Hour of the Wolf
As Polley, my guest blogger, wrote last week, I was in the hospital for a serious condition(my gratitude to her for writing a superb blog—-okay, I am prejudiced). Every night I went to sleep around 11 PM and awoke at 1 AM and stayed awake. I spent some of the dark hours reading my history book or watching dubbed movies about the collapse of ancient Rome featuring scantily clad young women who could not make it in commercials for laxatives and buff young men whose prime acting ruse was to look perpetually puzzled, or watching reruns of Chopped. But I spent most of my time thinking. Herewith some of those late hour thoughts:
As a philosopher observed, we go about the everyday mundane things in life because if we constantly spent time considering the profound and metaphysical we would go crazy. In the wee hours of the morning, what director Ingmar Bergman referred to as “the hour of the wolf,” there is plenty of thinking about the meaning of existence, my personal role, if any, in the scheme of things, and, thus, ample time to reflect and go crazy. I mean, if you cannot contemplate such things when you are on the brink, when do you contemplate them? So I considered and I thought and I summoned up everything I have ever read or studied or experienced and came up empty. Still it filled the time.
Which leads to another thought. 2:04 AM. Six hours to breakfast. Let’s see. How to make the time go faster. I relive my camping and fishing experiences with my father, fondly recall my courting of Polley in graduate school, smile broadly at remembrances of Christmas mornings as our children descended the stairs to see what Santa brought. I summon up the Bronx and my not-so-pleasant elementary school experiences, then flip through almost four decades of teaching high school English. I am almost exhausted from running through my rolodex of memories, and I look at the wall clock to see how much time has expired. 2:06 AM.
Which leads to another thought. A moaning patient down the hall keeps on crying out, “Angela!!!…..Angela!!!!!…..Angela!!!!!!” I know the nursing staff is in control—beautifully so—-but I am tempted to struggle out of bed and walk to the woman’s room and pretend I am Angela…anything to help her calm down. I like to consider mini-universes. Like most people when I drive past a hospital, I simply see a lifeless building of concrete and mortar, but inside the hospital is a hive of human activity operating according to its own organic rhythms and heartbeats. It possesses its own sense of time and purpose and protocol….especially protocol. I imagine other institutions are like that. I know schools are. Einstein was right when he replied to a question, “What is time?” His reply, “Time is whatever clock says it is.” I knew I had to adjust to the hospital clock. Daytime hospital is a sequence of routines so routine that I learned to listen to the distinctive sounds of the hospital carts—blood sugar cart sounded sleek and stealthy, vital signs cart clangy and clumsy, breakfast cart creaky and heavy on the linoleum. The people and the machines enter and leave the room on schedule. What seems like hundreds of doctors in various stages of becoming doctors, from gray haired institutions to medical students, visit me daily to ask questions and apply their stethoscopes to my body. There are other visits: nurses, nurse’s aides, the newspaper guy, the housekeeper, the trash emptier, the volunteers, the food bringers. The hospital day is filled with activity. My mind depends on and anticipates the routine. But hospital night is something else.
Hospital night is bereft of all the daytime visitors save for a nurse and nurse’s assistant. The darkness of night blankets the window and unable to get to sleep, I think. The IV in one arm, tubes sticking out of my neck, the only possible position is to lie down facing the ceiling which is not as interesting at 2 AM as one might think. I shimmy down some so that my gaze takes in the top half of the far wall. I believe I am the most boring man in the world…having spent the last three days observing my room’s ceiling…I have nothing to offer…then, again, compared to the seriousness of my medical condition, the blustering and bellowing of the world, especially its “leaders,” seem pretty trivial to me. And then those hour of the wolf thoughts come creeping into my mind. The nerve-gnawing thinking comes like a ground-hugging fog in the late hours, along the floor of the room and up through the bed and into my soul. Existence, non-existence, fulfillment, unfulfillment, ego and non-ego, every haunting question that has tormented every human being since the first of us realized his or her mortality. Dawn seems a long way off.
Which leads to another thought. How amazing is technology?! The book I am reading on the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair recalls the agony of many adults over toothaches. Some even die from dental infections. How far have we come since then? Several times a day someone comes into my room to check my vital signs. A cuff is place on my arm. Blood pressure checked. A device wipes my forehead. Temperature taken. A clip is placed on my forefinger. Oxygen level checked. A pin prick, a drop of blood placed in a handheld device, and blood sugar measured. Then there is the dialysis machine which filters my blood and removes unnecessary fluid. How do all these devices know what to do? I know I will suffer the human weakness of taking all this stuff for granted, but in the hour of the wolf I marvel at the technology. However, science has its limits. I gave my students this analogy: “Science gives us a temporary model of how the universe operates as best it can. The humanities tells us how to operate in that universe.” The important questions of meaning and responsibility are not addressed by science. That is not its domain. Such truths are revealed to us obliquely, through the arts.
Which leads to another thought. Upon admission to the hospital the staff works fast to find out why my levels of bad stuff in my kidneys are high. There could be several reasons, some of them not very good at all. There is this moment of knowing and not knowing, of certainty and non-certainty that is interesting. I remember a story about a Japanese war lord who sends his eldest son into battle to determine the fate of his kingdom. After a time a soldier returns to the war lord carrying a box. In the box is one of two things: the head of the rival war lord or the head of his son. At that one moment, before opening the box, two possibilities exist. The war lord waits. As long as he does not open the box, there is hope.
While awaiting the diagnosis I shared the war lord’s feelings. Yes, knowledge is power, but, sometimes, in uncertainty, there is hope. I hung onto the uncertainty. When the news came that my condition was serious but reversible, I was relieved, even happy, but the anxiety takes a toll, and I will never be the same person in totality again. Maybe that is a good thing.
Which leads to another thought. One does not go to a hospital to rest. There is no rest. One goes to a modern hospital to get well, and the getting well part requires energy and effort, not to mention patience. A patient must be patient. See? So I struggle to get out of bed, take a walking tour of my floor, IV drip in tow, to get those muscles going. I’ll rest and recover my sleep when I get home. Most of all, I try to summon the energy to not be a victim.
Which leads to another thought. This experience reinforces what I have already learned. In this age of specialization you have to be your own health care advocate. Ask your doctor how this newest drug will affect your system. Every single prescribed pill you put into your body may potentially affect your renal or liver system or cardiac system or all of them. Remember the commercials for various drugs—-“Ask your doctor if Xocoytin is right for you. The potential side effects include abdominal pain, vomiting, drop in blood pressure, paralysis, diabetes, suicidal tendencies, and possible death.” This should scare the hell out of us. You must be the overseer of your own health. Ask, ask, ask!!!
Last night, in my bed at home, I slept through the night, dreaming past the hour of the wolf. No calls for Angela. Enough thoughts. Time for some serious thoughtlessness—-how about them Cowboys!!??