fully understand. If I died, I would leave people behind who would struggle with my loss. I finally recognized that I matter to the people in my life and that I have a responsibility to matter to myself and take care of myself so they don’t have to lose me before my time, so I can have more time. When I broke my ankle, love was no longer an abstraction. It became this real, frustrating, messy, necessary thing, and I had a lot of it in my life. It was an overwhelming thing to realize. I am still trying to make sense of it all even though it has always been there.
It has now been more than two years. There is a throbbing in my left ankle that reminds me, “Once, these bones were shattered.”