Wednesday, January 20, 2010

A Hospital Remembrance

On the morning of my fourth day in the hospital, I ask for scissors and a razor. I haven't looked at myself in a mirror for weeks, but have gone unshaven at least that long. And I can feel it: the patches of wild, stringy whiskers covering my bone thin face. They itch something fierce.

It is quite a process making the ten foot trek from my bed to the room's toilet, me hunched over and footing unsure as I drag along the bulky IV stand with my hospital gowned ass flapping in the breeze. I've only made this journey once before, to piss last night. It has been two days since they determined I was no longer a threat to the staff or myself, removing my restraints and catheter.

My body is acutely weak, partly from the ravages of alcohol abuse but mostly from the subsequent and sudden withdrawal. With legs the consistency of rubber, the knees threaten to buckle at each step. It doesn't help that I am out of practice walking, having only attempted the feat twice in the past four days: once for the aforementioned trip to piss and once within the first twelve hours of my arrival into the ER, when I lashed out kicking and screaming at the hospital staff in the throes of the delirium tremens (and, as it turned out, breaking my foot in the bargain). But the cherry on top of this shit muffin is the damn IV contraption. Hooked up to refuel my depleted supply of potassium and electrolytes, it would have been a bitch to maneuver even if I'd been at full strength. The nurse later allows me to temporarily disconnect from the IV tether, making the potty trips so much easier. But that is still to come. As it is, I can barely fit my tubular companion into the tiny shitter with me. Still, I have to clean up or I'll go mad from the itch and smell.

The light in the bathroom is mercifully dim. I look up slowly into the mirror and am shocked at the thing staring back at me. My complexion is gray/yellow and skin clammy cold while the eyes follow suit in jaundiced exhaustion. I touch the top of my head and it comes back damp, the scalp is soaked and hair matted, curling over my ears and falling into my eyes. Perspiration seems to pour out of every orifice and the resulting stench rings of some unholy blending of BO, vomit, and gin. Clumps of long gray/black whiskers twist out at crazy angles along my jaw line and upper lip interspersed with the large barren patches that mark the reason I've never bothered trying to grow a proper beard. My hands are shaking violently as I crank the sink's faucet on hot and let the water warm up. I then soak a washcloth, soap it, and rake the rag across my face and hair. Rinse. I do the same up and down my body, at least to those places I can reach.

I next reach for the scissors with my right hand, gripping the back of the wrist with my left to steady it, and hunch over so as not to tear the IV out while I clip the whiskers down to shaving length. Midway through, the dry heaves take me away from this work. My intravenous ball-and-chain prevents me from the instinctive drop to hug the porcelain god, so I lean as far down into the sink as I can and spasm the yellowy clear into the faucet stream. Fuck. I rinse the bowl and resume clipping, shaky chills and start-stop nausea making it an arduous task. I eventually get the job done, my hands trembling a little less than they had been. I hurry up with a quick shave before the shakes catch me again, trying my best to work the cheap plastic razor with a minimum of cuts and snags. A quick look in the mirror after my clean up, sad and small.

And then it was time to slow dance the IV back to my bed, accompanied by the sounds of the hacking cough and gagging of my hospital roommate, an elderly guy whose ailment remained a mystery to me. Whatever his condition, it required him to release a lot of phlegm in myriad ways, loudly (in turn usually triggering my nausea; we're quite a pair). Once I lay down on the bed and get the IV stand situated back into its usual position, I kill the light and am bathed in the darkness of the evening with the faint flickering of the TV overhead.

The stench is still there, in the sweaty sheets sticking to my skin mixing with the pungent odor drifting over from my roomie across the curtain. But I'm essentially clean for the first time in weeks on a number of levels. Unfortunately, this deliberate act of cleansing the filth off my body seems to have awakened the mind's consciousness out of the foggy twilight slumber it's been mired in lo these many weeks. I now repeatedly replay my life unravelling over the past month, watching it slide down again and again into a hole from which there is no light. Indeed, it had been unravelling for years, but the rope had clearly since grown taut until it finally snapped in May. In fact, I see now that I'd been actively digging that metaphorical hole deeper, fervently hoping to come out the other end. Until I had no strength left to dig and with China still nowhere in sight.

It was this during this act of making the turn back up toward the light that I realized I'd hit bottom, there in that hospital bed, clean on an evening in early June of 2006. Now those recent horrors had crystalized, becoming quite apparent. But so had a new sensation I had never before experienced: a steely eyed resolve not to relive the madness yet again.

Then I cried myself awake until the morning's sun rose.

6 comments:

  1. Dear blogger,

    I am a student of english linguistics at the university of Basel, Switzerland and I am currently writing my Bachelor thesis on "Anonymity and self- disclosure in weblogs". I have foun your blog via blogcatalogue.com and woul like to ask you for your permission to use your posts and profile information for my data analysis. In the publication, all the data will be anonymized, i.e. your blog will only be evaluated for the use of personal and possessive pronouns, and labelled with "blog 4".

    Thank you in advance and best wishes,
    Kathrin

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sure. I should let you know that I've already anonymized it to some degree. I have no profile information and the name I use here bears no resemblance to my own; rather, it's a montage of Ben Sanderson's first name (the protagonist of Leaving Las Vegas), my father's middle name, and the last name of Don Birnam (the protagonist of Lost Weekend). However, the posts themselves happened just as written, told from my point of view (they happened to me) and are as factual (and beyond that, even true :-) ) as memory allows.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Ben-I found your blog through blog catalog too. It's completely different from the mundane little musings I write, but it was fascinting to me - or maybe that's why it was fascinating to me. Anyway, I'm putting it in my favorites to check back in...right next to to the one on scrapbooking. No lie - how weird is that? You're a good writer.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks, Lori. I took a look at your blog and it's very amusing. I have a similar blog under my own name (it's a bit more social commentary when I start ranting but usually its just things I'm doing). I post there regularly and here only when the mood and/or memory strikes. This blog is more therapeutic. I think it's very apropos to be next to scrapbooking because, in a very real way, this blog is a scrapbook of moments in my life (albeit ones I'd never have dared capture as such).

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  5. Hi Ben- I too stumbled upon your blog and I have to say, I was drawn in, provoked to read further. I was horrified by what you were suffering through and then thankful, when I noted the "past tense". Addication is a powerful thing-it takes so much away from the living of life. I wish you great success both with your writing and sobriety. We are fighting addiction with a family member and it is the hardest thing I have ever gone through. It ravishes all your reserves and breaks your heart. Sometimes I feel like I am walking around just waiting for that next call. Take good care.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Ripped,
    Addiction is an insidious thing, and is often the "gift that keeps on giving" in a family, whether through DNA or the dysfunction an addict-parent imprints upon their kids or some combination. I imagine the mix is different for each, but the results tend to be depressingly similar. How/when somebody hits bottom is, however, unique to the person. How they get and stay clean tends also to be unique. Whatever someone finds, if it works and they stay clean, you should encourage them to keep at it. Usually, the best approach involves surrounding one's self with other recovering people. AA works for some, though not certainly for all. There are alternatives, like Secular Organizations for Sobriety, who helped me a lot early on. Don't force feed any particular one. In the end, the person has to want to get clean. Then, like a marriage, they gotta work at it. I'll have four years clean in May but I don't kid myself that I can't be right back into the mix at the drop of a hat. I wish you and your family member all the best.

    ReplyDelete