I can't do this.

Sickbed thoughts, part one.

Before you get your pain meds, if you’re sitting around in the emergency room, you’re hearing a lot of screaming, and maybe you are also screaming, though in my case I mostly kept looking at nurses and saying please, please, please. Saying this to the nurses is part of an elaborate ritual because they won’t help you until it’s your turn and they know it and you know it but you are very afraid of being forgotten.

Then once you cross the blessed line, some sweet opioids shot right into your veins, the screaming keeps going. There’s a language to pain and to maintaining your access to the medication. If you mess it up and say your pain is a 6 when it needs to be a 7, you might have an understanding nurse, but you might not. But there’s also just the need for attention, to be recognized, because so much experience in hospitals involves being parked someplace by somebody you might not see again to await a test. And then maybe you’ll just sit there forever.

Waiting for a CT scan you hear a chorus of voices saying: nurse, nurse, nurse, nurse. They are scared and angry and everything else. They feel faceless. They feel annoying. (Sometimes they are.) People desperate for the sole attention of nurses can become manipulative and abusive. But even if the nurse hates you, at least they’re looking at you.

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There’s also of course that a lot of opioids are bad for you—and I’m not talking about addiction issues here (nor will I). They can put stress on your body but they can also, frankly, just make you feel weird. When I was on my daily IV infusions of my particular drug, I would consistently feel like I had died, like I was being dragged into my bed by hundreds of hands, like I had become perceptible to demons. All of this was immensely preferable to being in pain, but it was a real price.

So access to relief from pain can be denied because the doctor has fears about harming the body, not because the pain is assumed to be fraudulent. To the patient, however, I’m not sure how big a distinction this really comes down to. In the end the feeling one is left with is essentially that treatment of pain is a luxury. The person in pain has no choice but to keep keeping on.

I don’t have any complaints. I have been well taken care of. I just can hear things.

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I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. But then you can (because you are).

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I guess this is what I’ve been thinking about since I was talked into calling an ambulance (“I can’t”). I can’t while in pain on the floor, I can’t making the call, I can’t dragging myself outside to wait for the ambulance in my bare feet, I can’t in the long cold wait for help once I got there. I could, I did, but to say I can’t is true in a way that I find it very difficult is not. I really couldn’t do some of these things. I did them the way you “do” falling off a cliff. Certain forces take control. And then a lot of stuff that I couldn’t do, other people did. They walked my dog and they coordinated my things, they sent me flowers, they come to see me and make me laugh.

The truth is that while I can still remember the feeling when I finally got the real stuff—complete, blissful escape, which never stopped being a wonder no matter how many times the miracle was achieved—almost nothing else did more for me than being able to hold my mother’s hand. Not something a nurse should be expected to do. But it’s hard to be a human being in a hospital.