January 30, 2007

• My life, a midnight update in spurts

   

   

   

  Life came to a grinding halt last week, knocking me full in the stomach with a warning in the form of a swollen belly and incredible pain. It was then that I found out that it's not just UHS nurses that automatically assume every malady is pregnancy - we think you could be pregnant. no, you morons, it's swelling right below my rib cage. unless i'm about to have a child out of my diaphragm. Two miserable hours later, an asian female nurse more belligerent than my cranky pissy self (gotta love those asian females) made me swallow a litre of contrast in preparation for the ever so pleasant CT scan, which in doctorspeak really means they don't know what the heck is wrong with you. Given that my stomach was already swollen, the pain at this point was so intense they decided to just put me on morphine.

  Contrary to pop science and WWII movies, intravenous morphine is not "the good stuff." It courses through your veins with the alien coolness of harsh chemicals, ending up in the course of two excruciating seconds at the base of your brain. After that, all you get is a wave of nausea, which I suppose takes your mind off the pain because you are now entirely concentrated on not throwing up. All I could think was, god...this is what it feels like to be on chemotherapy.

  Anyway, the official physician prognosis was this: my insomnia was no longer an interesting side-story to be blogged about, but could hold life-threatening complications. First of all, claimed the ridiculously attractive blonde resident named Anja (who looked so much like a soap opera doctor I found it almost difficult to take her seriously) peritonitis usually results from surgical complications. Getting it, having never been cut up, implies that you are either a neonate or ancient, or have the immune system of either.

   

  So this is my quest to cure my insomnia. In recent weeks it's really become pathological; I have no reason to stay up at all other than just to stay up, repeatedly typing www.gmail.com www.xanga.com www.thefacebook.com over and over again, never getting past the front page but just closing and reopening and closing and reopening. Nor am I depressed or anything - I have a magical job where somehow they trust 20-somethings to help make decisions for CEOs and COOs, a miraculous apartment a 10 minute cab ride from just about anywhere you'd want to be, lovely roommates, loving family, sweet and loyal friends. I guess I could always lose a bit more weight or eat at one more nice restaurant, but for the first time in my life there is nothing material or immaterial that I covet or desire (in fact, I long to give some of it away.) I'm not sitting anywhere brooding. I simply have insomnia. It's bizarre, I but I do this strange thing, night after night, opening and reopening and opening and reopening, not really knowing what I am waiting for or when it might appear.

  ***

  It's kind of crazy how things change when you're older. Gone are the snowglobe days when "being sick" meant a mild cough, pleasant fever, nothing chicken soup from your mother couldn't cure. In the recent three times I've "been sick" it's been a rush to the ER and next thing I know it's hurry and put the I.V. in and fix everything can't you see I'm dying here. Gone are the days when "being sick" was actually a little bit fun, a gentle respite and the penultimate excuse note from life. When I was lying in the hospital bed next to some groaning gangster with a broken hip who had just had a catheter placed I thought to myself ok, honestly, never again.

  According to my roommate Christine we can't sleep often because there are things in our minds that are bouncing around somewhere in the deep corridors whose doors we shut while taking care of each day's mundane tasks. There has always been things inside my mind bouncing around a mile a minute so I suppose this is the year it finally, like an overflowing ball pit, started spilling multicolored moieties of mental ADD into that previously undisturbed pool of serenity known as the unconscious. I guess the only cure is to pour it out, candid by embarrassingly candid ounce, until I can sleep again.

   

   

   

   

  • 2:35 am
  • 4 Comments