A Lack of Leave

People hate doctors because they make you sit in a little white room, sipping on a cold spiced latte, knowing it will never taste the same again. The Doctor’s lips are moving, but my world has gone mute. Maybe it’s a lump or something in the bloodwork. Maybe a simple procedure turned anything but. Regardless, in a moment your life shatters, the reality you didn’t even know you were leaning on continuing no longer exists. Your life is flung from a cliff like a leaf from a tree, blowing aimlessly at the mercy of the wind as you try to figure out how to land. Those stupid words “There’s been an accident,” or “We found something,” gut you. They tear your heart out, and make me wonder what type of sick assholes are afraid of public speaking, when medical emergencies exist. 

 Guilt pumps through your veins as every missed workout and late-night snack come into stark focus. Those times your will power failed you, because you didn’t care enough to assert it, is a sucker punch from existence as time laughs at you. Those moments when your conscience was taking a siesta become an internal movie of failure. 

Every guilty mistake combines with dread in a cocktail of despair that you want to send back, but has already been drunk. The die is cast, the money spent, and you are just along for the ride. Maybe you curse your luck or any deity that will listen. Maybe you wonder why me, as you try to come to terms with the fact that you are not the exception to the rule. You aren’t immortal. Even if some form of consciousness is, your body will fail you and in this moment you can’t understand that blessing and what the true burden of immortality, a place without meaningful change, can be. 

However, when those words are delivered about someone else, an unfamiliar weight is laid on your shoulders. I heard the simple: “There was an accident,” delivered from a doctor, not an officer, on a Tuesday morning. An officer at your front door delivers finality. The doctor prescribes the danger of hope. 

When an accident happens, the chasm created in your reality is so vast that you can’t see the edges. It swallows the perceived safety net of routine that you unconsciously lean on. Time becomes as inconsequential as what your coworker is having for lunch. You meander in an existence of uncertainty, fumbling for a life vest like a parent on their first night home alone with their newborn. 

When this happens, you just do. Sometimes it’s productive. You talk to doctors, get information, change bedpans, and do the most important task of being there. However, it’s just as possible to fall into muck, that makes the simplest things impossible. Choosing a meal becomes as daunting as Mount Everest. Before this I never knew what it meant to exist, not live, but exist. In the hours after, the doctor told me, to the days spent by the bedside. Waiting for a surgery to start, then finish. Seeing your loved one struggle to survive while you punish yourself for humoring thoughts about your own care. Beating yourself up for every errant, unfocused thought that takes you away from caring for your loved one. You aren’t living or rebuilding your life in these moments. You are existing, waiting for the next shoe to drop. Meandering until a light comes or the last moment arrives. 

That pesky thing called time doesn’t stop, though. The same thing that brings nibbles of hope and healing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The rest of the world doesn’t exist in an all-encompassing fog. This life shattering incident is a few weeks in April and May for the medical team. It is a job for the therapists. An occupation for the social workers and chaplains who, after they pick through your pieces, go back to their own lives waiting to be shattered like an egg dropped from a wall. 

The world outside doesn’t notice your plight. Your emergency holds the same weight as a banana becoming too ripe. The world clicks and ticks. Movers and shakers move and shake. Football games still happen and people commute to work as you ignorantly walk through porridge, fighting for every breath and coherent thought. People have cook outs while you take a crash course in disease from YouTube and doctors couching their speech in legalese and the illusion of choice. That is until the bills rip you back into the world.

That’s how our society slaps you back into reality. Bereavement leave is a joke. Three days to grieve a lifetime of memories is insulting, but a bounty when compared to paid family leave. Unless you are part of the lucky few, being stuck inside these walls means that the trickle of money coming in has instead become a flood of expenses going out.

That is your burden. To build a life raft during a storm at sea. The sick are sick. It’s impossible to put a price on a cure, because while you are in the trenches, you are uniquely positioned to know that you would give every penny for another moment of life. What’s the price for hope? An indefinite amount of moments?

When you should focus on healing yourself and your loved one, you’re not. It’s calls, and being put on hold. Credit explodes as savings blink away, while you fight an AI that processes a number that is your loved one. It is doctors, and work. Weeks later, you’re trying to place the first brick on a foundation of ash that was your life. Even though you should take some time for yourself, you barely have time to eat, let alone sleep. How are you supposed to ask for help when you don’t have an instant to take stock of your surroundings? How can you ask for help when you don’t even know the day of the week? When you really want to scream how?!?

But time heals all wounds. That it’s darkest before the dawn is crap. A slogan thrown out by those wanting to inspire hope or bring metaphor to the muck of the dystopian part of life. Too often it doesn’t come, because even once is too many. A pre-snuffed life leaves ruin in its wake. Laughter isn’t a medicine as much a distraction. Surprised your diaphragm could gurgle and your body can still wiggle in that way. You laugh when you are so beaten down that you want the experts to make a choice instead of your hours of fog induced googling. Time heals all wounds holds true, because practice is the mother of learning. 

A new existence can swallow you whole. Being a caretaker can and is, in many ways, all-consuming. However, even if you don’t acknowledge it, you get better as you practice your new life every day. 

 Bills get paid. You get learn the dance of insurance and hospitals. As you train, the idea of rebuilding your life disappears as a new one emerges. As the pain culls, new days full of simple wonders rush into your life and, like a child discovering simple things, life is worth living again. Because it’s not that you could rebuild what you had, instead you live anew. You realize life is always changing. When you were a child, in school, and before this you were living a life couched in infinite mornings of constant change. No matter how similar, each morning is new and you can’t go back. No matter the accident or the hurdle, the only movement is forward into something different and new. Sometimes you gain a taste back for that spiced- 

“Mom, your tea’s ready.”

I switched to tea.