Chapter 11

PEEKABOO! ICU

The next thing I remembered was waking up with something big, uncomfortable, and plastic down my throat. I was in the ICU, and something had gone terribly wrong.

Maybe it was the drugs, but I don’t remember feeling fear, just annoyance and bewilderment. I remember fear on Jim’s face. I couldn’t speak. Something was up my nose. I had tubes coming out of my arm. Maybe they were there before, but now they just hurt. What was happening? Nurses were coming in and out, checking things. Jim talking to a doctor. I know now that at some point during my sleep I had aspirated my saliva and contracted serious bilateral pneumonia. Apparently they told me all this, but at the time, I had no idea I was in the ICU. I was just angry. I wanted to be better. I wanted to get up.

Now as I write this, I know I should have just been grateful that I was alive, but there was something about being stuck there in the ICU without knowing why, and not being able to talk, eat, or breathe on my own, that made me angrier than I had ever felt in my life. I was confronted with the dark part of myself. The part that does not feel grateful. The part that wants to control everything. The furious part.

Even more infuriating than the immobility, the giant breathing tube, the IVs, the nasogastric tube, or the not being able to communicate or understand what the heck was going on, was the hunger. It was painful. I was so hungry. I imagine the tube up my nose with the goopy formula being siphoned from the bag was providing the minimal calories that would keep me alive, and for that, I should have been thankful, but never underestimate the psychological power of eating and swallowing food.

Inside my head I was creative and clear. I knew I had my brain back and was ready to go out and use that new tumor-free gray matter to change myself and the world. My body, however, had different plans. I was so weak I couldn’t move. I normally have an excessive amount of energy. I’m not even one to sit on the beach and stare at the water. I’m putting sunscreen on my superpale kids, doling out snacks, and running around finding buried flip-flops. Jim always says, “Would you relax? Sit down and take it easy!” But I explain to him that moving around relaxes me.

At home there were things to do. I had to go to Marre’s room and make sure she was not on her phone while she was doing her homework. When Katie made slime, did she put down the plastic cutting boards so that the drips of glue wouldn’t take the finish off the floor? I had to tell someone to put a pull-up on Patrick before bed because he still wets occasionally. I have a regimen of washing each room’s bedding once a week, and the “safety pull-up” is essential to make sure we can stick to that schedule. Did anyone remember that the Xbox had to be locked up all week so Jack was not tempted to get on it? Whoever was babysitting today would have to remind Michael not to put the Legos in the Star Wars bin or the whole system would be out of whack. I had to plan this week’s menu. What did we have in the fridge that might go bad if not used this week? My mind was spinning and I was stuck in the bed. There’s no place for OCD in the ICU. As I lay there practically paralyzed, I had to come face-to-face with my demons. I was addicted to control, and I was in withdrawal.

Time is the longest distance between two places.

—Tennessee Williams

There are no doors or windows in the intensive care unit. When you are in the ICU, you have no sense of time. It’s like Vegas but without the fun. Instead of the colorful whirring lights and the musical dings of the slot machines, there is the methodical beeping of the medical machinery with flashing numbers and graphs that you are tethered to by IVs and tubes, rather than an obsessive desire to win the jackpot.

In my normal life, and even right now, I am amazed at how quickly time passes. As I write this, I look up at the clock and an hour has gone by and I’ve barely written a page. I see my children and think, Where did the years go? on an almost daily basis. Have I spent enough one-on-one time with this child or that child? I’m one of those pain-in-the-butt people who say, “It’s Christmas already? Didn’t we have Christmas a couple of months ago? Where does the time go?” Well, now I know where it goes. It goes into the ICU, where it stands still.

I learned to tell time based on twelve-hour nursing shifts, so when a new name was written on the whiteboard, I knew that half a day had passed. The whiteboard on the wall was my main source of news and information. It was like a real-life Facebook post without the Russian bots. When the whiteboard came into focus, I could see my nurse’s name, and a little bit into the nurse’s personality. If the name was haphazardly scrawled, I knew I had a no-nonsense, couldn’t-be-bothered nurse. If there was a neatly written name with a smiley face and a “Have a nice day” message, I knew I was dealing with a lunatic.

To entertain myself during these excruciatingly long hours, and to keep my mind off worrying about Jim and the kids, I would stare up at the tiny dots on the ceiling, which, after a while, I realized were actual blood flecks. I would create scenarios as if I were a blood spatter analyst at a grisly crime scene.

Scenarios:

• Sick of hearing his hospital roommate moaning in agony, an orthopedic patient waited for the room to clear before bludgeoning said roommate with his crutch. The spatter pattern would indicate that the murderer was a left-handed Caucasian man in his early thirties, with a torn right Achilles tendon.

• An unrealistically attractive woman complaining of stomach pains shocked the doctors when a snakelike alien burst out of her stomach, spraying blood on the walls and ceiling. X-Files agents, hell-bent on a cover-up to prevent panic in the civilian population, came in to scrub the scene clean of all evidence, but did not realize they missed a few flecks on the ceiling.

• A comedian’s wife who recently had brain surgery experienced a sudden head explosion when she realized that she’d had brain surgery.

You know how you feel when you have to make a really important call and you get put on hold for an exorbitant amount of time? That’s what the ICU was like for me, but without the groovy hold music.

It was unclear what strain of bacteria was behind the double-lung strep pneumonia. Therefore, I was put on a broad-spectrum antibiotic IV, which brought with it a host of other problems and ironically made me feel weak and queasy. The place where my head had been cut open was not painful at all and had been expertly reconstructed and reshaped with some form of synthetic putty or clay, sculpted to perfection by Dr. Bederson. The putty would bond to my skull and not require any plates or screws and hopefully not leave me with a weird bump. The scar went from behind the top of my left ear down my neck. My hair had been shaved off only in that one area. An extra courtesy by Dr. Bederson. I could hide the bald patch under the rest of my long hair. If my hair was in a ponytail, I’m sure I looked totally punk rock, but I couldn’t see myself because I was not able to get up to look in a mirror. As an act of kindness and courtesy, no one brought one over to the bed so I could have a look. I could feel what I looked like. My face was slumped on one side with my left eye shut. However, I could open my eye with some effort, meaning that the nerve was not cut. I would regain my face. Eventually. But for now, external beauty was the least of my worries. It was all about survival.

Whose idea was it to take this photo?

My time in the ICU wavered between periods of sharp perception and a total blur. I was getting sicker and sicker with the pneumonia, and there was no sign of it letting up. I remember being in and out of consciousness and waking up to see Jim and other loving, concerned family members at my side. I remember lots of uber-gurney trips down corridors and in and out of elevators, in and out of MRIs, which I now could sometimes sleep through. Though I do recall the first one with my new parasitic friend, the breathing tube, making me feel like I was suffocating. It’s not like natural breathing. If you go against it, it feels like you can’t get enough breath. In that confined coffin, the added element of the breathing tube made it a whole new horror. I understood why kids were not allowed in the ICU. I would never want them to see this. I was always the one to comfort my kids from their nightmares, not be the cause of them.

On the positive side, I prayed. I prayed like I’d never prayed before. I learned the power of meditative prayer. One time when I was in the tube, I went through an entire Rosary. It takes more than an hour. I know nuns who do it all the time, but as a mother of five with many symptoms of ADHD, I was lucky if I could get all the way through the Apostles’ Creed at the top, which is sort of like the overture at the beginning of the Rosary. For you non-Catholics, the Rosary is a series of prayers normally prayed on the string of beads with the cross on the end that Madonna made mainstream in the ’80s as a fashion accessory. It’s a very holy spiritual tool to help you keep track of different prayers and the number of times you recite them in the meditation. You don’t need the actual beads to say the prayers; they just help you keep your place. While having an MRI you can’t move or count on your fingers, so I pictured each bead in my mind’s eye.

The repetition and the visualization brought me to this deeper, mystical plane of peace. I never really understood meditation until I was near suffocation in an MRI coffin. I preferred to be in the MRI, alone with my peaceful meditation, than out of the MRI in the chaotic ICU. I hope you never have to be in pain like this, or know the terror of suffocation, but if you do, please remember what saved me. I feel like I got out so I could tell you: meditation was my Obi-Wan Kenobi. Okay, I broke the fourth wall again. That was awkward.