Post-hospital ramblings

I decided to start a new proper personal blog during a recent stay in the hospital, context here and here. This post covers some more details of past events during and shortly after that stay, before my memories have a chance to fade further than they already have.

Within the first few days, I was identified as having "anxiety", which is not something that had really occurred to me before, except maybe in connection to specific short-term situations. I soon worked out that they meant my intermittent compulsion to fidget with my hands or feet in a certain way, for no conscious reason beyond an instinctive "I know it's going to bug me if I don't". Normally, it probably just happens without drawing notice, but when your entire day is reduced to laying on a gurney and getting a couple blood samples drawn, then such things can rise to the level of conscious concern. Once we understood each other on this front, then it was fine, as I had enough room to let those compulsions manifest.

Partway through, I also had a couple panic attacks - an unpleasantly new experience - due to realizing that something (pain in general, or a charley horse due to dehydration) was bad and getting worse, and the only effective thing I could think to do was hit the verbal panic button and let the staff know that they needed to intervene Right Now. After the first one, we discussed how to do so less disruptively (saying "Do something!" rather than just shouting at deliberately rude volume; the second time, they had already put pressure on it before, so I just needed to tell them to repeat that).

All those days laying down all day took their own toll. My weight had slowly crept up from about 250 to 265 pounds over a couple decades; when I was discharged, it was down to 240, and in particular I could easily feel the atrophy in the back of my lower legs (they have since recovered just fine, and I've probably gained back a few pounds). I only stood or walked when a physical therapist was available to monitor me, though I barely needed a walker after discharge, and set it aside entirely after about a week. (I also quickly developed a grudging stoicism for having to be cleaned up periodically by the nurses, and ignoring the situation until they were reasonably available.) And I struggled with instructions like "move yourself up" - reminding myself that they meant "in the direction of your head", and then working out how close or far I was from the handholds - or with how to raise and lower parts of the gurney on my own, and how much or little would work best for me.

I quickly learned the value of keeping my mind occupied with some appropriately challenging puzzle or familiar music, in order to tune out ongoing pain and discomfort. When your physical faculties are diminished enough, "appropriately challenging" can be as basic as "how to say something in as few words as possible so the listener doesn't have to wait forever", or "how to move your food and drink containers and the tray they're on so you can feed yourself, and which things to save for last". (Hospital food is indeed mediocre, but only parts of it, and you quickly get used to dealing with it for the duration.) For music, "familiar" was the key word; one time I put on a long video, but I began at the beginning and I was only familiar with a short section in the middle, so it failed to help. (Another time, I triggered some nostalgia by hearing the theme to The Young and the Restless, which I'd never watched, but I did learn to play the theme on the piano back in grade school. It's the same sort of nostalgia that I have for the type of New York City neighborhood depicted on Sesame Street, even though I've never been to New York City.)

Speaking of impaired speech, that turned out to be partly due to some sort of tube in my nose getting twisted around, then overlooked on an X-ray; a speech therapist caught on and pulled the tube out, which was probably the second worst pain I felt during the entire stay (worst was getting a catheter inserted), but a vast improvement afterward. I think a few days worth of gunk building up in my mouth was also related; I was given a suction device to clear some of it out, but that ran into diminishing returns pretty quickly, and I had to remind myself to leave it alone because I was just tiring myself out for no good reason.

I've long been accustomed to focusing on a few high-priority things and offloading others onto a to-do-eventually-maybe list, but I had to get used to worrying even less about long-term goals and how far off they were likely to be, and focusing solely on whatever the next one or two things were going to be.

Another familiar thing from the day job is the fallacy of wanting to accomplish Y, but ass-u-ming that the way to get there is to do X, and then asking "how do I do X". (Ideally you would ask "how do I accomplish Y" and then add "I think I need to do X to get there".) I ended up tripping over that one a couple of times, and had to make myself watch for it and correct myself.

I stumbled onto a form of mood alteration, via listening to music while my emotional filter was intermittently knocked out of commission (because my body was too busy diverting energy to physical healing). Filter in place? "Oh, that music is pretty." Filter removed? Same music, literal tears. (Compare to this video starting at 29:53 - she explicitly says that it's just a handful of pixels, and still feels what she feels, and goes on to imagine some subtext that would never have occurred to me.) Then I re-invoked it deliberately from time to time, knowing that hospital staff were around in case I managed to overstress myself. I actually considered trying marijuana later as another route to that sort of mental state (I've never sought it out for fear of a negative feedback loop), though I'm on enough prescription meds at this point that I would need to run it by my GP first.

A couple things to wind this up:

• Be brutally honest with medical staff. (I was.) Otherwise, something like this may occur.
• Be kind (still honest, but diplomatically so) with family. If you're struggling mentally, consider seeing a therapist; while your family may understand where you are, they probably have enough on their plate already.