2022
Twenty-Two Staples charles coe
W
hen you enter a hospital for major surgery the first thing you give up, or rather the first thing taken from you, is the sense of boundaries around your own body. Your clothes and possessions are bundled and shipped off to wherever, you put on a hospital gown, someone wheels you into a big, bright operating room, puts a mask over your face, and while you’re off in Never Never Land they lift the hood and get to work. No one’s asking for your advice or permission. If you’re fortunate enough to wake up after surgery, people you’ve never seen before and might never see again stroll into your room at random times to poke and prod and stick you with needles and peer at the blinking lights of the machines you’re lashed to. They bring you juice (no solid food of course) and reload your IV antibiotics bag. Just as I opened my eyes a few hours after my operation and thought, “Hey, I’m still alive. How ‘bout that?” the nurse came in to say, “So now we need to put in a catheter.” (“We?”) “Take a deep breath,” she said, “and let it out slow.” As she did the deed I realized it had been nigh on thirty years since a beautiful young woman had handled that particular appliance. But fortunately even though I was still addlepated by general anesthesia and an IV painkiller drip I managed to push-broom enough brain cells together to realize I should maybe keep that insight to myself. A couple of days after surgery another nurse strolled in and asked if I’d had a bowel movement and said, “When you do, don’t flush; we need to check it out.” I’d never fielded that particular request before. When the surgeons opened me to rearrange my giblets my system freaked and took a few days to get back up and running. When I finally did my business I felt proud and pleased, like a newly potty-trained toddler. (“I make poo-poo!”) Too bad nobody gave me a Cub Scout medal to pin on my robe . . . . On the afternoon of Election Day 2020 I’d gotten a ride to Mass General Hospital’s Emergency Room, feeling as though my chest was in a vise that was slowly cranking tighter and tighter. I could hardly breathe. I thought I was having a heart attack but it wasn’t my heart; it was my gallbladder. Which had to come out. Immediately. Nowadays a gallbladder operation’s usually done with the aid of a laparoscope, a long thin tube with a light and camera attached that lets the surgeons poke around your innards and take a look. They make two or three tiny incisions in your abdomen, maybe an inch long. Then snip, snip, ease out your gallbladder like a deflated balloon. It’s usually a minimally invasive procedure. Some people go home the same day, or maybe spend a night at the hospital. That’s the best-case scenario. But the surgeons discovered my gallbladder wasn’t just filled with stones, it was infected. So they had to open me up old school like a can of tuna fish, otherwise it might have burst. I had an e-coli blood infection that kept me in the
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The Lowell Review
