Low Points, and Room 242

It's really the longing that hurts most after two weeks in the hospital.You see the bright sunlight out your window and the trees rustling in the breeze and you want to be there walking freely. You want a home cooked meal that doesn't taste like hospital sheets, and a few new episodes of a show you'd never watch, just because you cannot bear another rerun. You want to sleep in, and the beeping sound to go away, and to rip all your bandages off for a good hot shower. You want the aching in your veins to stop, and people to quit pricking you with needles of various shapes and sizes, and that drip drip drip, watching antibiotics enter your body, to never drip again. You just want to go back to how things always were during the normal times when you felt good, which of course weren't appreciated because normal never is. It is a sad truth of life we don't value things like good health until it is taken, the same way we tend to neglect good people until they die, leave us, or travel far away. Life in the hospital is wrapped up, suffocated, and constrained by IV chords, and you stay strapped down to a bed in ways beyond the physical.

Things can always be worse. The nurse told me one night I was easy and that patients are often admitted for three months and can't roll over or go to the bathroom by themselves. A few weeks earlier I was shown the general ward of Kenyatta National Hospital, where a number of victims of a recent Al-Shabaab bomb blast in Nairobi were being treated - in a room that resembled an airplane hanger. Illness comes in many forms, and I was lucky that a short series of invasive procedures and a steady flow of drugs, standard from today's perspective, ultimately saved my life. 150 years ago the case may very well have been different, and that is always a powerful thought to let settle. As life slowly and gradually gets normal again, it becomes very clear how unimportant some things are I made very important for far too long. We drive ourselves to the grave, I think, always chasing after something. It is such a trick in life to realize you are free and that you need nothing.

I felt sick the entire drive home on a cool Friday night, with seemingly more questions than answers. One of the worst feelings in the world is looking at your body, or life, and not knowing exactly what troubles it. Without that spout of knowledge, you don't know how to fix it, and we all just want to be fixed when we sit alone and ill, our minds left to run wild. There were a few scary nights in there, up late in the dark sweating and aching, wondering what would happen next. I have little doubt I will sit at a bar in a city where sickness is less extreme and treatment more organised, someday far off in the future, and talk about that time I got meningitis in Africa, realizing that probably made me better, my story more interesting, and my spirit more resilient in the end.