It's been a long week

It seems a lifetime ago, but it was only last Saturday that I fell ill with this mutant strain of the flu and just after midnight, not being able to get out of bed or even move my arms, Tracy called 911 and I was in an ambulance to Newton New Jersey Medical Center. It was scary for both of us. In those early moments, with the symptom of not being able to move, we didn’t know if I had had a stroke, or what.

It was soon revealed that I had flu, and this was a symptom in older people with compromised systems like lungs and heart, both of which I suffered from. My heart was in Afib when I reached the hospital, another side effect of the attack of the virus on the body. From there, it was downhill until I turned a corner on Tuesday and it was slowly back uphill.

One of the things that doesn’t occur to you, until it does, is how infantilizing disease like this is. You end up on your back in the hospital being attended to as if you’re a child: someone is lifting your head, because you cannot lift it yourself; someone has a straw in your mouth telling you to take slow sips of water. Someone is jabbing needles in each arm for IVs. Someone else is sticking electrodes on your midsection and running an EKG; the Xray guy arrives and another person props you up for a “picture” as they call it.

All the while you can’t talk because your breathing is so shallow and rapid and the wracking coughs just keep coming, shaking you like little personal earthquakes.

You’re helpless and it somehow feels right to be that way, because the disease has taken over your body’s life systems and is having its way with you. Helplessness in that state almost has no feeling, because the experience is so complete. It’s like a white-out. Everything just goes down down down to focus on that one thing – getting your body to start working again. One of the ways that happens is your body responding to the treatments from the hospital staff – taking vitals every 15 minutes, pushing new drugs through your IV like a multi steroid cocktail to reduce the inflammation in your lungs and help them open up, administering a nebulizer “breathing machine” that pumps two drugs into your lungs to further help them open, and then more head-lifting and more sipping through the straw, all of it happening in a fog through which you cannot even catch a glimpse of your healthy self, the adult who was only hours ago sitting on a couch talking politics and getting up to get bowls of Clementines from the kitchen, one for Tracy and one for the “me” that was.

They discharged me from the hospital on Thursday afternoon. I wasn’t that much “better,” just a little bit, but enough to stand up and walk around the room so that they could monitor my heartrate and blood-oxygen level and determine that my base functions of breathing and a beating heart were strong enough to let me go home and continue a longer recovery from there.

Thank goodness. I was greeted by Tracy and the animals and all of us are adjusting to this new reality. Tracy has the same flu I do, was treated at home with Tamiflu (as was I in the hospital), and is in about the same stage of recovery that I am, which is to say, weakened and exhausted and still coughing up the dregs of her lungs at the same rate and manner as I am. Tracy bravely soldiered on at home while I was being cared for in Newton, feeding the animals, walking Ruby, somehow feeding herself and drinking enough fluids to keep herself from collapsing. I don’t know how she did it. In the hospital, I couldn’t even lift my head.

Tracy let me sleep until noon yesterday and she got up and walked Ruby and fed the cats, and this morning, I was able to do the same for her. We’re both taking the nebulizer breathing treatment now, which really helps, and we ate soup last night and yogurt and banana this afternoon. I know this doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a lot for us. It has become restorative enough that we can see a light up ahead. There will be an endpoint to all this. That alone is more than enough to keep us going and cause us to give thanks that even in our weakened state, we’re still human, still functioning adults, still love each other deeply, and there is hope that, as they say, this too shall pass.

I will be back to writing about the real world as soon as I am able. In the meantime, thank you from the bottom of my heart for all your support and love. It means more to me than I can say that you are out there, loyal readers and subscribers.