Detours – a Week In and Out of the Hospital, Dahlias, and Feeling a Little Down While Wishing on Stars

Dinner Plate Pink Dahlia, my own garden

Detours – A Week In and Out of the Hospital, and Dahlias

Hello my friends! Since I last wrote, I had several unplanned detours into the hospital. I lost ten pounds in two days, ran 102 temperature, and endured two separate hospitals who took blood, gave me fluids and electrolyte bags, and let me tell you – stay away from hospitals during Covid if you can. The nurses were so inattentive as to seem terrified and understaffed. No visitors are allowed back – you may have heard about this – but the hospitals seem even more gloomy and terrifying than usual (and as you know, I’m something of a hospital veteran – having volunteered for five years in various wards at hospitals, including end-of-life wards, before starting, at 20, to pay way too many visits for my own health. First they were fighting a superbug – and then a complication from the drugs that treat the superbug – and then unexplained mysterious symptoms no one could explain. Not covid though! Just a reminder – there are things out there that can still make you sick enough to hospitalize you that are not covid, though covid is getting all the attention.

Anyway, spending time at the hospital is never pleasant, and was less pleasant this time than any time in recent memory, perhaps because I was also suffering and a bit out of it, which always makes bad things loom larger.

My care team – Glenn and Sylvia

When I got back from the hospital, and I was well enough to walk around my house, this pink dinner plate dahlia greeted me, as if it had been waiting for me. My care team – pictured to the left – Glenn and Sylvia – barely left my side as they made sure I drank broth and Pedialyte, and watched movies and documentaries (including a great one on Joan Didion, who, it turns out, was diagnosed with MS!)

These unplanned detours – which often seem to occur to me in August – derail my writing, my meager (during the plague, especially) life plans. But today I talked to a poet friend, my little brother, and caught up with my parents – a nice way to re-enter the human world, not the suspended animation of the medical care world. The dream (or nightmare) world of IVs and fever, of blood work and doctor exams.

Like going to and fro from the underworld, we need companions to help us re-arrive in the land of the living in one piece, recovering our spirits and reviving our bodies.

The circle of life, in typewriters

Feeling a Little Down, While Wishing on Falling Stars

Have you been watching the falling stars each night at midnight? I’ve been standing on my back porch, drawn to the red glow of Mars on the horizon, once in a while catching the quick winking of a falling star, wishing and wondering if I should even bother wishing. Is it naïve or child-like for me to even make wishes?

It’s been a tough year, definitely because of the plague-related disruptions, the tearing away of my comfort zones (oh, my bookstores!) and my support networks. Watching Americans do stupid things under a stupid president. Maybe also because I have two finished – or mostly finished – manuscripts – still looking for homes, maybe because both times I returned home from the hospital there was a rejection waiting for me (both places having taken a year to get back to me).

Field of flowers in Woodinville, sunflowers and dahlias

I won’t deny feeling down when I read about Trump’s attack on the post office (though I was a little cheered by Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris as VP, for whom I voted for Presidential candidate). I feel down when I read about coronavirus deaths, and I couldn’t help but absorb a little fear from those gray-faced nurses at the hospital, curt and perfunctory in their fear. I feel, again, betrayed by my frail body that manages to be so sick I cannot control it. I feel that while all my writer friends are celebrating triumphs, I continue to fail. I know this may be temporary – perhaps a bit of gloom traced to the IV fluid in my veins, to my still sore arms (they couldn’t get a blood draw the third time, and my IV had to go in different places three different times). How to separate the physical from the mental and emotional?

I will quote here a bit from Joan Didion’s “The White Album,” her neurologist’s advice after her diagnosis (after many tests) of MS. “Lead a simple life,” the neurologist advised. “Not that it makes any difference we know about.” Ah, MS advice hasn’t changed a bit!

I try to find the beauty in the simple things around me – birds and the flowers of late August, sunflowers and dahlias. Tonight I will go out again after midnight, to watch for meteors flashing across the sky. I will probably still make a wish.