Nightmare
I recently had a nightmare come true. I have discovered that being confronted with the reality of a nightmare: “you have cancer,” for example, is nothing like the nagging anxieties that accompany a long-running terror. I suspect it is one thing to be confronted by an insoluble nightmare: “your beloved dog is dead” and quite another to face a potentially-soluble one: “you need to fight off a treatable but deadly disease.” My experience with the latter has been that condensing diffuse dread into a defined challenge transforms an emotional quagmire into a task. Once the rational, purpose-driven, task-accomplishment frame of mind takes over, it is harder (but not impossible) to be terrified into quivering impotence.
Other times, as in the case of long-feared social confrontations, the reality occasionally turns out to fall far short of one one’s expectations. In my Passover update I described the “utter terror” I experience when I imagine the hoses of my catheter might “get caught on something and the catheter will be ripped out of my arm. It runs… into the vena cava (the big vein that brings blood to the heart)… I have a recurring waking nightmare where it gets torn out and I bleed out or lose an arm or something. I… have learned to sleep without really sleeping…”
On Sunday night, I was working on a final exam from my first semester of graduate school (I was admitted to the hospital on the last day of final exams in December). I was offered an A- but allowed to do additional work to make a run at a possible A. That they even made this offer says a lot about the kindness and character of my graduate program and its faculty/staff. Those of you who know me well will be unsurprised to learn that I felt compelled to pursue the higher grade. You will also be unsurprised that a) when my family arrived at my apartment in mid-hospital stay, it looked like a hand grenade had exploded inside a small International Relations library and therefore b) all of my reading materials for the exam had been filed away neatly (needless to say, untraceably) and c) in my typically ADD-perfectionist way, I stayed up until the very last possible moment working on the exam.
I fell asleep around 7AM and around noon, I leaned over the side of my bed and saw a smallish puddle of red liquid. Lest you think I am some combination of paranoid and intelligent, I saw this puddle and thought “hmm, that looks like it might be blood.” I then tried to inspect it more closely and tumbled out of bed, over my shoulder, flat onto my ass. I managed to miss most of the blood-like substance, at least. My awkward gymnastics also convinced me that I was not noticeably injured. I could not find a wound, and did not feel any pain, so I concluded that the blood did not come from me: a wounded victim of Anastasia’s mouse-hunting, a bloody nose (my mom’s nose, obviously), or something… my best defense is that I was very tired and less than 100% functional.
About two hours later, I was feeling a little better, and ready to shower. When I took off my shirt, I saw my catheter nightmare come to life.
2 months ago