Charles Coe Twenty-Two Staples

Twenty-Two Staples

charles coe

When you enter a hospital for major surgery the first thing you give up, or rather the first thing taken from you, is the sense of boundaries around your own body. Your clothes and possessions are bundled and shipped off to wherever, you put on a hospital gown, someone wheels you into a big, bright operating room, puts a mask over your face, and while you’re off in Never Never Land they lift the hood and get to work. No one’s asking for your advice or permission.

If you’re fortunate enough to wake up after surgery, people you’ve never seen before and might never see again stroll into your room at random times to poke and prod and stick you with needles and peer at the blinking lights of the machines you’re lashed to. They bring you juice (no solid food of course) and reload your IV antibiotics bag. Just as I opened my eyes a few hours after my operation and thought, “Hey, I’m still alive. How ‘bout that?” the nurse came in to say, “So now we need to put in a catheter.” (“We?”)

“Take a deep breath,” she said, “and let it out slow.” As she did the deed I realized it had been nigh on thirty years since a beautiful young woman had handled that particular appliance. But fortunately even though I was still addlepated by general anesthesia and an IV painkiller drip I managed to push-broom enough brain cells together to realize I should maybe keep that insight to myself.

A couple of days after surgery another nurse strolled in and asked if I’d had a bowel movement and said, “When you do, don’t flush; we need to check it out.” I’d never fielded that particular request before. When the surgeons opened me to rearrange my giblets my system freaked and took a few days to get back up and running. When I finally did my business I felt proud and pleased, like a newly potty-trained toddler. (“I make poo-poo!”) Too bad nobody gave me a Cub Scout medal to pin on my robe . . . .

On the afternoon of Election Day 2020 I’d gotten a ride to Mass General Hospital’s Emergency Room, feeling as though my chest was in a vise that was slowly cranking tighter and tighter. I could hardly breathe. I thought I was having a heart attack but it wasn’t my heart; it was my gallbladder. Which had to come out. Immediately. Nowadays a gallbladder operation’s usually done with the aid of a laparoscope, a long thin tube with a light and camera attached that lets the surgeons poke around your innards and take a look. They make two or three tiny incisions in your abdomen, maybe an inch long. Then snip, snip, ease out your gallbladder like a deflated balloon. It’s usually a minimally invasive procedure. Some people go home the same day, or maybe spend a night at the hospital.

That’s the best-case scenario. But the surgeons discovered my gallbladder wasn’t just filled with stones, it was infected. So they had to open me up old school like a can of tuna fish, otherwise it might have burst. I had an e-coli blood infection that kept me in the

hospital for six days on a liquid plutonium-strength antibiotic drip.

When I awoke after surgery and flipped on the television, voters were still at the polls. My mind drifted back to Election Night 2016, when I’d dared to feel hopeful as early returns rolled in. I’d finally hit the sack late, taking comfort in the fact that Hillary Clinton had a small but clear lead in the popular vote, only to be horrified the next day to learn the antediluvian Electoral College had gone the other way and thrown the election to the Orange Atrocity. This time as I lay in my hospital bed with a belly full of staples staring at the TV, I was again encouraged by early returns but still skeptical—worried which way the electors would go.

Everyone who came into my room paused to glance up at the television. There might have been some workers on my floor who foolishly supported, as some in the medical profession still do, the man whose criminal and cynical handling of the Covid-19 pandemic had caused thousands of unnecessary deaths and put them and their co-workers at risk. But no one who chatted with me during my stay said anything of the sort. Everyone seemed enthusiastic and hopeful at the prospect of That Creature being ejected from the White House.

A few days passed lying on my back glued to the screen watching election commentary until the Hallelujah moment when a nurse breezed in to say, “Good news. You’re graduating from apple juice to Jello,” and a little while later someone from the kitchen showed up with a cup. Maybe I should be embarrassed to admit how happy I was to slurp that first jiggly, lime-green, gelatinous offering. Could it be I’d never shown the staff the respect and appreciation it truly deserved? I did my best to make amends.

That same day a nurse’s aide came to my room, a middle-aged Jamaican woman who asked if I’d like her to wash my face. I hesitated a moment, then she smiled when I gave her the go ahead. She started by gently wiping my forehead with a warm, wet cloth, then moved on to my face and neck. “Water is healing,” she murmured. Would you like me to wash your chest”? She spoke softly and calmly, like a horse whisperer (a “patient whisperer?”) and eventually gave me a complete wipe down from face to waist. She was a shaman easing me into an ancient healing ritual I’d resisted at first but then surrendered to, magically transported to a river’s edge in some African village, surrounded by torches and incense, listening to the sounds of animals wandering about in the darkness beyond the fire’s glow. All my physical discomfort, all my anxiety about the election faded for the moment into the background. Later I heard her murmuring to my roommate on the other side of the curtain, easing him into his own ceremony.

I was getting stronger as the days rolled by. I said goodbye to the catheter and was able to haul myself carefully to the john. I moved from Jello to the glories of baked chicken and mashed potatoes. And Saturday, five days after election day, I lifted my apple juice to toast the television when the talking heads called the election for Biden and Harris. Trump’s Russian pals hadn’t managed to help pull off the steal this time, and Republicans were hopping up and down screaming about “voter fraud,” doing everything but throwing feces like furious chimpanzees. No one who came into my room made the slightest effort to hide their jubilation. Smile lines crinkled above every mask.

The next morning when it was time to go home, I was nervous about surrendering the safety of the hospital cocoon. I’d been well-tended for the last six days, acclimated to a comfortable routine, but I still felt fragile and now I was being sent back out into the World.

There were forms to fill out, and an explanation of release procedures I struggled to keep up with; in my befuddled state it sounded like a lecture on differential calculus. But I got through it and a kind friend picked me up to drive me home.

Those first days were tricky. I live alone and though I have friends and neighbors who shopped and cooked for me, It was a little rough at first. I spent most of the time zoning out on the sofa staring at the tube, listening to music, and talking on the phone. When I had to pee I got up cautiously, afraid that if I moved wrong something might tear loose. An irrational fear maybe, but it didn’t feel like it then.

One time after four or five days at home I was walking from the kitchen to the living room and as soon as I stretched out on the sofa realized I’d left my phone on the kitchen table and forgotten to plug it into the charger. I uttered a word my grade school nuns wouldn’t have liked, got up, headed back to the kitchen and realized halfway down the hall that I’d rolled off the sofa without worrying about my staples. I started taking slow and careful cane-assisted walks to the end of the block and back. I was over the hump.

A few weeks later I was at Mass General once more for the post-surgical follow-up. My surgeon was a stylish, middle-aged Latino gentleman who strolled into the exam room in a sharkskin suit that looked like it would have set me back a couple months’ rent. When he asked how I was doing, he chuckled when I said, “A heck of a lot better than when we met.” Like an elegant mob boss, he stood with folded arms while a colleague picked up a set of pliers and removed the twenty-two staples from my nine-inch scar, which I said reminded me of Highway One snaking along the California coast. He smiled. “Just think of it as your dueling scar. Quite interesting that you earned it on Election Day.”

Interesting, indeed. Like the caregivers on my floor who’d told me how Trump’s handling of the pandemic had made their jobs so difficult, I’d been delighted that he lost the election. But he continues to spout the lie that he was “robbed” and yammers about running again in 2024. Maybe that threat’s just a scam to milk his Trumplodytes for more cash. But the possibility that he might run again and actually win fills me with horror. He’s Yeats’ Rough Beast become flesh, scales glittering in the moonlight, doing everything he can to drag American Democracy down into the sewer. But at least it was a moment to rejoice when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were acknowledged as winners. Lying in bed in my nest of tubes and wires, I took pleasure in knowing his four-year squat in the Oval Office was finally coming to a close. That my body, and The People’s House, both had a diseased organ removed on the same day.