They placed me in Cunningham Hall, informally known around the University hospital as the “dengue ward.” I didn’t have dengue, but the hospital was filled to overflowing, its capacity overran; I’d heard from a nurse there had been times patients found themselves getting stuck at an ER bed for two straight days.
And so I was, I guess, lucky to get a bed at all, albeit in a public ward, in an air-conditioned hall, and right in a corner that afforded me a bit of privacy in a place that has 18 beds. Getting a private room was out of the question.
I didn’t mind: I figured–between the paroxysms of pain coming from my guts–that I wanted to study people, and perhaps this was a perfect opportunity for that.
I didn’t know if the other patients around me had dengue: the man on the next bed apparently had been suffering from severe pneumonia for some months now, but his diabetes was masking the normal fever that should have been a symptom to his distress. He looked grizzled and his skin was jaundiced but otherwise, he moved about fine. I learned about his condition when he made a quick conference with his doctor one morning, and I was eavesdropping–not for lack of restraint. In that close space, everyone eavesdropped.
By day, the place was teeming with bantays and visitors and nurses and orderlies and the rare doctor making their rounds. I didn’t much like daytime in a hospital, I quickly decided: it was much too noisy, although I had surprised myself by being able to sleep through the noise and the abundance of fluorescent lighting.
Otherwise, sleep was good; it was antidote to the boredom of hospitals.
By night, a comfortable kind of quiet settled down, and only the nurses on duty–a plump girl given to knitted sweaters and a tomboyish one who told little jokes–made the tiniest bits of noise. They’d wake you every four hours or so, to get your vital signs (“Your blood pressure is…,” “Your body temperature is…”), to adjust the drip of your IV, to ask you if you had drank water or peed or pooped since their last query. I always made myself very helpful to these disruptions to my sleep. They marked the hours, they represented things happening in the dullness of fluorescent stillness.
That was easy to do, as I didn’t feel sick at all–although I knew the pain in my stomach had been coated over by the magic of painkillers. I was doubling up in pain when I was wheeled into the ER that first day to be quickly administered to by doctors on duty who apparently used to be my students. (In my mind, I hoped I gave them good grades.) And now I was just biding time, waiting for what organism ailed me to get flushed out, to let me get back as soon as I could to my interrupted life of busy routines.
Again and again later, while lying on my hospital bed prevented from moving too much by the IV that punctured the back of my left hand, I’d watched the dextrose drip, I’d pass the hours, and I’d made myself game to the battery of tests they were giving me. “As long as I’m here,” I had told my doctor, “I might as well get that complete physical exam I don’t ever get to do every year because I’m always busy.”
So now I knew my blood sugar level, my cholesterol level, my triglycerides level, and all the other vital information about our bodies that become paramount once you’ve reached the age of 40.
I don’t always pay attention to my body.
In my head, I am still that 21-year-old traipsing through Southeast Asia on an impulsive backpacking trip. I am still that 28-year-old who lived by the shots of tequila drank, and the number of sunrises to signal the ultimate bed-time.
I still feel very much the same although I know my bones are starting to rub wrong in their joints, and there is a new breathlessness that attends every burst of energy.
I find that I am slower these days, and lack of sleep are harbingers of coming days ruined. I find I can no longer eat pretty much everything I want, like I used to.
It’s a strange thing to behold, growing older. Your body speaks more, and you have to learn to listen.
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Author’s email: ian.casocot@gmail.com
