The Hospital Bed
The first month of my 19th year of life was spent sedated and unconscious in an ICU bed in Cheyenne Regional Medical Center. I had been in a car wreck and it was a miracle that I was alive.
To put me back together took a number of surgeries.
The trauma surgeon had inserted a titanium rods through an incision in my hip for my broken femur to heal around. My neck was immobilized in a brace to protect my 7th cervical vertebra, which had been fractured. I was lucky I hadn’t been paralyzed. Through a hole in the front of the brace snaked the tracheotomy tube, inserted to ensure I could breath because my mouth had been wired completely shut, by the Maxillofacial surgeon (who repaired the broken bones in my face), because they didn’t want to risk me suffocating. Wired shut because my jaw had been broken, along with every other bone in my face.
And then there was my head, shaved only partially in the hurry to get to my brain to relieve the swelling that came from the impact of my head against the cement. My mom braided the hair they left on the right side of my head because it was getting so tangled until they finally agreed to shave it off too.
It wasn’t a pretty picture.
When you’re injured like that they sedate you, drugging you to avoid feeling the pain, pacifying your mind so your body can rest, and adding in pinch of medicine to help your brain mask, to forget, the traumatic experience that got you there in the first place.
I don’t have many memories from my time of being sedated. All I have are little vignettes, like a scene that fades in, a hazy memory of some past moment with muffled sounds and unclear sights. They were memories of opening my heavy eyelids to see a wall of flowers in front of me. Waking up and sensing a hand holding mine, and seeing one of my best friends smiling and saying “well hello you”. The feeling of waking and lifting to get out of bed…but not being able to and not understanding why, before fading back into the darkness.
It turns out that no matter your past strength, your muscles atrophy when you’re lying flat for weeks on end. That the effort to lift up even an arm becomes a task that requires focused, struggling, effort. And I wasn’t technically allowed to do any of that — I’m told they strapped me down to the bed at times because I was so insistent that I could just get up and get on with life!
It was like living in the haze of a bad dream — where you can make out the ghost of a life happening around you but you’re not able to participate in it. Moments waft by in front of you but you can’t grasp on and be in them. Where you wake up and you can’t actually tell if it’s a day different than the last or the same one dragged long and thin through the haze.
It was its own purgatory — relentless, confusing, and with no end in sight.
I remember feeling confused. I was frustrated. I just wanted to be able to find my place in the story again, to gain solid footing instead of floating like a cloud in the sky. It was its own purgatory — relentless, confusing, and with no end in sight. Subconsciously I knew that I had been in an accident and badly hurt. But without any clarity of consciousness all I felt was frustration — I wanted to scream out but my mouth was literally wired shut.
Imagine. To wake up and be stuck like that. Suspended between the life you had and a foggy reconstruction of the life you were now living. A life you never thought you’d experience and an experience so far from living that you couldn’t actually participate in. Having moments of consciousness and hoping that you’d get out of the maze and be yourself again. Having no idea if you’d ever escape the purgatory of your own half-conscious existence…
