Day: July 4, 2013

[This post and the others on this topic was written on paper in fragments or even less – single word prompts for ideas – at the time of the events – and assembled later. It’s taken a while to put things together… not through any particular emotional difficulty but just lacking the energy and willpower to do much in the weeks right after the surgery, in addition to a certain perfectionism with respect to the project which I’ve now managed to finally abandon.]
Third Shift Word: Hermitage
My third shift, the Friday morning shift, I had a slightly pudgy nurse
with a friendly face and a halo of short red curly hair – in Korea this
isn’t as uncommon as you might think, what with hair coloring and
styling and perms and all that. She helped a lot. She was a bit
absent-minded though.
One time, I remember, she detached my breathing tube to clean around the wound there, and she left it lying loose, like a fat, translucent, hissing worm, on my chest, and ended up going away to do something else. It was too early in my stay for me to have the confidence I had later on to lift my arm and place the tube myself – my right arm was utterly immobile, and the range of movement of my left arm seemed limited by the weird holes in my body’s proprioception that I was experiencing. So the tube lay there for some 5 or 10 minutes, while I tried feebly to get my nurse’s attention – anyone’s attention – and point out the situation. I was voiceless, and so unless someone was looking, I had very little I could do to get someone’s attention.
When she finally came back and noticed, she shrugged and put it back in place, saying “sorry.” In fact, I wasn’t in any particular danger, it was just a breathing assist with oxygen, not a breathing replacement. Still, I was deeply alarmed at my sense of helplessness.
Later, toward the end of my stay, I realized I could get a nurse’s attention by holding my breath. This would set off the alarms on the breathing monitor and send someone running quickly. But that came later.
I decided during this morning shift, entrapped in these feelings of helplessness, that this ICU, and this cancer that had put me here, were my hermitage. Why, specifically, would I choose the word and concept of hermitage?
The korean word for cancer happens to be a homonym for the korean word for hermitage (ie. a small hermitage such as Buddhist monks will occupy – not a major monastery but a small mountainside retreat). Both words are the syllable “암” [am]. This time in the ICU was coming to resemble a sort of hermitage. I didn’t have my glasses. I was not allowed my phone. I couldn’t sleep well, not because of pain but because of post-nasal-drip.
My time in the ICU became my 48 hours in the wilderness.
I have always been fascinated by the idea of hermitage. I remember in my “Quaker” phase I would read these little Quaker journals in the meetinghouse library in Mexico City, and there was a series on Christian hermitages, describing different traditions and approaches, everything from Catholic to Finnish Orthodox to Coptic. I remember thinking, Quakers need hermitages, too. And I was then and remain transfixed by the figure of Thoreau (even recognizing that there were senses in which his hermitage at Walden was a “cheat”), or more contemporary writers like Edward Abbey with his Desert Solitaire.
I have often craved and intended hermitage, and there’s a sense in which my “8 hours of solitude a day” requirement is a sort of daily hermitage. The closest I came to true hermitage – the several months living on my uncle Arthur’s land in Alaska in the Fall of 1998, went badly, in retrospect, but it was more because I wasn’t prepared and wasn’t in the right frame of intention to pull it off.
So here, then, in the ICU, I had been gifted with a kind of social hermitage, yet surrounded by dying and suffering people and militaristic nurses.
Here are some pages from my interactions during the 3rd shift – including visits from Dr Ryu and Curt.
The first page is just a journaling effort, and the first entry is from 3rd shift and the second is from 4th shift, q.v.

This includes my visit with Curt.

This seems to be mostly my conversation with Dr Ryu or a surgical intern.

The nurse brought me a radio to keep me entertained.

[This post and the others on this topic was written on paper in fragments or even less – single word prompts for ideas – at the time of the events – and assembled later. It’s taken a while to put things together… not through any particular emotional difficulty but just lacking the energy and willpower to do much in the weeks right after the surgery, in addition to a certain perfectionism with respect to the project which I’ve now managed to finally abandon.]
Second Shift Word: Gratitude
The following shift (my second in the ward) was a night shift: there was a
very accommodating male nurse. He was communicative, competent, friendly, and even handsome, to boot. He frequently was off assisting the other nurses, too, so it was one of my “least attended” shifts. But when he was beside me his efforts were always exactly right.
The nurses in the ICU are hardcore. But they are human, they make mistakes, too. I felt so vulnerable to them, and I felt that it was becoming a sort of human-relations puzzle to solve how to get the best care possible, given how limited my communicative abilities were.
So meditating on how to solve the problem of maximizing my quality-of-care (and really, I was thinking in those terms even in such straits), at some point between my first shift there and my second, I realized that the key is gratitude. Not just felt gratitude, as in a prayer or affirmation, but expressed gratitude.
I began trying to remember to write “고마워요” [thank you] on the corner of each new page of note paper that I was using to communicate my needs, and anytime any nurse did anything, I would point to that word – saying, in effect, thank you for doing your job. Some nurses found it amusing, or perhaps it made them uncomfortable. I’ve realized in retrospect that the ICU nurses have to work very hard to avoid emotional entanglements with their patients – especially in a cancer hospital, many of these patients are dying, and many more are in such great suffering that they are unreachable through human contact.
The sheer volume of human suffering ambient in the large ICU room was constantly palpable – there was moaning, there was crying, there was screaming, there were men yelling like babies, “아파” [it hurts!]. There were doctors rushing around reviving patients who had stopped breathing or who were lapsing into comas.
Yet this little quirk of mine, of pointing at “thank you” and making eye contact with the nurses when possible, proved remarkable. The coldness faded a little bit, and they would take extra steps to make me comfortable, or even strike up “conversations” – me writing in my pad in bad mixtures of Korean and English while they phrased simple questions about my background or situation.
I was being forced to write everthing on sheets of paper – I did not
talk at all during my time in the ICU. I wasn’t able to remember to save
some of the papers from the earlier shifts, but I believe this paper is
from the second shift – it’s me introducing myself to my nurse and
maybe some other nurse or orderly.