first night

I'm siting up in the Intensive Care Unit, awkwardly clacking away at my laptop. It's the first time I've been "up" since the surgery. I am not a pretty picture: I have an iv plugged into the back of each of my hands. There's a white wire with a red light taped around my pointer finger. I have name tags on each wrist, and a red blood id tag. I can barely find the keyboard past the mass of wires that surround my wrists. Am I more android or Frankenstein? A long incision runs across my forehead, and a thin tube leads out of my head and fills a plastic sac with violet fluid that looks uncomfortably like kool-aid. That's my CSF, and there's so much drained out--it's hard to imagine that football-sized sac of fluid fitting into my skull.

My eyes work against me; they are tired and want the dark. Though keeping myself up is hard, I want to get back to writing as soon as possible.

I cannot organize my thoughts well, but there are some moments from the last days that stick with me.

One am, Friday, May 14th:
I begin to lose my ability to deal with the suffering. The medication is wearing off. My head throbs and spasms from inside. It seems there are fault lines along my skull, where i can feel pressure erupting from inside. Trudi sits next to me in the bed, and feeds me tiny ice shards from a spoon. The coolness on my lips masks the pain until the ice melts. I try not to swallow because even a drop wracks me with nausea. When we pause for a moment, I am a desert again.

I have a catheter in me and I'm dying to piss, but cannot. My hands and legs begin to go numb. It's what happens to me when I have panic attacks. I try to relax by closing my eyes and taking a deep breath, but with my eyes closed the pins and needle sensation only feels more overwhelming. I think, I can't, I can't take this anymore, but I know that's a bad path. I have to, I say out loud. I can take it. Yes, you can, Trudi echos, and I'm a little embarrassed.

Trudi looks for anyway to make me feel better. Can I rub your legs? she says. More ice? "Nothing," I say, "no." I look up at the wall, where there's a little blue booklet in a plastic holder that says, "Welcome."

"I don't want this to be real," I say. I choke down tears. "This can't really be happening." Trudi strokes my back. "Ok, baby," she coos. "It's okay."

I was not prepared for this amount of pain. Throughout this whole week--I had not bothered to ask, "why me?" The answer was simple. There is no "why." "Why" is because life isn't perfect, and bodies don't always work right. Because I didn't feel sorry for myself right away, I thought dealing with this was going to be easier than I expected.

(to be cont.)