March 23, 2016
8:30am
I don’t think there is much I wouldn’t do for a couple pieces
of bacon or a thick slice of ham right now. Despite their knowledge of my
allergies I have been served two boiled eggs and a biscuit of some sort. The
nurses can’t tell me one way or another if there are eggs in it. At least the
tea is hot. I’m hoping to scam a fellow patient of two out of their fruit cups
so I can get more than a kiddie sized box of milk for my breakfast.
The TV is tuned to the news this morning, perhaps not the
greatest choice considering the state of the world right now. The refugee
situation in Europe has brought out the worst in some people resulting in three
bombings in Brussels last night. At least 31 are dead and over a hundred are
injured. I’m hoping they change the channel soon so that I don’t have to watch
those numbers tick up, like a telethon’s tote board. They will rise. They always
do. This is the earth after all and the human ability to hate and attack each
other seems boundless.
The news is talking to people jumping to assign blame to the
refugees themselves, not even considering the possibility that it was right
wing radicals trying to make their point, and this brings to mind two thoughts.
The 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by sixteen non-refugee
men. In the fifteen subsequent years, how many attacks have been on American
soil have been carried out by Muslim extremists? One, perhaps two (what I wouldn’t
give for access to the internet right now so I could find out for sure) and
neither of those were carried out by refugees. Instead, it was men and women
living in the country by completely legal means.
I am trying to focus on something of consequence rather than
the minutiae of life but my brain has other ideas. Did the Canucks win last
night? #teamtank My blood pressure was way down this morning. 131/81 is almost
normal and far less terrifying than the artery bursting 171/104 reading that I
got last night while being admitted. It makes me wonder what meds they gave me
last night. While my heart beats are better, I have heart burn. I really do
need more than milk. Dry toast is even appealing at this point.
I know I had a second point to make about the bombings but
it has left my mind. My brain is often like this and it’s why Dr Jahmeel tried
me on Ritalin when I first got my depression diagnosis. Even as a small child,
I remember my mind being four or five steps ahead of where I was. Every possibility
opened before me like a branching tree, reaching skyward for the sun. Early in
grade school, this meant that I was not only ahead of where the class was in
whatever lesson we were doing, I was often ahead of the teacher. When we were
doing addition, I could already see how subtraction worked. I was reading at t
third or fourth grade level while the concept of “sun”, “fun”, and “bun”
rhyming was just becoming apparent to the rest of the class.
This skill had its advantages but, while I didn’t know it at
the time, it had far more disadvantages. I was so far ahead in my assignments
that I was often extremely bored and would get myself in trouble while trying
to occupy my mind. I often found something in my bag to surreptitiously damage
my desk, just to see what was under the next layer of fake wood. I got good at
it. In the third grade, I drilled a hole into the front edge of my desk that
was deep enough to fit an entire crayon in it, lengthwise. My chairs were a
monument to scratching with makeshift shivs and extreme boredom. It’s hard to
convince an 8 year old to do the lessons being assigned when he’s read six chapters
ahead in the textbook and could teach the class if necessary, so the habit of
not bothering with homework was well established, following me into high school.
It was never that I was lazy but rather I was quite bored with most of school
and what few topics and subjects which interested me never challenged me in any
way. I really don’t like this about myself and it is something I have fought
against nearly constantly since my diagnoses.
It is why going back to school and getting my high school
diploma meant so much to me. It was the first time in decades then I had set a
goal and followed through on it. It’s also why writing down these thoughts are
important to me right now. I don’t know if they’ll be useful in the future but,
at least for now, they are something I’m working on which has no specific
purpose and is also a means to try and slow my mind down. Right now, in this
place it doesn’t seem to be working.
My bed is in a specified area, my very own five by five
space, separated from the person on my right by a curtain and a wall to my
left. Halfway up the wall are stains in the paint looking suspiciously like a splatter
of some bodily fluid. There are five or six of these of these spaces in a row,
making privacy flexible and important but a complete illusion at the same time.
However intrinsic and flawed the uncomfortableness of this situation is to me,
I am one of the lucky ones. Just outside this are three gurneys lined up along
the wall with no privacy whatsoever. I wonder if I get a curtain because I am
not likely to need emergent care or if it’s because I just happened to get here
first. There are also patients to whom a bed is an unattainable luxury for they
await a better situation sitting in a hospital style recliner chair. About a
half a dozen people have been in those all night. For them, I’m sure a
goodnight’s sleep must have been a fantasy, unless of course the nurses were
able to knock them out with a cocktail of meds. The only one I’m sure slept
well in those chairs is the young man with the mark on his face. He seems to
have been comfortably asleep throughout the night, his hat pulled over his eyes
as a shade from the pulsating fluorescent lights above that I doubt are ever
turned off.
There is one thing about the curtain beside me that I have
not mentioned. I have been reluctant to do so for it is a reminder of why I’m
here, more than the bed situation, or the bracelet on my right wrist. I could
have easily deluded myself, created a delusion as to why those things are
present. The curtain is of a cheap artificial fabric of some source, although I
doubt it’s nylon as it has a tendency to go up in flames like a flamethrower.
It must be thirty or forty years old, perhaps even the surplus from Super 8
motels from across North America bathrooms. I am in a section of the hospital
where clean, new and soothing is not a concern because those states are reached
through the use of Thorazine, Xanax and Valium. I am not meant to be
comfortable. I am meant to be alive.
The nurse has taken pity on my empty stomach and found me a
fruit cup and grabbed me a tea from her private stash. I don’t have the heart
to tell her that I wish it was decaf. It
makes me feel completely uncomfortable because I feel like I’m getting special treatment
as it is so to but in a special request is completely out of the question.
The mental image of me being on a fat camp reality TV show
has jumped into my brain. I feel like I’m getting ready to do my
last-chance-workout, all the contestants sleeping in the same room but I won my
bed and curtain space in this week’s reward challenge. The state of curtain
betrays that thought.
As I turn and lean on my left shoulder to hide these
thoughts, I am faced by the discoloured wall. Twisting to keep my legs on the
bed I am face to face with the one foot square section of wall which is now
clearly a stain from arterial spray. I am currently both glad and upset at
having seen so many episodes of CSI over the years. I can falsely speculate on
speed and directionality based on the size and shape of the droplets. I think I
can discern a void in the stain, as if there used to be something in the way; a
person perhaps.
This is the beginning of page twelve in my notebook, which
means I’ve written more in the last 16 hours than I have in a very long time,
perhaps ever. Doing it curled up on a hospital gurney is very uncomfortable and
my back is beginning to get sore. I only hope that, if not today, it helps me
at some point. Otherwise, I’m just spinning my wheels again, distracted by my
seething mind, destined to end up in the same place I began.
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