I got brought to my knees recently by an organ in my own body–no, not my heart.

My useless appendix.

Talk about a perfect storm. It’s March first at 10 AM, one day before my 81st birthday. Ed and I get our second shots of the Covid vaccine. Yay, right? Back home, normal day. Eye doc appointment at 3:50 PM, no problem. Unexpectedly, she decides, “Let’s go ahead and dilate those peepers and do a thorough exam.” I’ve been having some problems with blepharitis–look it up–and I’m a little frustrated, so I agree. At the end of the session, she spells it out for me: this is what you need to do to keep your eyes healthy–a regimen, if you will, and I’m okay with regimens. In theory, at least, not always so diligently in practice. So, I head home with those inserts in my sunglasses. It’s 6 PM, and I think I should eat, so I roast some cauliflower and eat it watching a session of . . . I don’t remember.

Sitting on the sofa, I start to feel bad. Tummy pain. Not what you’d expect, not what I should have expected, but I’m a classic vacillator. Ask anyone. A girlfriend sent me a little sign, “Wait, let me overthink this.” Yep. So, it must be that I’m going to have a reaction to the inoculation. Forty percent of the recipients do.

I go to bed. Gets worse.

Later in the night, I vomit. And then again, And then again. You get the picture. Roasted cauliflower, remember? Sorry.

Next morning, no more of that, but pain, my old friend is still with me. And gets worse. In the afternoon (lost track of real time) I tell Corey, my wise daughter, “I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight with this pain.” And she says, “Mom, on a scale of 1-10, how bad is it?”

“A Nine?”

She drives me to the mini-ER, and they perform a CT scan and tell me I have a perforated appendix. Two friendly, burly EMT’s transport me by ambulance to the hospital ER where I hear them say I have a ruptured appendix. I don’t know if there’s a difference between perforated and ruptured, but . . .

View Post

A man (of course) has come in ahead of me with gall bladder surgery, so he goes in first and maybe three hours later, with my daughter standing beside my gurney, they roll me in and take the dreaded thing out laparoscopically. My surgeon, Dr. Rose, cute guy, fit and buff, great personality, tells me on a scale of (here we go again) 1-10, my appendix was at an 8 in terms of mess. His cheerful assistant beams at me and says, “We share a birthday! I was born on March second, too!” She in 1990, me in 1940, but hey. Corey has stayed, of course. She monitors my transfer to a room, kisses me on the forehead and takes off. After midnight.

The fun continues. My roommate is a loud sigher. Also, she has an alarm on her bed that goes off when she gets up unassisted. So there’s that. She can’t weigh (when I finally saw her) fifty pounds, but she’s a force to be reckoned with, and the nurses are so very patient, but I can hear the frustration in their voices every time they come in. Seems she has to go potty every hour or so. She has her own little chair thing, and after she pees, they have to empty it in the ‘real’ bathroom, next to my bed, and then flush, The flush sounds like a freight train. So it goes.

I’m up walking at first light. Holding my tummy, carrying my pole with the I.V. drip walking up and down. No way in hell do I want to stay here another night. Cheerful guy with long dreads brings me my liquid breakfast, not that I’m hungry, and 75% of it goes back. The nurse, Brenda, God bless her, is new! First day on this floor, second day in the hospital. Late thirties, spry, fit, pixie cut–totally overwhelmed. It’s a fucking madhouse. Can I just say, we’ve overloaded our healthcare facilities to epic proportions? Everyone is masked, but there are TOO MANY PEOPLE in a small space, all hurrying, talking–desperate, I’m sure, to be done with their shifts, even as they begin them.

My daughter and my husband come to visit, around ten I think and I watch my daughter get the drift of the drama on the curtained side of my room as my roommate once again makes her wishes known to the beleaguered staff. Corey looks at me and we are in agreement. Not where she wants me to be. My family hangs out, we chat, they leave. Then I hear that I’m to be without a roommate. She’s being discharged. It takes forever to get her dressed. So many complaints, so many questions! Finally, she’s gone.

Then, guess what? A new roommate. An amputee, lovely light-skinned black woman named Vivian with the sweetest husband. He fills the room–must be at least 300 pounds, so kind and so solicitous of her. He has all the answers, and they should trust him because she’s pretty fuzzy on stuff. But, no, they run him out because they’re going to ask her if she’s safe and things like that. So he goes, promising to come back that night, but she puts the kibosh on that, telling him it’s too far, he needs to stay home, she’ll be fine. So he goes. I give him a thumbs up and tell him he’s doing great. He gives me a big mile.

Vivian’s medical history is alarming. If there’s a condition and a medication out there she doesn’t have, I’d be surprised.

My surgeon has said I can go, but I need to pas gas. Nurses repeat this mantra. No gas–not out of me, anyway. Floor doctor, gentle, calm demeanor, Latin with no accent, comes in. Sits down and says, “I’d really like to keep you for a full 24 hours so you can get 24 hours of I.V. drip of antibiotics. “You are in danger of infection,” he says in all earnestness, while not bothering to look at my arm, which is disconnected from absolutely anything because my poor nurse had to take it out since it was out of the vein and flowing a large bubble in my muscle in my right arm. I don’t want to tell on her; I’m sure she’s forgotten me, but I also cannot comply. I look at him and say, “I really want to go home.” He looks down then looks at the room and looks back up at my face and says, “OK.” Nothing from him about gas. I would have lied.

Since I have some time, Brenda decides she’ll try again to get me hooked up, but in spite of multiple tries, she cannot. (You should see my bruises.) She does the best she can, but in fairly short order, I’m bubbling again, and I get her to take it out. “Let me go, honey,” I say. I can see she hates to admit defeat, and in less stressful circumstances, I bet she could have taken care of me. But these are not those circumstances. This is a circus and I’m not willing to play the clown anymore.

I call my daughter-in-law Renee, who has volunteered to take me home, let her know we’re working on it, and within a couple of hours–maybe three–I’m in Discharge Another cheerful lady marvels yet again at how I don’t seem my age, and how she can’t believe I have so few prescription meds to take and so few life-threatening medical conditions–no dentures, hearing aids–almost unencumbered am I. Lucky me.

People everywhere. Sorry, but mostly fat people. I know I am also fat–thirty pounds could miraculously fall from my body and I might be a normal-sized person–but hundreds of pounds fat. Poor things. I’m not judging, I’m just distraught at what we, as a species have done to ourselves. We’re over fed, while in the meantime there are people starving. What is WRONG with this picture?

Renee is there with her sister and her mom in a big, black Navigator. She, too is aghast. “I feel like I’m coming to a club before Covid,” she says, referencing the crowd. Coming in, leaving. Whew. She takes me to the pharmacy to my meds and then home. She brought a birthday present and food. Hot chicken soup, some groceries from Fresh Market. I have a wonderful family.

This is Sunday. That started on, well, Monday, I guess. The surgery was Wednesday. I’m alive and happy to be so. I’m sore as hell and moving slowly. Surgery at my age is not nearly as easy as it is when I was younger. I worry about infection and doing something wrong to get me back there. I’m taking my meds, I’m taking laxatives and eating the right kind of food, I’m walking. And I’m sleeping.

I haven’t decided yet what lessons, besides the obvious, to draw from this major life experience. Count your blessings, maybe? Right now I’m grateful to live out in the country away from people and cars and where it’s quiet and my nearest neighbors are a few cows and my pets are glad I’m home and my husband’s world has re-aligned itself.

I was commenting to my acupuncturist that it feels strange to wake up every morning without dreading the latest assault on decency. To not approach the news with my shoulder muscles tensed wondering what new dastardly deed the man in the oval office had foisted on the public. What horrible atrocity had spewed from his tiny mouth.

And she reminded me of something.

We survived a traumatic event. Our minds, bodies, and souls felt it and absorbed the negative energy from it. And we are still dealing with it. Like tiny pieces of shrapnel.

We have to acknowledge that we have been at war. Sanity prevailed, we won the final battle, and our side is in charge now. But it’s hardly over. The enemy continues to make noise and his soldiers continue to harass and intimidate. Even though they are no longer in power doesn’t mean they don’t have power.

For four years we were bombarded with the message that we were enemies because we didn’t agree with the scorched earth policies of the administration. Because we took a more generous, more tempered, more compassionate path, we were suckers and losers and traitors. Told we didn’t want America to be great again–great with Christianity as the official religion, great with the requirement that everyone stand, hand over heart, in deference to the flag, great in the recognition that whites founded this country and were superior in every way to anyone of color or from a foreign land. Great in that the leader of the free world was God’s gift. He would fix what was wrong with this country and make us strong and proud again. If we didn’t agree we weren’t to be trusted.

We knew better. We knew that the founding fathers, in spite of being rich white men, knew the meaning of ‘liberty and justice for all’ and ‘all men are created equal’. Those weren’t just words to them. They knew what autocratic government looked like and knew they didn’t want it. This country was going to be a democracy. Of the people, by the people and for the people.

What did we know? We knew that a grimy little con man, sociopathic sexual predator, liar, cheat, bully and opportunistic braggart was not the answer to anyone’s prayers. Certainly not to America’s. But there he was, feet on the desk of the oval office, rattling around in that revered place, eating burgers and fries and tweeting lies.

We held on. We endured daily assaults like so many bombs to our psyches. We hunkered down, covered our heads, found like-minded friends to gather solace from and give comfort to. We protested to anyone who would listen, but mostly we worried. We were affected. Let’s not forget that. It was traumatic to watch our country be so overrun by ugliness. We have wounds that will take a long time to heal. We will always bear the scars to remind us of the damage done by Donald J. Trump and his minions. He hurt us. He cheapened us, and made us ashamed with his ‘us vs. them’ rhetoric, his praise bestowed on the most despicable people we could ever imagine being held up as an example. His firing of almost everyone with any experience at running a government and replacing them with toadies with nothing to offer the job but money in his pockets, his insulting our allies, his willful rolling back environmental protections of the land we leave to future generations for oil–oil that won’t even be relevant in the decades to come. Instant gratification in place of preparation for the future. Tossed out the playbook for how to protect people in times of cholera and then went to play golf while hundreds of thousands died on his watch. Then, the ultimate insult–denied due process.

He lost because enough people couldn’t stomach the idea of four more years of death and destruction and disregard for anyone but himself. Enough people voted for the other guy. The time from the day of the election until the storming of the Capitol was some of the most upsetting any of us ever lived through. As if the previous four hadn’t been enough.

We don’t realize how affected we were.

But we need to. We need to acknowledge that we need comfort. Even though there’s no chaos doesn’t mean we’re not still in turmoil–inside. None of us feel that we can truly relax. And we’re probably right not to. We need hugs in times when hugs are dangerous. These are perilous times. I hear, “Be kind to yourself.” I get it and I try. But what makes me happiest is when some random person is kind to me. I thanked a woman for being willing to stop and give me directions today, in this ‘we’re all enemies’ culture. She smiled and said, “You’re welcome.” Imagine that.

The kindness of strangers is what we need more of right now.