I’m finally physically recovering from Friday. Friday morning, I had a double colonoscopy. For those of you who don’t understand, I’ll leave it to you to figure out; the procedure left me bloated, in pain, and constipated for four days. Still, barring the results from a biopsy they did (because there was still some inflammation, but that’s routine in these cases) I’m on track to be put back together around the end of this month or the beginning of next.
I also find it funny that I’m getting ready to go back into the hospital as the Iowa Caucuses and New Hampshire Primary are taking place. In 2004, I went into the hospital the day before Iowa, and got out the day after New Hampshire. I went into the hospital with my preferred candidate the front-runner, and left with his political career over. Oh, well.
During my hospital stay last summer, and in the months since, I’ve found myself playing a spoken word piece by Henry Rollins over and over. If you haven’t heard it, I suggest it. It’s on the “Human Butt” album, and it’s entitled The Adventures Of An Asshole. At just under an hour long it’s not something to put on if you aren’t ready to make a full commitment to listening, but it’s worth it if you find the time.
In this piece, Rollins describes some of his misadventures in Australia, which ended with him punching a guy in the mouth during a show and getting a very bad infection in his hand as a result. In the hospital after an emergency operation, he looks at the large chunk taken out of his hand, and his doctor explains that “we took out all the parts of you that were rotting.”
The piece goes on from there describing, in hilarious detail, Rollins’ experiences on morphine and confronting a problem experienced by every male who has ever been hospitalized, but my mind keeps skipping back to the explanation of his wound. Every day, when I look down at the scar and other consequences of my September operation, I keep thinking “they took out all the parts of me that were rotting.”
At one point during the piece, Rollins asks himself “What have we learned today, Henry?” All he can think of as an answer is “don’t do stupid shit.” It’s a lesson worth taking to heart, because a lot of stupid shit is what put me in the hospital in the first place.
I have suffered (okay, with the test results from Friday it’s official, “had” suffered) from diverticulitis, it turns out, farther back than I care to remember. I can remember similar symptoms going back to at least age 15, and most of those cases have one major thing in common: stress. Stress is a major aggravating factor for diverticulitis, and when it first became acute in 2004, it was the one aggravating factor I didn’t actively try to eliminate from my life. When stressful situations (and there were many) arose, I managed the pain instead of managing the stress. I got very good at managing the pain, too, because it kept coming. When my life crashed and burned in the early part of 2007, I never managed the stress caused by everything that went wrong. As a result, it came back with a vengeance on my 38th birthday and put me back in the hospital.
The doctors took out all the parts of me that were rotting. The parts that my inability to deal with the twists and turns that life brings killed. The parts destroyed by my stubbornness and inability to throw in the towel when needed. The parts that forced me, for the first time in ages, to slow down the hard way.
The experience has gone deeper than one would imagine, deeper than the scalpel could ever hope to cut. It reaggravated the depression I was trying so hard to overcome and that still kicks me in the head when I would least like it. Huge chunks of me, both physically and mentally, have been ripped out. Fortunately, I’ve had good friends and even perfect strangers who have shared with me how much I have meant to them for one reason or another, and come to my support financially as well as emotionally. (Those are people I will have to pay back some day, but just their thoughts have given me some hope.)
Now I’m finally looking at the end of this long process. I’m going to be sewn back together (minus the rotting parts) and will ironically be healthier than I have any time since probably the turn of the century. The question is, will I take the full lesson away with it? Can I really eliminate stress? Can I change the very basic nature of my being? Can I keep other parts of me from rotting, existentially or physically?
What have we learned today? “Don’t do stupid shit.”
Indeed.
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