Stand Up! Pick up your Mat!

 

The old church at Fish Creek

When a Winnipeg friend heard I was in hospital in Saskatoon, he messaged me to say he hoped I’d be out of “that cesspool of contamination” very soon. I admit, it was the stubborn pneumonia and imagined consequences that pretty much wiped the fear of COVID 19 off my radar screen as they loaded me into an ambulance in Rosthern, as I waited in a cold compartment for assessment in the Emergency section of St. Paul’s Hospital, as I was wheeled back and forth between CT scans, X-ray machines and finally transferred to the sixth floor.

Clearly a case of forgetting about the wasp on the dresser as long as there’s a scorpion hanging around under your bed.

                Health care during a pandemic can reveal a lot about ourselves. How we react to the care that can be given by workers who are themselves traumatized by their vulnerability is a case in point. So I’m thirsty; I push my call button and wait five, then ten minutes for the duty nurse to respond. Sure, it’s a non-covid ward, but it’s easy to forget that personnel work under strict protocols: nurses don’t handle food or utensils, fresh gowns must be donned after and before practically every contact procedure, masks and shields must be in place before most procedures.

Unless specifically requested, personal hygiene from sponge bathing to tooth brushing are left to the patient; there’s just too much to do and too few people to do it. I went two weeks without a decent wash and although I tried to clean my teeth daily, there were days when that was just too much.

                This is probably more than you wanted to know. In a public ward, of course, there’s a whole other layer of inconveniences and aggravations, not the least of which involves attempting to sleep through the combined noises of three other people. Separating me from a neighbour—who for some reason needed the TV on day and night—was only a thin curtain; I listened to about twenty episodes of Friends one night, accompanied by the steady rhythm of snoring.

                The days of a family doctor who comes to see you at home are long gone. I’m hard put to describe how today’s medical care actually functions. I was through emergency and up in a bed before I noticed the band on my wrist with my doctor’s name. The next morning a woman came to see me and in answer to my question, drew an anatomy of my chest and pointed out what needed to be done. I never saw her again. Later that afternoon a doctor in a turban came in and adjusted the apparatus to which I’d been connected by yet another doctor and nurses somewhere in the bowels of the hospital. I never saw him again. It was day two or three when the doctor answering to the name on my wrist band introduced herself. She never examined me nor did I see her except at some mornings where the nurse on duty took her and medical students on rounds and I was discussed as a “case.”

Crowds of sick people—blind, lame, or paralyzed—lay on the porches. One of the men lying there had been sick for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him and knew he had been ill for a long time, he asked him, “Would you like to get well?”

“I can’t, sir,” the sick man said, “for I have no one to put me into the pool when the water bubbles up. Someone else always gets there ahead of me.”

                        Jesus told him, “Stand up, pick up your mat, and walk!”

                        Instantly, the man was healed! 

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It’s 2:30 a.m. I can see into the hallway and nothing is happening there. No carts, no mops and pails, no nurses (I imagine them gathered in a coffee room, exchanging notes about difficult patients, like me perhaps?) I push the call button, thinking I’ll complain about the TV. Like a phantom, the silhouette of the night nurse is hovering over me, taking a desultory stab at ordering my disheveled bed clothes. “What do you need, George?”

                “I have no one to put me into the pool when the water bubbles up.”

                “Pardon?”

                “Could I have a pitcher of ice water please?”

                It’s no problem of course. She even pours me a plastic tumbler-full and holds it out to me.

                “Was there anything else?” she says. And ghost-like, whispers away down the dim hallway.

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I’m sure COVID 19 has contributed much toward the experiences of today’s non-COVID patients. For one, masking has made it impossible to convey a smile without a great deal of effort, and the half-dozen Filipino nurses on the floor—all being petite and wearing masks—could all be the same person. (Actually, they could all be Albanian; my residual racism has decided they’re Filipino.)

Timing is everything, we sometimes say. The hospital experience illustrates that, given the right circumstances, timing is nothing. I’m sitting on the side of my bed, having just been awakened by somebody with my breakfast, a plate with what appears to be cinnamon French toast, a thin sausage and juice. I pour the plastic . . . thingee of maple syrup on the French toast just as a tech enters my cubicle and says: “I need to draw your blood for the lab. It’ll just take a minute.” She’s barely done when two other persons who could be the same person appear with a wheel chair. “We’re here to take you down for a CT scan,” one says.

“What. Now?” I say, and immediately feel remorseful, knowing as I long have by now how much personal risk health care workers submit to in order to drag me and others to the waters of Bethesda.

Across from me a man named Kevin stalks about in his pyjamas and baseball cap and rails at his imprisonment. “Why are they keeping me here. I’m healthy as a horse.” For two days, he fiddled with a cell phone on which one of his three brothers had promised to call him. The phone never rang. A social worker comes onto the ward and Kevin demands to know why the nurses are keeping him here. “They’re not,” the worker says. “We’re keeping you here until we find a place for you to go.”

“I used to be a flat roofer,” he told me several times. He also told every nurse and patient in earshot that he’d been to “Paree” and that he should have stayed there. “At least a hundred women were waving at me in Paris,” was a line I heard more than a dozen times.

They caught him smoking an e-cigarette in our ward one night. When they wheeled me out to be taken back to Rosthern Hospital, he wished me well. Between me, Kevin and Mary—an indigenous woman from near Regina with so much wrong that I’m sure triage on her alone would take time—we would have considered ourselves friends had we all been there for another week. The nurse told Mary, “You won’t be going back to your house when you leave here.”

“Don’t underestimate me,” Mary replied while three nurses together wrestled her onto a gurney. Mary didn’t believe in call buttons; she simply bellowed her wishes into the ether until someone would attend to her in exasperation.

 And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And he entered a house, and would not have any one know it; yet he could not be hid. But immediately a woman, whose little daughter was possessed by an unclean spirit, heard of him, and came and fell down at his feet. Now the woman was a Greek, a Syrophoeni’cian by birth. And she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.

 

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A snow storm blew in on my second day at St. Paul’s. Many staff were snowed in and couldn’t make it to work, I was told. From where I lay, I had no sight line on the window and so had to take the word of others regarding the relative ferocity of the storm. But when you’re feeling rotten, snow storms are nothing-burgers. With a chest tube hooking your left side into machinery, an intravenous drip your left, finding a sleeping position becomes the only significant real-world problem, especially when it’s 2:00 a.m. and you’ve been staring at the same stained ceiling tile since 9:00. 

            Kevin gets up periodically at night. He wanders into the hallway where he’s not supposed to be, mask-less, of course, as is not allowed. And when he comes back with a nurse scolding him gently, punches the air and says: “There’s something wrong with this place. Why can’t a guy get a couple chocolate bars if he gets hungry?”

                “It’s a hospital, not a restaurant,” I say.

                Kevin has unique ways of expressing his near-continuous outrage: open hands, arms extended, shoulder-shrugging postures of unrelenting pissed-off-ness.

The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall!
My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me.

                                                                                                                      

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At 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m., a two-minute devotional is broadcast on the public address system. It is “St. Paul’s,” after all. I mouth the Our Father along with the loudspeaker in the hallway; I see no notice being taken by anyone else. Extinction through much rote repetition. One reason, I think, why Christian opening exercises in schools always were penny-wise and pound-foolish. Besides my pastor—who kept in touch by Messenger video—only one offer of counselling came to me, that one in the form of a starched, nervous woman who did more explaining about the non-denominational nature of what her church was making available than about the counselling itself.

                It got me thinking about the role of the counsellor generally. Were you to ask me to counsel you on your sickbed, what would you be asking for, exactly? Advice? Inspiration? Reassurance? Healing? Prayer? Much is made of being first and foremost a good listener. Would that be my key to giving good counsel? And if I requested counselling, what would I be hoping for?

                I left St. Paul’s in a taxi driven by an immigrant or refugee with little English. I don’t know what inter-hospital transfers require, but nothing about the trip was superior to having a friend pick me up. For $285, I was given the opportunity of traveling 144 Km. in a cold cab.        

After saying this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes.  “Go,” he told him, “wash in the Pool of Siloam” (this word means “Sent”). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.

 

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The loss of a sense of humour is probably the canary in the mine as regards the fight to stay hopeful and buoyant while suffering. I don’t know what’s funny anymore to the young generation that is the workforce in the clinics and wards. My humour responds to a time that’s past. When I arrived at St. Paul’s, a nurse asked if I had any cuts or abrasions in my skin. I said, “None that your profession didn’t put there.” She didn’t crack a smile.

I noted in myself—as I’ve done before—that despair and humour sit at either end of a teeter-totter. When humour sinks to its lowest, despair is at its highest. Commode jokes might tickle some funny bones, sometimes, but when it’s you calling for one at midnight, making a joke of it doesn’t occur first.

 

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I think her name is Julia, or Penelope, or something that sounds like Martha. She is a second-year nursing student struggling to master on-line learning and grateful for the opportunities Rosthern Hospital gives her and her young colleagues to gain some clinical experience. She can’t weigh more than 100 pounds but her eyes shine brightly with a mixture of intelligence and naiveté, a naiveté that lets her walk right up to me in my bed and ask, “Would you mind if I examined you?”

                By now, I’ve been examined, probed, CT scanned and X-rayed so often one more can’t possibly matter, even though her youthful enthusiasm makes me feel a lot like she’s asking to play doctor with me. While her mentor for the occasion watches and quietly interjects with suggestions, she listens to my chest, my heart, my stomach, nearly yippees with delight at one point and says, “I found your pulse in your feet!”

    She wasn’t so lucky with the eyedrops, which turned out to be cheek and ear drops.

                Her mentor is called away just then and tells the young would-be nurse to wait until she gets back. That’s when we have a longish talk about Hamlet and Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and why she chose nursing and at one point exploring what she really wants to know from me. “Are you religious?” she asks.

                “Are you?” I ask, and we agree that we’re both “spiritual” but not “religious.” She wants to get back into church; she’d attended an Alliance Church in Regina for a time and found it rather nice. I think I said something about following the spirit before her mentor whisked her away.

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.

Then the whining schoolboy with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school . . ..  From As You Like It; II,7

https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/asyoulikeit/page_96/

 

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When I first presented myself at admissions in Rosthern, the doc on duty asked me a number of questions about symptoms, then asked me what I would like them to do for me. I said something about my preference for being admitted so my problem could be found. It was an odd question, I thought, but maybe that’s a direction medicine is taking these days. “Take charge of your own healthcare” and all that. There’s another saying: “He who treats himself has a fool for a doctor.” (Or “He who defends himself has a fool for a lawyer;” take your pick.)

                My knowledge of anatomy—including my own—is vague. Two weeks in hospital taught me some, but “some” is already way more than I care to know. I like my medical care to be like taking my Ford to the mechanic: “Don’t explain it to me. Just find it and fix it.”

Somewhere I’ve picked up the idea that the human body is simply a support-system for a brain, and at so many levels, that rings true. Now, however, is not the time to ponder the existential possibilities that that opens up, except that if the computer too, is a “brain,” its support system (a plugin and a cord) makes the human body seem way more complex and vulnerable than it would need to be. Well planned, the human body should obviously adjust to its various ages; I, for one, find myself in old age to have way more skin than I need.

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? (Hamlet II,ii)

 

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I’m home. I might say it’s great to be home if the pandemic weren’t on, if it weren’t winter and if quarantining and isolating weren’t the buzz words of the times. Nevertheless, it’s great that I can spend the time in the company of the love of my life, even though we’re both wondering if we can make it sanely through the rest of the winter.

We will . . . somehow.

And to all you nurses and student nurses, you doctors and lab technicians, don’t pine for me too deeply. One thing I have learned to accept is that I’ll be back, and that probably sooner than later.