Another Tuesday Night In April

Content warnings: hospitals/medical stuff (including needle mention), asthma/lung stuff, death, near-death experience. 

 

I spent most of Tuesday night/Wednesday morning in the hospital.

 

There's a lot to unpack here, and I'm mostly writing this to sort things out in my brain.

 

On Easter Sunday, we went to the in-laws' place for an Easter meal. This had been planned for a couple of weeks, so we dutifully woke up early to make the drive out. When we arrived, we found that 90% of the family had either had a cold within that past 48 hours or were actively in the throes of one. My husband's sister sounded like she'd been chain-smoking for centuries. If it wasn't for that, we may never have known. Nobody said a single word about being sick. Even the sister said at first that she'd just lost her voice yelling during a hectic card game the night before. Less than five minutes later, she was saying she caught it from her son.

 

Within hours, my husband was showing symptoms. He took it upon himself to sleep in the spare room to spare me. He had a very sore throat and complained of headache and joint pain -- just a regular, annoying cold.

 

Tuesday night, April 7th.

 

I was sitting at the kitchen table playing Core Keeper (I LOVE THIS GAME) and my husband was beside me at his desk, playing Valheim/Helldivers, depending which of our friends on the Discord call needed more help at the moment.

 

I started coughing more than usual around 7:30 or so and my immediate thought was 'oh no, I'm getting that cold too.' But the cough felt different than both my usual chronic cough and the cough I get when I have a cold. It was an abnormally dry, persistent cough that moved absolutely nothing, and it was happening after every. single. breath I took. Not intermittently, not every other breath, every single breath.

 

I noted that that was weird, but kept drinking my tea and kept playing the game. I took shallower breaths to try to avoid triggering the cough, and while that sort of helped, that also meant I was not getting as much oxygen. Focusing on the game became harder and harder, even though I tried to switch to more mindless in-game tasks like gardening. Finally I quit the game and rested my head on the table. Breathing was taking every ounce of my focus and I no longer had enough spare brainpower to hold up my head.

 

I slid to the floor and literally crawled to get my blue inhaler (maybe ten feet away, if that?). I laid on the ground for ten minutes trying to gather enough energy just to shake it. I managed one dose, at 9:30pm. My lungs were burning, like a chemical burn, like there was acid in my chest. I was trying to breathe slowly and calmly to avoid triggering a panic response on top of whatever was already happening.

 

The entire time I lay on that floor with the inhaler in my hand, I kept thinking of the girl who lived in the room next to mine in my freshman year of college. She was a bit of a writer too, energetic and empathetic, with that determined zest for life that many depression survivors have. I remembered reading the news stories that ran after she died of influenza in January 2020. Healthy to dead in eight hours. She had only been married for a few months. She had been so happy for those few months.

 

Was this what influenza felt like? Or was I just overreacting again?

 

My husband asked if I should go to the hospital. I said 'maybe,' and started packing a bag. Phone charger, extra sweaters, extra pair of warm socks, water bottle, my daily meds in case I wasn't home by morning.

 

Around this point, my chest muscles were becoming fatigued. After every exhalation my muscles were so exhausted that I didn't have the physical energy to trigger an inhalation. I would sit there in a fully exhaled state for a full 5-8 seconds before my automatic nervous system would kick in and force an inhalation. This was happening every breath. I considered calling an ambulance to transport me due to the fatigue, but the hospital was less than ten minutes away, and the decision to go to the hospital had given me enough adrenaline to stand. I drove myself.

 

By then it was 10:15. There were exactly three other cars in the entire parking lot. The place looked abandoned. I parked as close to the entrance as I legally could, shuffled very slowly to the door (wondering the entire time if I was overreacting by coming here), pressed the 'night call' button, and lurched through the automatic doors into a dark and completely deserted emergency room. A nurse appeared at a door to the side.

 

"Are you here as a patient?" she asked. I had no breath left to respond, so I just nodded. She beckoned me into the room behind her and got me registered and triaged, then led me straight into a room.

 

I fully expected them to do bloodwork and 'diagnose' me with anemia, the way every other doctor in the country has for sixteen years. But no needle appeared. The nurse listened to my chest in several places with a stethoscope, then the doctor came in and did the same thing. He quickly formed the opinion that I had a virus, and I feared I was going to be sent home to struggle, but I was not officially released. The doctor swabbed my nose for a COVID test, then left. After some interval of time (I was so focused on breathing that I didn't track how long), the nurse returned and deposited a pile of inhalers and a cup of water on my little side table.

 

It was then that I learned I was having a legitimate asthma attack.

 

She gave me a spacer and careful instructions on how many doses to take of each inhaler, then brought me a cup of applesauce with a Reactine and a Prednisone crushed and stirred into it (because I can't swallow pills). She returned yet again with a needle -- not for bloodwork, but to inject Toradol. I tried to argue that the pain wasn't that bad and probably a standard Advil would suffice, but I did not officially refuse so she went ahead and gave it to me.

I took all the inhalers as instructed, then got the medication slurry down (Prednisone tastes awful, even in applesauce).

 

Then... nothing, for a very long time. I drifted in and out of sleep, wrapped in all the sweaters I'd brought with me. The pain in my joints and my chest did ease up, a little.

 

Sometime around 1:00am, the nurse poked her head in to ask how I was feeling. I asked what exactly we were waiting for, and she said the doctor wanted to keep me for observation for a few hours.

 

That felt strangely validating. It meant they were actually worried about my condition and didn't feel safe just handing me a prescription and sending me back home. Content with their level of concern, I texted my husband an update and drifted back to sleep... no easy feat on such a hard bed.

 

Around 2am the nurse went off shift and was replaced. Shortly after, the doctor came in and gave me the option to stay the night or go home and rest there. As much as I wanted to ask to stay the night, the bed was so hard and the burning in my lungs had indeed gone away. He asked how far of a drive it was. I told him not even ten minutes. He asked if I felt safe to drive that far. I said yes (after all, I had driven to the hospital in far worse shape). He then gave me a run-down.

 

The COVID swab would not get back for testing until late the next day (there are no testing facilities in this region; all specimens are picked up daily and trucked in to the capital city some 3-4 hours away for actual testing). His educated guess was that I had a viral infection, so he prescribed three more days of Prednisone. This as-yet-unnamed infection had triggered an asthma attack, so he directed me to keep the inhalers I had already taken -- two puffs of one twice per day and two puffs of the other one every 4-6 hours as needed. They would contact me with the results of the test once they had it, if it was COVID or influenza, I might be asked to return for further treatment. (Personal aside: I don't think it's COVID, as I've had it twice already and both times it presented like strep throat. This does not line up at ALL with my experience this week. But maybe a different version would cause different symptoms?)

I packed my colourful collection of new inhalers and went home.

 

The next day (yesterday) I was tired but feeling surprisingly good, considering. I took all the inhalers as directed and filled my prescription. My boss had already found someone to cover all my shifts for the week and told me to focus on resting.

 

I thought a lot yesterday about my cousin. Playing with her siblings at the playground across the street one Tuesday evening at 7:30, dead in an ER bed by 10pm. Tuesday nights were tainted for years following that one. Tuesday nights in April were the worst of all. And here I was fighting the same monster that killed her eleven years less three weeks before.

 

The losses echo in my head. Eight hours to dead. Three hours to dead. Healthy to ER in three hours. It seems hours aren't really that long, and yet within each one hangs an entire life in suspension. When lungs hit a wall, they hit it hard and fast. Somehow Brittney lived like this every day for 22 whole years.

Today I feel measurably worse than yesterday. I've set a timer for the 4-hour inhaler and am taking it EXACTLY every four hours (not seeing if I can stretch it to five or six hours), but I'm not sure it's helping as much anymore. I am considering going back to the ER. The burning has not returned, and the cough is not quite every single breath yet, but my chest muscles are getting fatigued again and there is a distinct sense of pressure. At what point do you go to the hospital? How close was I to death on Tuesday night, really? Should I have gone sooner? How bad is too bad?

 

I don't feel that this will be my last post on here, however life is only dealt out to us in hourly doses and none of us really knows how many doses we have left.

 

If it is, thank you for being here. Remember me as a quiet courageous person who felt whole while writing and dancing, who loved her husband, her friends, and her family dearly, who could do nothing but rely on the scandalous grace of God (as she was not capable of earning His favour). Play some Daniel Amos or White Heart and dance for me. Maybe learn some choruses from the Nachmo Alphabet project.

 

If it is not, then I look forward to writing in this composition window again soon.

In the meantime:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMgFRTfeGYI

 

 

 

 

(Don't think I wasn't tempted to do a Rick Roll there.) 

Nine Years / Yesterday

Nine years ago my cousin, age nine, drew her final tortured breaths into burning lungs.

 

This year marks the epicentre. She has now been gone as long as she was here.

 

It was about 9.45pm, with the last gasps of a golden sunlight running lazily across the wooden floor when my mother hung up the phone and made the pronouncement of death to me.

 

My cousin left us on the coattails of the sun as it dipped away from us into space. Every year as the days lengthen, so does my dread... more daylight to carry my loved ones away.

It still feels as if I'm sitting there on that chair in my parents' dining room. It's been nine years of sitting on that chair.

I've graduated college. I've gotten married. I've moved multiple times. I've rewritten a literal novel. I'm still sitting in that chair at my parents' house. I'm still seeing the golden sunlight take my cousin away. I can still see her face on the Skype call the last time I saw her at Easter -- you know, the holiday where we celebrate Jesus' resurrection and talk about how He conquered death.

She had two weeks of breaths left in her and none of us knew. My uncle, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer eight months before and had already outlived his prognosis by Valentine's Day, had another four years of breaths in his lungs. Yet somehow this lively, spirited little girl running around only had two weeks of air left and none of us knew.

April Saturday

Saturday morning.

My asthma is acting up the worst I think it ever has. I've doubled my meds for the last two days (as my doctor advised), but I still feel like an elephant is sitting on my chest and I'm breathing through a straw. It has not escaped my attention that the anniversary of my cousin's death from this same disease is this coming Friday.

At one time (late college), I would have welcomed this -- oncoming death? No more dealing with the world and all its neurotypical BS? Sign me up.

But now, I sit on my couch with a half-finished painting beside me, half a rewritten novel in front of me, and a crochet project that's almost done nearby, and now I think, I can't go now... I'll never see how these turn out.

The painting in particular stands out to me. I really don't like how it looks so far. I would consider it the first failure of my fledgling watercolour hobby. But I want to finish it, to see if maybe the finished project doesn't look so bad after all. My husband likes it so far and knew what it was without me having to explain it, so it's at least recognisable. If I die now, I will never know if it'll turn out all right in the end.

The novel... there was a time when I would have been okay leaving it unfinished. I made several attempts on my life between drafting it and now. But now I'm around the halfway point of a proper rewrite, and I'm invested. I want to know that I can finish it, even if the 'final' rewrite still needs some touching up. I want to send this out to beta readers. I want to send this to an editor. I want to publish it. I want other people to get invested in this story too.

The crochet project is a small one. I've made two others like it this week. But I used less stitches and a thinner yarn for this one, and I want to see how the final product changes with those variables altered.

I'm still stuck in the desert with no real hope of getting out on the horizon, and it's still beyond my ability to explain just how suffocating it is to wake up to this drab, soul-draining view every morning of my life. But if I can still be creative here, then I can be creative anywhere. Right now my main goal is to fill this dead brown place with colour -- and given how vast and stubbornly brown this desert is, that means I have a LOT of work to do.

So I have to finish this painting, this novel, this crochet project. And that means I have to take care of my health -- something I've never properly done before.

Music Day - A Briefing For The Ascent

Two years ago today my cousin stopped breathing. And she never started again.

A lot of bitterness and anger has marked the past two years. The death of a child, even if it's not your own, changes you -- permanently. And when that child's death is at the end of four hard months of intense academics and other assorted family issues AND the death of a very close friend, it can break you. I am only just beginning to actually process what happened to my cousin. I've spent the past two years working on the backlog of all the crap that happened before her final asthma attack.

But in recent weeks, I have finally begun to approach that date -- 28 April 2015. Thinking about this is one of the hardest things I have ever experienced. Even as I type this, that date and what it means threaten -- in a very real way -- to destroy me.

For two years I have screamed at the empty blue sky, screaming for God to answer me -- where were You that night? Why didn't You hear us? Doesn't our love for her mean anything to You? And if You couldn't keep her here with us, couldn't You at least comfort us in her absence? I have heard largely nothing -- not from God.

But He has created and sent us an artist, a man by the name of Terry Scott Taylor, a man who himself endured loss -- but who was also given peace in the midst of the loss and a talent for songwriting to express the intensity of the emotions.

This man, this artist, wrote a beautiful song of release in 1987, and it appeared on his second solo album -- the second solo album born out of terrible loss. The first song, the title track, began with the journey between the two worlds:

Take a burning spear and the Saviour's promise
Ride a horse of air through the burning forest
With our Father's faith and a child's wonder
Down the halls of grace -- by His mercy go under
It will seem so sudden
Yes, but through God's will
The season will dream and time will stand still...

And it was so sudden -- how suddenly one missed breath can become two, three, four... and eventually beyond the hope of starting again. The horse may be made of air, and so was her life -- take the air away and it's gone. To say death is a mercy -- well, that's a matter of perspective. I am still too bitter about this to comment on it, although I suppose for her at the moment, it probably was. But time does stand still -- on both sides of eternity. In many ways I am still -- two years later and in another province -- sitting stunned in a chair at the kitchen table, feeling my heart shatter into a thousand cold pieces without a sound.

Close your eyes and rest secure
Your soul is safe, your body sure...

'Your body sure' -- even as it turns against you, even as it starves you of the oxygen it needs. Christianity teaches that the body will rise again at the last day, and this is what Taylor is referencing here, but it still sends a twinge of something through me -- irony, perhaps.

But the part that broke me the other day was the next line:

He that loves you is He that keeps
The One that guards you never slumbers, never sleeps...

When I last listened to this song, once again begging God for peace, if not answers, Where were You? Did You ignore us? this line hit me: He was not sleeping. He was carrying her -- carrying her beyond the wall of sleep, beyond the stars. Away from us.

I don't know how I feel about that. Yes, she is safe in His arms. But she is not here.

It will seem so sudden, but you will laugh as you run
You will wash in the river, you will shine in the Son...

And yes, she is laughing, and running, breathing freely. But what of the rest of us, whose every breath is shot through with pain from the sharp shards of a shattered heart? What of us, the broken hearts in waiting?

I don't know. The song doesn't address that. Rather, it takes a posture of yearning but contentment -- waiting for the reunion.

Title: A Briefing For The Ascent
Artist: Terry Scott Taylor
Album: A Briefing For The Ascent
Year: 1987
Label: Frontline Records
iTunes here; YouTube here.
Artist Patreon page here.

Even the instrumentation is light and airy, floating up, up, beyond our reach, with her and her Guard -- gentle acoustic guitar, mellow steel guitar, open drums, and the lightest of keyboard touches. It's heart-wrenching and soothing. One of the greatest songs Terry Scott Taylor has written to date.

Kyrie - Communication In Art (A Ramble)

I can't get over Kyrie.

For those who don't know, Kyrie is the name of my most recent novel, written November 2014. It's still in rough draft form, but I've reread it every three weeks since I finished it.

It was my first real foray into literary fiction (though I didn't realise at the time that that's what I was writing). Usually my novels are pretty plot-driven (get back to 'your' time before the plague kills you, destroy the magical jewel in the Red Cave before an entire civilisation dies, find your kidnapped wife before you go crazy with loneliness, that sort of thing), but in Kyrie, the plot mostly centered on the development of a relationship. When I wrote Kyrie, I was giving a lot of thought to the concept of being an artist -- being that weird 'unambitious' relative that everybody pretends doesn't exist, trying to distill truth and beauty into a medium of choice in a world that increasingly despises truth and beauty. And so the character Kyrie spent a lot of the book working out those same questions that I had, with the help of the book's first-person narrator, also a performing artist.

Spoiler alert: Kyrie dies before all of the questions are resolved. And that leaves her friend not only taking up the mantle of her unanswered questions, it leaves him with additional questions of his own regarding this almost-ethereal artist friend that seemed a step removed even from his world: questions about what she really knew, understood, and saw that she hadn't yet been able to communicate, as well as questions about the nature of her death (he's not convinced her death was a complete accident).

It's eerie now to think that I wrote Kyrie before my friend died (of lung failure), before my cousin died (of an asthma attack), before half my extended family died (of divorce). Kyrie's backstory involves a family whose harsh opinions she's actively trying to escape (how much do I want to escape the desolate landscape formerly known as family gatherings?) and Kyrie herself dies of an asthma attack. Again, I wrote Kyrie's death before 2015, with all the hell it would bring, dawned.

And maybe that's another part of why the writer's block is SO strong. If I write something 'bad,' in which the characters die or their families are torn to pieces... what if it actually happens in real life? I know that's pretty much impossible and the fact that Kyrie died of lung failure and then so did my friend and cousin is probably a coincidence... but when my cousin died I realised this stuff happens in real life. Real people die, and you can't get them back. Looking back, I think my treatment of Kyrie's friend's grief was actually pretty true-to-life, but to have it written in words somehow cheapens the depth of it. And here we come back to communication, truth, and beauty (not that we were actually there, come to think of it, but this is a ramble-post so let's roll with it). As a writer, how can I communicate the depths of this kind of hellish grief without cheapening it? How do I tune the phrases, the mood, the character's voice to give the proper amount of weight to it without swinging into melodramatic territory?