Real Life, Virtual World

Dear Present Day Self:

You’ve got a birthday coming up, which means it’s the perfect time for some reflection on who you are and who you want to be. Knowing that you’ll be doing this, I’m going to make a suggestion to you: stop annoying your future self, OK?

See, Future Self gets really annoyed when you do things that are selfish, Present Day Self. Remember that time you were too tired to make up the coffee pot before going to bed? When Future Self woke up the next morning, she was pissed. PISSED. She groggily came down the stairs only to find no java waiting, which meant she had to figure out how to put everything together while half asleep and still suffering from blurry sleep-induced vision. That wasn’t very nice of you.

There are lots of other examples, it’s not just about the coffee. When you decide to be lazy on a weeknight so you can play around on your computer, Future Self gets stuck cleaning the bathrooms on her day off. And those bills that Past Self in college put off paying? You got it: Future Self got stuck with them.

It’s inevitable that you’re going to let people down. I’m realistic and I understand that it’s going to happen. But letting yourself down gets really frustrating and I know you’re better than that. The next time you look at something you need to do and debate about putting it off, just take a moment to think about how that’s going to make Future Self feel. I promise you, it’ll be worth the effort.

Sincerely,

Me

I’m making my way into day three of hospital living: I’ve been here since Monday evening (well, with the exception of ten hours). During the day our time has been spent as professional waiters. Wait for the nurse, wait for the therapist, wait for a test, wait for results, wait for the neurologist, etc. At night, my job is to make sure my dad remembers he’s go an IV when he gets up to pee.  It sounds a lot simpler than it is, unfortunately.

At any rate, here are some of the things I’ve learned so far as a guest in Hospital Land.

1. Images of a blue sky and puffy white clouds is the wrong thing to have on the ceiling of the elevator, especially one used to transport patients on gurneys. Lucid people find it rather “Charlie In The Chocolate Factory”-esque. Those who aren’t so lucid tend to think they’re taking an elevator to heaven.
2. Even hospital cafeterias can be behind the curve when it comes to celiac awareness. My sister has decided to write the hospital requesting gluten free signage, or at least that ingredient lists be posted with the menu.
3. When your finances take a turn for the worse, spend some time in the hospital. Well, if you’re not gluten intolerant…  Seriously, the cafeteria food is rather tasty and you can eat three meals a day for under $10. Plus, the wifi is open and there’s free coffee on the upper floors.
4. No matter how badly you’ve slept and how uncomfortable you were, these four things will make you feel human in the morning: wash your face, brush your hair, change into clean socks, and get a cup of coffee. To tell the truth, I’d already learned this lesson the really hard way: stranded overnight in the Buenos Aires airport. I’m just getting a refresher course right now.
5. Apparently snoring men can sleep through the most heinous alarm beeps known to humanity, but will wake up and grumble the instant someone bumps the lighting up from one candlewatt to two. It’s an interesting phenomenon, surely someone has written a paper on this already.
6. Hitting the recommended 10,000 steps a day is really easy: just make three trips to your car from the second floor of the hospital. Another option is to pace incessantly in front of the elevator bays as you curse the fact that only half the elevators are working.
7. Dysphagia (problems swallowing) can be a contraindicator of speaking difficulties and can be managed and treated by eating different food textures. That is the good news. The bad news is that suffering from dysphagia means that at first everything you ingest has to have a consistency somewhere between tomato juice and pudding. And I do mean everything, including your coffee, peaches, and chicken. Trust me, if you’ve never seen chicken with the consistency of pudding, you are a lucky person. And if you do happen to see chicken pudding, whatever you do, don’t smell it.
8. Nurses will actually ask you if you want your prescribed stool softener suppository rather than just giving it to you. Amazingly, they report that some people do in fact say yes. Obviously those patients are not subsisting on a diet of chicken  pudding.
9. The surefire way to get taken away for that test you’ve been waiting for? Have your meal delivered. My father has had one hot meal in the past two days. Rumor has it that cold chicken pudding is even more horrific than hot chicken pudding.
10. There’s always someone worse of than you are. Period. Don’t believe me? Walk through the hospital during visitors hours. Heck, just walk through a parking deck and you’ll hear enough to convince you it’s true.

It’s 3a EST and I’ve just returned from the hospital. I’m hopped up on coffee and adrenaline, so the odds of me going to sleep any time soon are slim. I wanted to say ‘thank you’ to everyone on FriendFeed who has shared their kind words and support, however I found I had more to say than the space would allow. So, I’m posting it here.

This is my second trip to the ER within a week: last week we spent four fun-filled hours dealing with my husband’s first kidney stone. In hindsight, last Monday was a walk in the park because today my father had a stroke. The scary thing is that it may very well not be his first one.

Daddy is 51, still young in this day and age. He’s been to the hospital twice in my lifetime: once for out-patient knee surgery, and once 20+ years ago when he was a construction worker (he fell off a building). Other than that, he’s always been healthy as a horse.

But a year or two ago he had an episode of faintness where it was hard to stand and speak. The doctor said it was too much coffee on an empty stomach. This past November he stopped driving because his eyesight suddenly got worse (previously he had 20/10 vision). Even after he got his new glasses, he said things still didn’t look right and drove as little as possible, never at night.

And now he’s laying in a hospital bed, curled on his side looking smaller than me. Well, technically speaking he is, by about 10 pounds… And I’m left wondering about those episodes over the past two years.

While I know it’s common for stroke victims to make a very full recovery, I’m still preparing myself for something worse. His body has already bounced back: he couldn’t stand or walk at 7p tonight and at 10p he flew through the neurologist’s physical tests with no issues. But he couldn’t see properly: anything more than 12 inches away didn’t get a reaction. He’s not speaking properly, nor fully comprehending what he’s hearing. The doctor had to pantomime the actions for the physical test.

He didn’t know how old he was, or my mother’s name. I don’t know that he knew which one was me and which was my sister. It didn’t even register with him when the doctor said he’d had a stroke, an hour later he asked what was wrong with him.

So now I find myself hoping for the best but planning for the worst. It’s a bad habit of mine, actually, so in a way this morbid train of thought is familiar and comforting. He closed his business last month, and with it went the insurance. The bills will start coming and odds are he won’t be in a position to work (at least, not for some time). Where he’s going to live, how he’s going to get to therapy, how we’re going to keep his prescriptions filled…

It’s too much to think about, but at the same time I can’t help it. I’m supposed to be getting a couple hours of sleep while my husband camps out at the hospital until work, but I think sleep will prove elusive tonight. Perhaps tomorrow will prove to be a better day.

ADDENDUM

Just so no one will think that I’m entirely morose and loosing my oddball sense of character, let me tell you the story about the broken hearted meatloaf picnic in the ER waiting room.

My soon-to-be-ex brother-in-law (STBeBIL) was supposed to bring a meatloaf to our house tonight for dinner: I was starting mashed potatoes when my mom called. My family has a tradition of eating heart-shaped meatloaf for Valentine’s Day, and STBeBIL had made his own heart-shaped meatloaf since he wouldn’t be joining us for Saturday’s festivities (what with him and my sister splitting up and all).

STBeBIL was already on his way to our house, so we called him to let him know we were headed to my mom’s. The amublance was leaving when we got there and we immediately headed to the hospital. So, we placed another call to STBeBIL telling him to change his route to go there instead. Now, STBeBIL has a horrible sense of direction, he couldn’t find his way our of a paper bag. He made it to the hospital after changing his GPS three times, one for each intended destination. And tonight’s meatloaf was still in tow.

After a few hours in the waiting room we were all getting nibbly and started joking about bringing in the meatloaf. The liaison brought us cups and forks and said it wouldn’t be a problem, so STBeBIL and my husband promptly headed to the car and came back with 5 pounds of meatloaf. Which, by the way, was wrapped in aluminum foil and had to go past a metal detector.

So we get ready to unwrap the meatloaf and STBeBIL says he has to explain something first. Basically, he’d made the heart-shaped meatloaf but since he’s getting a divorce he thought it’d be funny to make a statement with it: he’d broken the heart in half. Which is kinda funny, until you find yourself sitting in the critical care waiting room with your soon to be ex and about to eat said meatloaf…

And hey, at least we weren’t there for a heart attack. Then the broken hearted meatloaf would’ve been all kinds of wrong.

Something rather unremarkable happened to me at lunch today. I needed to cross the street.

My office is on a corner, marked A in the image to your right. I needed to cross the street and make it to B. A gentleman was standing next to me, and needed to go from point A to point B as well. As you can see, though, our progress was impeded by a not-so-friendly “Do Not Walk” sign. Because there is a left turn arrow at this intersection, the rightmost “Do Not Walk” will cycle before the one between points A and B.

I can only attribute what happened next to a basic difference in psychology. I waited on the corner in order to go straight from A to B. The gentleman next to me crossed to our right (the bottom green checked sidewalk), took take advantage of the rightmost walk signal, and wound up jaywalking through the top of the intersection to arrive at point B.And for all that effort, he still arrived after I did.

The question is, what did this gentleman gain by traveling three times as far to make the same journey? He didn’t save time, that’s for sure. It was chilly outside, so it’s possible all that walking warmed him up, but I think the wind probably offset that.

The only thing I can see that he really gained was the feeling of control via action: rather than waiting on the light to change, he took control of the situation to find an alternate solution. This is a pretty normal human thing to do, actually. The only problem is the result: he got nothing extra for his effort. His actions to control the situation did absolutely nothing. Moreover, had he taken just a moment to review the situation, he would have seen that all that extra action (not to mention the risk of injury by jaywalking) would be fruitless.

Like I said, it’s actually a very normal human reaction. When faced with an uncontrollable situation, we want to take action, do something, anything, to try and make the circumstances fit what we want. We even take risks that we know aren’t outweighed by the possible rewards.

And in case you haven’t figured it out, I’m not just talking about crossing the street here. We engage in this kind of behavior all the time. Think of how you drive during high traffic: are you more likely to take side streets so you can keep moving, even though you might arrive home no earlier than if you’d taken the stop-and-go main route? What about computer issues: do you take the time to review the logs to see what exactly went wrong? How about the stock market, or a crisis at work?

Our initial reaction is to jump in, get moving, and stay moving, even though analyzing the situation we may be better served by taking less action. Or even no action at all.

It’s a hard lesson to learn, but it’s one worth remembering. Action doesn’t always equal progress.