One of the things I worry about most before my laryngectomy surgery - beyond the loss of voice in general - is the suddenness of it. Go to sleep with a voice; wake without one. It’s the stuff of nightmares. However, my voice starts to disappear a couple weeks before my surgery. It has been scratchy and weak for months - since radiation, really - but a couple weeks before my surgery, it disappears entirely. I consider this a bit of a blessing, although I am upset that I can’t finish all the recordings I have been in the process of making. (I have been recording myself reading phrases, words, and stories so that I can possibly use a tablet in the future to ‘speak.’)
Despite losing my voice before my recordings are complete, I am relieved that I can stop obsessing over what my last words to Michael, Mara, and my family will be. I want to tell them I love them before I go into surgery. I want those to be the last words that I speak independently. Over and over, I imagine myself saying, “I love you” to Michael before being wheeled down the hall to the operating room. I become paranoid that some doctor or nurse will ask me a question in the operating room, and I’ll have to answer, and instead of my I love you to my husband, my last real words will be something like, “Yes, the IV is pulling a little.” Fortunately or unfortunately, I am spared this by losing my voice in advance.
Cut to the night before my surgery (pun completely intended). I am sitting in our rented apartment in Houston with Michael, Mara, and my parents. I haven’t been able to speak for a couple weeks, so we’ve been getting a sneak preview of what it will be like to communicate after my laryngectomy. I’m nervous about the surgery in the morning, but I’m not panicking. Mainly, i just want to spend as much time with Mara before she goes to bed. I know that I will have to leave for the hospital in the morning before she is awake.
And then, I can talk.
I don’t even know how I realize that I can talk all of the sudden. I have no memory of consciously deciding to try using my voice. Since it hasn’t been working for a couple weeks, I don’t know what makes me think it is working now, but there it is. I can talk.
“I can talk,” I say, and everyone in the room looks at me in astonishment. “I can talk.” I’m alarmed but buoyant. For some reason, I understand that it will not last long. “I love you,” I say to Michael. “I love you,” I say to Mara. “I love you, Mom. I love you, Dad.” My mom is crying. I can’t stop saying, “I love you” to everyone in the room. It is all I can think of to say. Mara is staring at me. “I love you! I love you!” I tell her.
I want to call my sister and brother and tell them I love them. Someone gets Caitlin on the phone. “I love you,” I say. She is crying. Her husband, Ryan, isn’t home from the office yet. I want to tell him I love him too, so she promises to call back when he gets home. She wants to keep talking, but I am worried my voice will go before I get to tell John and his wife, Katie, that I love them. We hang up and get John and Katie on the phone. “I love you,” I say. I don’t remember what else I say. Caitlin beeps in. Ryan is home, so I talk to them both. “I love you,” I tell them.
Once I am off the phone, I continue telling Mara I love her. Part of me wishes that Michael and I could go in another room so that I could talk to him in private, but, in all honesty, I still can’t even think of much else to say except I love you. I feel as though I should give a speech, but I don’t have one written. I’m like a faltering Oscar winner who didn’t expect to hear her name called. If I had expected this, I would have prepared for it.
Soon, it is time to put Mara to bed. For the first time in weeks, I am able to tell her, “Goodnight. I love you.” “You make us proud and happy,” I say - part of our nightly routine.
After she is asleep, I sit with Michael and my parents, and someone turns on the tv. None of us knows what else to do. I continue to try my voice a few times while we sit there watching. I occasionally repeat, “I love you” to Michael.
And then, I try my voice, and it is gone. I don’t expect it to come back.
But now, the loss of it hurts.
To be able to talk, even briefly, is such a gift, but when it is over, it is painful. I can’t help but think that it is cruel to give someone the ability to speak again the night before it will be taken away forever. It is wonderful, yes, and I am grateful, but dammit, it hurts.
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I don’t remember much from the morning of my surgery. Mom wakes up to say goodbye before I leave for the hospital. Dad drives Michael and me there. My memory of the prep before surgery runs together with all the other surgeries I’ve had over the last year.
I do recall that, at one point before surgery, I become convinced that I’m not going to live through the procedure. I am surprisingly calm about this. It is not an uncommon thought for me to have - every time I’ve experienced airplane turbulence, I’ve come to terms with my certain impending death. Put me in any sort of situation that is even slightly scary, and I’ll think, “Well, this is it.” For someone who has spent the last year trying not to die of cancer, I am quite accommodating when I think I am.
Even though I feel calm, I still accept the anti-anxiety drug they give before surgeries, Versed, when it is offered to me. It helps prevent panic from setting in when you are being wheeled into the operating room and positioned on the table. I think a lot of people don’t even remember those things afterwards because of the medicine, but I always do.
The Versed makes me euphoric and uninhibited. The nurses and doctors are now my friends. I wave to people who walk by my curtained pre-op alcove. I smile at everyone. When it comes time for me to say goodbye to Michael, I give him a long passionate kiss. Apparently, Versed turns me into a teenager. Though Michael is visibly nervous about my surgery, he can’t help but laugh.
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In what feels like seconds later, I wake up in the ICU. The surgery took almost 10 hours and was a success, but I have no way of knowing this yet. All I know is that I can’t move, I can’t focus my eyes, and I’m going to throw up.
My arms are tied to the bed because I’m still on a ventilator, and they don’t want me to pull it out. Someone explains this to me, as I thrash around on the bed, and it makes complete sense, but I need them to untie my arms - not just because I am about to throw up - but also because I want to pull out the ventilator.
I can hear Michael’s voice by my bed, and I try to communicate to him that I am going to be sick. It takes a while, but he eventually figures out what I am trying to say. “She says she feels like she’s going to throw up,” he says to some other faceless person in the room. (With all the drugs in my system, I am not really able to see anything around me. It is possible my eyes are not open yet.) “She can’t throw up,” a man’s voice says. It sounds definitive - not like she-really-shouldn’t-throw-up, but more like she-is-incapable-of-throwing-up.
“She can’t throw up,” he repeats. “Her esophagus is too small.” I hear this, and it sounds reasonable, except for the fact that I am going to throw up.
I throw up.
Whomever had been in the room before must have gone, because Michael has to go into the hall to get help. “My wife is throwing up,” I hear him yell. I remember little else.
Later, a doctor is in the room. I recognize his voice as the person who declared it impossible for me to vomit earlier. “She threw up,” Michael tells him. “I heard,” he says. “How ‘bout that?” He sounds impressed and a bit amused. I am not.
The rest of my stay in the ICU is a blur. At some point, the ventilator is removed and my arm straps are loosened. Soon after, I am told I am being transferred from the ICU to a regular recovery floor.
A transporter shows up to wheel my bed from the ICU to my new ward. A transporter is someone who moves patients around the hospital if they have to change floors during their admission or if they have to go somewhere for treatment or a scan. They also wheel you out when you’ve been discharged. I’ve had bad luck with being transported in the past. One transport person exposed my entire family to the flu during the middle of my chemotherapy treatment last year, just when my immune system was at its weakest. The hospital informed us the next day that the transport person we’d had had come to work sick - we all got to take 10 days of Tamiflu and to experience all the lovely side effects that come along with it. Ever since, whenever a transporter shows up, I get a little nervous.
To his credit, the transporter who comes in my room does try to hide his reaction when he sees what I look like. I haven’t seen myself in the mirror yet, but I know my face is swollen to an uncomfortable level, and I can only imagine how I must look. The transporter looks away from my face just quickly enough that it is clear that I am not the most attractive person right now. In fact, when I see myself for the first time later that day, I will find out that I am not even recognizably human.
The transporter wheels my bed into the hallway and out of the ICU. When we get to the elevator and the doors open, he slams my bed over the bumpy threshold into the elevator, sending pain through every inch of my skeleton. I glare at him as we travel to my new floor, but he ignores me. When the elevator jolts to a stop, I’m again wracked with pain, and I haven’t recovered from that when the doors open, and he slams my bed over the threshold again. I begin to plan his murder in my head.
Once in my room, I meet my new nurse who fiddles with my IV pole for the better part of an hour, though it is unclear what she is doing. She tells Michael that I am lucky to have one of the bigger rooms, and we both assume she is joking because the room is miniscule, but it turns out that she isn’t kidding. I have one of the biggest rooms on the floor, but it is easily a quarter of the size of the hospital rooms I had in Chicago. We have managed to find the one thing that is not bigger in Texas.
My bed takes up almost the entire room. Two small chairs are wedged between the far wall and the bedside. In between them is the entrance to the bathroom. One wall has a door to the hallway, outside which is the nurse’s station. The other wall has one narrow window. It seems to have been designed like windows in a prison - small enough to preserve the pervading sense of claustrophobia, but large enough that you can see what you’re missing in the outside world.
From my bed, I can look out the window and see the roof of the building next door. The roof is covered with rows of solar panels that blink in the sunlight, and I will spend the next six days watching repairmen work on the solar panels. Solar panels must be tricky technological devices. From what I can tell from my window, repairing them requires one man to work on the panels and five or six others to sit on their hardhats on the rooftop drinking Gatorade.
In the ICU, I was given pain medication on a schedule, with the nurses administering it when it was due, but my nurse on this floor tells me that I will now be in charge of my own pain medication, and she hooks up a device so that I can push a button and send a shot of Dilaudid through my veins. It’s a fantastic device, and I hope the man or woman who invented it won a Nobel prize.
She shows me how it works. The button only works periodically - when you hit it, a small amount of medicine comes out and then you have to wait eight minutes before you can hit it again. A timer on the screen counts down from eight minutes, so I turn my attention away from the solar panel repairmen and spend the next few hours watching the machine count down from eight and hitting the button every time it gets to zero. Despite this, I remain in enough pain to make me cranky.
In fact, I’m more than just cranky. I’m seriously, seriously pissed off. I’ve never felt so angry in my life. Before my surgery, anger wasn’t really a problem for me even though it would have been completely justifiable under the circumstances. I’d had friends and family make comments to me about how anger is normal during cancer treatment, but I hadn’t really felt that angry before my surgery. I’d mainly felt a deep sadness. From the moment I woke up from the surgery, however, I’ve been overwhelmed with anger and resentment. I remember a Law & Order SVU episode I saw years ago in which a man has brain surgery and wakes up with a different personality. In the show, he starts yelling at his wife and kids after surgery because the doctors had fiddled with something in his brain. I immediately diagnose myself with Law & Order Disease and absolve myself from any responsibility for how I treat people. I snap at anyone who asks me a question and begin to insult people openly. Since I can’t make any sound, I’m just mouthing insults and curse words that no one but Michael can understand - he seems to be the only one in the hospital who can read my lips. He’s acting as my translator, but as my comments get meaner and my language gets saltier, he begins to edit what I’m saying when he repeats it to people, which only makes me more angry.
When I meet my occupational therapist - a girl of about 25 who describes herself as a “goofball” - she makes faces at me and dances from foot to foot in an attempt to make me laugh. I stare at her and finally mouth, “Did you hit your head recently?” She can’t read lips and looks at Michael to translate. “How many patients do you have?” he says, changing the topic. When she leaves, he glares at me.
I’m mad at the doctors for not warning me about how bad the recovery would be. I’m mad at the nurses for not being able to understand what I’m saying. I’m mad at everyone who tries to understand what I’m mouthing to them, and I’m mad at the people who come into the room and talk only to Michael, ignoring me entirely. Although I don’t have a reason for it, I’m very, very mad at Michael. I’m mad when he tries to help me with something and mad when he just sits and works on his computer. When he says he’s going to leave the room to go get food, I get angry that he’s leaving, so he orders food to the room instead. Then, I get angry because I have to watch him eat. It makes me livid whenever anyone suggests to Michael that he go home and get some sleep or take a shower, but it also makes me angry when he refuses and the nurses and doctors remark how devoted he is.
Since I don’t have any reason to be mad at Michael, I have to come up with one, and eventually I do: he is the one who most wanted me to get rid of the cancer by having this surgery and, therefore, it is his fault that I am in pain right now. I know this is not rational at all, but my sense of reasoning seems to be on hiatus. I know the rational part of my brain is still in there because she occasionally looks up and tsks at my behavior, but mainly she just lounges and watches the proceedings.
Days go by like this. The occupational therapist returns, and she announces that she is going to help me brush my teeth. “I can brush my own teeth,” I snap as she comes towards me with the toothbrush and toothpaste, but this proves to be more difficult than I expected since my face is so swollen that I can barely move my jaw. When I finally manage to get the toothbrush in and move it around, she claps and squeals. I wonder how long it would take to sharpen my toothbrush into a shiv.
A physical therapist comes in with a walker. It is time for me to learn how to walk again after having my right thigh sliced open from knee to hip. The incision is much longer and gnarlier than I had expected it to be, and I am actually quite impressed by it. If it weren’t for its uniformity, I could tell people the 15 inch scar was from a land mine and have it be passably believable.
The session with the physical therapist is agonizing. I have no strength in my right leg whatsoever, and every effort to move it sends pain ripping through it. I feel as though the incision is going to come apart every time I step down on my right foot. The physical therapist either doesn’t understand my complaints of pain, or she is ignoring them, and I am made to do exercises in a chair and walk several steps around the bedroom.
Actually, the word walk is generous. I’m basically just draping myself over the walker and lurching around on my left leg while trying to keep my right leg off the floor as much as possible.
“You’re doing great,” Michael and the physical therapist tell me. “Shut up,” I mouth at them both. Michael rolls his eyes. I wonder how many times he has to do that before it starts causing ocular damage. We must be nearing that number by now.
The physical therapist is scheduled to come by several times a day. Like the occupational therapist, she is a perfectly kind woman whom I have decided to blame for my condition and treat terribly. Eventually, I am told that if I do my exercises and practice walking without her there, she will only come by once a day. “It’s a deal,” I tell her, plastering a grin on my face and giving her a thumbs up.
I am lying. I have no intention of doing the exercises or practicing walking. She seems to know I am lying and shakes her head at me. Then, she reminds me that I won’t be discharged from the hospital until I can walk safely and comfortably with the walker. This is all the motivation I need. I have recently decided that the hospital is the cause of all my troubles and that I will feel fine as soon as I am allowed to go home to Mara. Even though I am nowhere near recuperated and have not even managed to walk to the bathroom yet, my first question for every doctor is, “When am I being discharged?”
I can’t sleep in the hospital. At bedtime, Michael reclines one of the chairs in my room, puts in earplugs, and goes to sleep. I try to sleep, but every two hours, a nurse comes in to check my neck with a doppler device to make sure the relocated blood vessels in my throat are still working. Also, every two hours, a nurse’s aide comes in to take my vital signs. These visits aren’t coordinated, so rather than come in simultaneously, giving me two complete hours of rest between visits, they stagger their visits, meaning that I am woken up at least every hour. After each visit, it takes me a while to fall back to sleep, so I end up spending most of the night watching Michael sleep in his chair.
One of these nights, he wakes up and shifts his pillow around, trying to find a comfortable position. He has one pillow, and it is about an inch thick. A foam finger in a pillowcase would provide more support. I have eleven pillows. Four under my neck and head, one under each arm, one under my left leg, and two under my right leg. It is the only way I can stay even marginally comfortable in the hospital bed.
“Do you have an extra pillow I can use?” Michael says. “No,” I respond. After he is asleep again and even though I am still irrationally angry at him, I feel bad. I decide that I will tell him to spend the following night at home so he can sleep in a bed. When he wakes up in the morning, I tell him this, and he is so visibly relieved that I don’t take it back when he packs up and heads out later that evening.
My night alone in the hospital starts out fairly well. The nurse comes in and gives me some medicine. I find a channel on the tv that shows old black & white movies, and I watch the end of one and the beginning of another. I doze while food is pumped into my feeding tube from a machine.
Around midnight, however, I wake in pain. The pain medicine I administer to myself is no longer working, but it is too early for the nurse to give me my next dose of supplemental pain meds. My food has run out, and the nurse has brought the new bag of food into my room but has not hooked it up, so it is just sitting across the room. I push my call button, but she can’t understand what I need when she comes in, so I just give up and try to go back to sleep.
I can’t. About an hour later, I need suctioning. Because I can’t cough, I need a device to suction my mouth and throat. It’s disgusting, and I hate it. Unfortunately, when the nurse comes in, she brings me the wrong supplies for suctioning. She can’t find the right ones and says they have to be ordered. She leaves and doesn’t come back.
Later, a nurse’s aide comes in. “I have to pee,” I try to tell her. She doesn’t understand me. Eventually, I am able to communicate that I need to go to the bathroom, and she helps me out of bed. My walker is folded up across the room, so I have to stand by my bed for a few minutes before I can make her understand that I need her to get it for me before I can walk. By the time, I have the walker in front of me, I am already exhausted by the effort. She ignores this and looks me up and down. “You’re taller than I thought,” she says. “You look smaller in the bed.” “Thank you?” I mouth, uncertain if this is a compliment.
I take a few steps, but I don’t have the strength to go any further, and I am still several feet away from the toilet. “I can’t make it that far,” I mouth to the nurse’s aide. She doesn’t understand me. She turns on the bathroom light and opens the door further for me. I continue mouthing, “I can’t walk any more,” but she’s not getting it. I try sign language, but I can’t lift my hands off of the walker for more than a couple seconds and, in any event, she doesn’t understand any of my gestures.
I like this nurse’s aide. She had been in my room several times earlier that day and had made several snarky comments to my television set, which I enjoyed. She is a large woman with a loud laugh. When I first met her, she described herself as “sassy” and she is. But, the longer I stand there stranded in the middle of the room without her comprehending what I need, the angrier at her I get. Fortunately, the anger gives me a boost of energy, and I am able to take another step, and then another, and another. As I stumble closer to the toilet, she chuckles and says, “Look at you go! You a tough lil’ sump’n!”
When I feel so weak, so broken, it’s incredible to me that someone could look at me and think I’m tough. It’s encouraging, and I repeat it to myself as I walk.
When I gave birth to Mara in 2015, I chose a natural unmedicated birth. It’s not the right choice for everyone, but it was for me. In preparation for the birth, I wrote down several phrases that would motivate me, and I repeated them to myself during each contraction. When I got too fatigued and addled to remember them (somewhere around hour 15), Michael repeated them to me. It sounds crazy, but it worked. I think of that as I repeat “You a tough lil’ sump’n” over and over in my head. I climb back into bed, exhausted but somewhat proud of myself.
The feeling doesn’t last long. It occurs to me that a year ago, I was running, working, mothering, living. Now, I’m proud that I can go pee with minimal help. It’s a dark feeling, and it stays with me for the rest of the night.
In the early morning hours, a new nurse comes on shift. I still don’t have the right suctioning supplies in my room, but it is impossible to communicate this, and I’m too tired and frustrated to try very hard. My anger grows.
Around 5:30 a.m., the doctors start making their rounds. First, my head and neck surgeon comes in to examine me. Once he leaves, the plastic surgeon comes in for an exam. Next, in come their residents - first the team from the head and neck cancer department, then the team from plastics. Next, the physicians’ assistants from each department. In between these visits, the nurse and nurse’s aide are coming in and out of my room, giving me shots in my stomach and hooking my legs up to a compression machine. A woman comes in to take out the trash; a man comes in to empty the sharps box on the wall. A social worker comes in to talk about hospital services, but since Michael isn’t with me, she says she’ll come back later.
Around 9:30 a.m., my mom arrives to spend the morning with me. I haven’t slept in six or seven hours. I haven’t had any food for longer than that. I’ve had constant visitors for four hours. I still don’t have the right supplies, and my call button for the nurse has stopped working (or they’ve stopped answering). I’m tired and furious and ready to hit the next person who comes through my door.
It’s the occupational therapist. She has heard that I was able to go to the bathroom by myself during the night, and she does a little dance to celebrate.
My mom and I have worked out a system where I send her text messages while she stands next to my bed, and she reads them out loud to help me communicate. “I hate her,” I text my mom. She starts to read the text out loud, realizes what it says, and stops herself.
“Do you want me to help you take a shower?” the occupational therapist asks.
“No. Tell her to go away,” I text.
“She says she doesn’t feel like a shower right now,” my mom says. “She’s having a rough morning.”
“That’s pretty common at this point after surgery,” the occupational therapist says. “This happens with a lot of my patients. They hit a wall.”
I text my mom: “That’s because of her.” Mom reads the text and suppresses a smile. The occupational therapist waits for her to translate, but mom doesn’t say anything.
The occupational therapist has some questions about what supplies we have at home, but neither my mom nor I know the answer, so we get Michael on speaker phone. He is at the apartment playing with Mara and my dad but is about to leave to come to the hospital. As he is talking, I hear Mara in the background. “Mama, mama!” she says. I lose it. I start sobbing. I’m shaking.
“Is that your daughter?” the occupational therapist asks me cheerily.
“Get out!” I tell her. “Get out, get out, get out!”
“Maybe you should give us a minute?” my mom says apologetically, and she leaves. The door opens again and it is my physical therapist. We send her away too.
By the time I am calm, Michael has arrived at the hospital. I am exhausted and furious at everyone. It feels like everyone is treating me like an imbecile. It’s more than the celebratory dances my occupational therapist keeps doing. There’s a general patronizing tone that I feel like everyone keeps using with me. I used to be able to ask questions about my medical status and that would show them that I had a general idea of what was happening and that they could use medical terminology with me, but I can’t do that anymore. Now, they talk to me like I’m a child. Earlier that day, a phlebotomist had come in to take some labs to check my liver enzymes. A nurse explained that my earlier labs showed my liver was “unhappy,” and they wanted to run some more tests. “How can a liver be unhappy? What the hell is she talking about?” I think. Another staff member helps me untangle my IV pole and when I thank her, she says, “Stick with me. I have a master’s degree.” I have a doctorate degree, I want to say to her, but I don’t. It has occurred to me that another word for mute is dumb, and I’m beginning to think that’s what everyone thinks I am now.
“Tell everyone to stop treating me like a child,” I tell Michael. “If one more person does a ‘potty dance,’ blood is going to pour out of my ears.”
The nutritionist enters. She is there because I’m having trouble digesting my tube feeds. “How long have you been having stomach problems?” she asks. “Eleven months,” I tell her. She looks at me like I’m a moron.
She has lots of questions and most of them involve bowel movements. As she starts talking, all I can think is, “Please talk to me like an adult and not like a child who is going through potty training.” Before I can even formulate the thought, she points to a pin on her shirt. “See this pin?” she says. “It says PP. Know what that stands for?..... Poop police!” She laughs.
This is too much. I grab a message pad next to my bed and start scribbling a message. I hand it to Michael to read aloud. He has been given strict orders by me earlier in the week that he is to stop editing what I say and read whatever I write aloud. He is about to regret agreeing to this.
He reads my message aloud, and his face turns red as he reads. It says, “I am a 34 year old trial attorney. I am not a sixth grader who thinks poop jokes are funny. I am fully capable of understanding how the digestive system works. Please talk to me like an adult.”
The nutritionist looks like she wants to hit me. My mom is shaking her head at me, and Michael is both apologizing to the nutritionist and glaring at me. The nutritionist finishes the rest of her consultation and rushes out of the room. Before she leaves, she mentions that she is Facebook friends with a “select few” of her patients. I don’t expect a friend request from her anytime soon.
A couple hours later (and mercifully after I’ve had a nap), my speech therapist and her assistant come to see me. Even though I am still in a terrible mood and ready to snap at everyone, it is impossible to be angry at my speech therapist. She is extremely funny and likeable. She has brought me an electrolarynx, which is that horrible mechanical device you see on anti-smoking commercials. You hold it to your throat and speak, and it creates a robotic voice. I am horrified by the sound of it and had decided not to use it long before my surgery. My speech therapist knows this, but she has convinced me that I need to learn how to use it just in case of an emergency. If I ever have to call 911, I will need to use the electrolarynx. I have no plans to use it otherwise.
We practice with the device, and even though it is an emotional experience and the sound of myself talking with the robotic voice nauseates me, my speech therapist makes me laugh several times. After she leaves, Michael remarks that it is the first time he has seen me laugh in weeks.
Days pass, and my mood only worsens. “This is more than just sadness about the laryngectomy,” I finally write for one of the physician’s assistants. “I think something’s wrong.” She promises to send in a psychiatrist to consult. Simultaneously, my speech therapist contacts Michael and tells him that she wants a psychiatrist to see me. I am not adjusting as well as I should be after surgery.
The psychiatrist comes by my room later that evening. She sits and asks questions for about an hour. Michael helps translate. She wants to know what year it is, what day of the week it is, who the president is. I have to count backwards from 100 by 7s. My brain feels foggy, and it is harder to think of the answers than it should be. At the end of my appointment, she tells me that she thinks a sudden change in one of my medications is related to my mood changes. Apparently, she checked the computer system and found out that the nurses have only been giving me 25 mg of a drug I used to take 75 mg of. For the last 5 days, I’ve only had one third of my usual dose of a mood-altering drug. She is not surprised that I have been feeling the way I have.
Within days of getting back on the right dosage of medication, I’m feeling much calmer. My walking has improved, and the only barrier to going home is that I am still taking intravenous pain medication. I have to be off of IV pain meds for 48 hours before my discharge in order to prove that my pain can be controlled at home with only oral pain medications.
The soonest date they will consider discharging me is Friday, so 48 hours before that, I tell the nurse to unhook my IV. I will spend the next 48 hours using only oral pain medications so that I can be discharged as soon as possible.
At times, the pain is agonizing, and the nurses keep offering to bring the IV pain meds back to me, but I refuse. I want to go home to Mara. I cannot imagine spending another weekend in the hospital.
Fortunately, I am cleared to be discharged around noon on Friday. Michael calls my dad, and he comes to pick us up from the hospital.
I have been agonizing over how Mara will react to seeing me again. She’s too young to understand where I’ve been or why. I’m worried my appearance is going to scare her. Besides using a walker to walk, my face is still very swollen (although it is better than it was right after surgery). I can’t even look at myself in the mirror. “I look like a monster,” I tell Michael. He says I’m being dramatic.
As I make my way from the parking lot to the apartment we have rented while we are in Texas, I tell myself not to cry if Mara doesn’t want to come near me right away. It will take some time, I think. You don’t look the way she remembers.
The apartment door opens, and Mara and my mom come out. Mara is carrying a helium balloon that says Welcome Home. When she sees me, she grins and comes running towards me. She hands me the balloon and runs back to the door, squealing. She leads me into the apartment and then does what we call Happy Feet, where she jogs her feet and says, “Happy, happy, happy, happy!” It is one of the happiest moments of my life.