Seventeen hours in the ER (emergency room) gives a person plenty of
time to reflect on a life lived. For some, it’s a reckoning they don’t want to
face. For others, it’s a confirmation that, thus far, they’ve avoided the
cruelties of careless living. For me, it was an opportunity to listen carefully
(with no apologies, I might add) and reflect on how others had lived their
lives up until their collision with reality.
Quick backstory here; my friend had contracted shingles in her eye.
Even with the Shingles shot and the booster, she was one of the unlucky four
percent that caught the virus. It was incredibly painful. I was there as her
caregiver, confidant, listener, sounding board and doctor translator.
Sequestered behind half curtains, her in the hospital bed, me in a
chair beside her, I couldn’t help but overhear the conversations between nurse
and patient all around us. This was a regional trauma center at a major
hospital, so it was busy twenty-four seven. As the patients came and went out
of their neighboring cubicles, their dialogue gave me pause and plenty of time
for reflection.
The phrase ‘side effects’ glued itself inside my brain. It came from a
sign on the wall, prominently displaying possible side effects of some
medicines administered. Here came one patient after another, each asked to
review their medical history to the nurse then doctor. For most of the
patients, it was an open admission of poor judgment, unhealthy habits,
unforeseen circumstances, and a hundred thousand other excuses for not living a
healthy life.
The first was fifty-five years old skeleton of a woman. She had had most of her major external body parts replaced, removed, or switched out for titanium. Her voice sounded like she was pushing one hundred and her body wasn’t that far behind. She knew a lot of the nurses there and they shook their heads when they saw her name on the roster again.
A middle-aged man came in, about as strong and robust looking, as any other man seen in the ward. Chest pains brought him in with a history of heart attacks in the family. After a litany of questions, the nurse hit the jackpot. ‘Yes,’ he did drink a lot. Only hard liquor and every day. Might this be the cause of his heart issues. He didn’t know but he sure as hell wasn’t about to stop drinking, he announced. End of that conversation.
Another relic of better times had started smoking at ten years old, continued for the next fifty years but then went cold-turkey and turned to drinking instead. Now her kidneys were shot (or so she was told) was probably diabetic (she didn’t want to get tested), was on her third husband and didn’t know where he was anyway.
Moving my friend and I from the ER to a hospital bed took me away from evesdropping but not observing. Each day, the nurses would take their patients on walks around the front desk. Some were recovering from surgery, others from heart attacks and still others from some debilitating illness that had brought them there in the first place. Each was on the road to recovery, some on the high road, others the low road.
For some, age was the culprit but for others, it was simply life catching up with them. For me and all of them, the dye has pretty much been cast. Healthy living may extend the inevitable for a little longer while unhealthy living is most certain to curtail it one way or another.
Side effects in life are like choices made, decisions confirmed and
lifestyle avenues taken or not taken. The curtain is dropping for all of us.
For some, it seems to be dropping a lot faster than others.
My friend has pretty much recovered. It was a long and tedious process with plenty of Tylenol to ease her painful journey to recovery. They say that once you’ve had the Shingles, you’re more susceptible to a relapse. Hope it doesn’t happen again. But if it does, I’ll be there to help her along that journey again.
Definitely a side effect of love and affection still rock solid after
all these years.
