Sunday, May 29, 2016

Scars and mirrors

Her twisted face is mere inches from mine and my ears are ringing from how loud she is screaming inside this small room. Her shrieks are echoing out into the rest of the Emergency Department which has gone eerily silent.  Black eye makeup streaks down her cheeks to mingle with tears and sweat. She is screaming obscenities and commanding me to let her go. The smell of alcohol, dirt and sweat stings my eyes. In the next breath she is screaming, begging ,"please just kill me. Just kill me". I am speaking quietly, calmly down near her ears where I hope she can hear me. " I hear you. You need to try to calm down. We don't want to hurt you. We are trying to help you."  But she is beyond hearing.  She is spitting, kicking and trying to bite my hand that is holding her hand down onto the bed as our staff struggle to put on the locked wrist and ankle restraints without being kicked.  I look down at her slender wrist, see the thin blue veins which are lumpy and scarred from shooting up and then my eyes travel further up to a network of silvery and red horizontal lines, scars from cutting. There are hundreds of them. A small, homemade broken heart tattoo hides on her inner arm. Her eyes are pleading, enraged, defiant and sad all at the same time.

Later, when the medications I have given her have taken effect and she is lying quietly in the darkened room with a warm blanket she whispers to me, "You just don't know.  I have to get out of here. I got kids."  She is barely out of childhood herself, though she looks much older. I imagine if that was one of my children, with a scarred body and shattered mind, strapped to a gurney in four point restraints, strung out and off their meds and so drug addled and drunk they want to die. And I know that I've seen the look in her eyes in my own mirror after I've been drinking.

**********
The gurney rolls up the back ER ramp, surrounded by EMS workers in blue uniforms. On the stretcher is a man a greyish white color that any nurse recognizes immediately as a bad omen.  He looks frail, his skin translucent and clammy. His eyes meet mine with an animal desperation as he vomits cascades of bright red blood into a cheap plastic bucket. I can read what he is asking me without words: "Am I going to die?" I speak to him calmly, recognize the smell of vodka mixed with blood which is a smell that stays in your nostrils long after you've gone home and showered in scalding water. He vomits again, a seemingly endless gush; a startling crimson sea. I start his IV, type and cross for blood transfusion, start hanging IV boluses as I watch his pressure dropping precipitously. I send a tech on the run down to the blood bank.  As the monitors start alarming with a startling cacophony, he grips my wrist with his grey cold fingers and he says "is this it?" And I say, "I don't know. We are going to do everything we can." He is whisked off to the OR to fix his ruptured varices.. veins in his throat that are torturously dilated after years of chronic alcohol use. I survey the wreckage in the room he has vacated.. the trash on the floor, the suction equipment, the empty bags of transfused blood, the air still heavy with fear and vodka and the unmistakable metallic smell of blood. He is a year older than me.

***********
The car screeches up onto the ramp in front of the ER, the doors fling open and a body is tossed out onto the sidewalk which is more like a river since it is pouring rain. I run down with my radio, immediately notice the blue color of the boy lying on the ground, call for help and start CPR. My team arrives, we load and go with me sitting on top of the gurney still doing compressions as we roll through the waiting room, full of wide -eyed back pain sufferers, toddlers needing stitches and miserable flu patients, back through the pneumatic doors to one of resuscitation bays. Everyone does their jobs, we administer narcan and suddenly the dead boy is back. His eyes open, he takes a gasping breath and immediately starts yelling and cussing at me, calling me the cunt who ruined his high. I remind him that he was dead five minutes ago and that we just saved his life. The doc and I calmly explain the need to monitor him for a while in the ER since the heroin he took could cause respiratory depression and death when the meds we gave him wear off.  He tells us to go fuck ourselves, rips the heart monitor off, flings it at me, cusses a few more people out and storms out of the ER, out onto the street as thunder rumbles.

Forty five minutes later we get a call on the EMS radio that they have a priority one overdose en route to us with a 5 minute ETA. They roll through with an intubated patient,  CPR in progress. I see curly wet hair, then peer at his face and recognize the boy who had just left an hour ago. EMS said unknown down time. We work the code for a long time, check with ultrasound for cardiac activity, and finally he's pronounced dead, exactly 2 hours and 24 minutes after I first took his pulse out on a sidewalk in bucketing rain.


***********
I hear a familiar voice from behind the curtain of room 3. I know who it is, even before I go in the room to go assess my latest patient.  He smiles at me as I enter and I check him out. Double amputee, Vietnam vet in the bed, wild grey hair he has covered with an old bandana. He has a raspy cigarette voice and a deep laugh that makes the fluid wave in his distended belly ripple. He is dayglow yellow and smiles with perfect white teeth in his wasted face. His spindly arms are cradling his massively distended belly and he jokes "We've gotta stop meeting like this, Wen."  He goes on to brag to me that last week, when I was off work he came in and they tapped him for 4 liters of fluid. His personal record. His stories are great, his attitude is amazing. Yet his body is failing, his liver is shot and most likely I won't be seeing him much longer. But there is something about him. He talks about the joy he found in sobriety. A joy that sustains him, even when he is obviously dying. I look at him and I think how can he be joking and laughing when he's in so much pain. How can he be telling others about his peace and serenity now that's he's finally sober?



In my gut, deep down, under my neat blue scrubs and name badge that says "RN" on it, under my professionalism there was a voice that I tried to ignore. A voice that was warning me. A quiet voice drowned out by the raging need I felt after shifts like those when I would pull into my driveway in the wee hours. I'd come up the steps with throbbing feet and reach for that glass, hear the glug glug glug of wine that I was gulping before I even had my coat off.  When I was still a young, unjaded nurse, I used to come home and pray and go to bed.... then years later I would tiptoe into my sleeping babies' rooms and kiss their sweet innocent cheeks and breathe a prayer of thanks over them, then lie awake until the call of the alcohol drew me downstairs for a glass or two. But in that last year, I couldn't face their innocence knowing that I was bringing a monster inside me into their rooms. I didn't want to breathe my poison on them.  I felt tainted by what I had seen.. and utterly convinced of what I knew was coming for me. I would sit in my dark kitchen and drink until the faces faded. But they still haunted me the next day when I would wake with a splitting head, queasy stomach and a soul that felt shredded and hollowed out.


***********
My last shift before my last drink.

EMS rolls in with another intubated patient. Eyes fixed and dilated, she's posturing on the gurney, a sure sign of neurological damage. I'm the primary nurse. Rest of the team shows up to help. EMS tells me that she was found unresponsive by her family. Suspected alcohol overdose. Respiratory arrives and we put her on the ventilator and we start multiple IVs. She starts seizing and I yell for meds. Someone brings them and I am hanging them as her family enters the room. 16 year old son acts as spokesman and her two younger daughters, age 10 and 5 hang back with fear in their huge eyes. One of the nurses goes over and speaks to them quietly, assuring them. I speak to her son who tells me that she had been in recovery for alcohol for a year, started dating a new guy who he said was bad news. She decided last night to have "just one more" which turned into him finding her slumped on the floor of the kitchen when he woke up in the morning at 10 am. He wasn't sure when she stopped drinking or how long she had been lying there.
I start focusing on titrating drips as her blood pressure is dropping and she's continuing to have intermittent seizures. I listening to the rhythmic hiss and whoosh of the ventilator breathing for her. Her jaw is slack, her eyes rolling. Her two little girls are crying quietly at her bedside and kiss her arm and hand.  The son takes them out to the waiting room to meet their aunt who has come to take them. I stop focusing on numbers and the medicine for a minute and really look at her. Notice that her necklace is digging into her neck around the ties that are holding her breathing tube in place. I can't loosen it so cut it off and place it in a bag with the clothes we cut off. I wonder what the story is behind it... an angel with a single wing.

Boyfriend arrives, staggering and slurring, yelling at her to wake up and pulling on her tubes and lines. I call security and we all try to calm him down. His eyes are blood red, his hair is wild and nothing we are saying is registering. He keeps grabbing her and crying he's sorry. He turns his eyes to me and towers over me saying " the paramedics told me she was fine. Why did you do to her? Why aren't you helping her." His voice gets louder and he comes closer, grabbing both my arms. I grab his hands and twist away as security steps in and end up dragging him out of the ER.  Her son appears a few minutes later and tells me he called the cops to have the boyfriend arrested because he tried to assault him in the waiting room. I ask him if he's ok and he says in a shaky, shuddery voice, "yeah. We've been through this a lot. I thought she was finally better. I can't believe this is happening. She just kept saying she just wanted one more and then she'd be done for good."

A few hours later, I've taken her to CT and xray and we've discovered that she had aspirated (vomited while unconscious and breathed it into her lungs), had a massive hemorrhagic stroke and most likely an anoxic brain injury. She will probably never wake up. I'm reading the CT results on the computer I've rolled up next to her bed and I look at her. Freckles across her nose, red hair, slender. A few years older than me. She looks like me.  I have a premonition and the hair is standing up on the back of my neck. I shake it off.  I give report to the nurse taking my assignment. I turn in my radio, grab my bag, walk out of the ER and drive home feeling that need. The need.

At home, it's 0300 when I get in the door. I'm shaking. I can't stop thinking. I drink. And I drink some more. As if I can just wipe that memory out of my mind, deny the premonition I felt.  The irony that I was making it come true was lost on me as I just slammed shot after shot.

I stumbled to bed, woke with my alarm, had a rough morning getting the kids to the bus. Fight with my son who was melting down about the seams in his sock, sending him off to school in tears instead of with a hug and less annoying socks.. still seeing her face when I shut my eyes. More drinking. A whole bottle of whiskey. Then darkness. Blearily waking to realize I forgot to get my preschooler off the bus. Squinting with one eye to see to drive when the road looked like four roads. Entering the school office, realizing I was slurring terribly. Bursting into tears and telling some unintelligible story about having the flu and oversleeping my alarm. Alarmed faces of the office ladies. Maybe the real truth was too hard to believe. I was almost falling down drunk at noon and about to drive my five year old home. I have no idea why they let me take her. Another squinty eyed drive up the road. Home. Making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, pretending to be the competent mom who gives her kid lunch after a busy day learning her ABCS. Except I dumped a jar of olives instead of jelly onto her bread. Started over. Opened a second bottle of whiskey. A few more shots since the shame was trying to creep in past my "don't care, nothing can touch me" alcohol fueled bravado.  I remember giving my girl a sandwich and some fruit and then stumbling upstairs to my room and that was it for the next 12 hours.

I remember horrible blips and snapshots of that night. I somehow called my husband in my blackout and told him to come home. I remember him trying to pull me out of the shower and my voice that sounded like someone else's' just crying over and over that I wanted to die. Telling him I'm an alcoholic. I want to die. All those fearsome truths that I'd been skirting around for years. The truth was out. The curtain was whipped back like in Oz and this was the new reality. Around midnight, I sat up in bed, finally able to steady my spinning mind to ask about my kids who I was assured were safe. Looked down at my legs and saw that my kneecap was completely dislocated. I felt nothing. Not a thing. Absolute numbness. Stood up and it popped back in, hobbled to the bathroom, squinting in the light to see the entire right side of my face covered in bruises, my lip split and swollen, my tooth missing, my entire body covered in bruises and aching from falling. I have no idea how I busted my face. Limped back to bed, pulled my covers over my shaking shoulders, feeling ice in the pit of my stomach. And I sat there in the dark and realized that I had two choices: I could ignore it. Chalk it up to a bad shift, a rough week, just a one time mistake. Yes, I'd had blackouts and hurt myself before but never that bad. I could cut back or try moderating again. Or, I could absolutely face the fact that I was going to die if I continued this way. I could choose to surrender to the idea that I simply can never, ever drink again. I could have killed my daughter or myself or someone else. The school could (and should) have called the cops. I could have fractured my skull falling with that much force, could have aspirated and been just like my patient, leaving my three kids crying and never understanding why I left them.

I chose the second. And every day I wake up and choose the second.

And I see these patients with different eyes now. I don't fear them anymore, being terrified to see myself in them, wanting to deny the similarities.  Now I see the commonalities. I feel compassion.  I am able to quietly share, ask questions now that I never would have before. Because I KNOW them. I am them. And they can make that second choice too.

So, I'm like my dayglow yellow man now. I have hope and joy. I am utterly grateful that I was given the chance to walk away, though limping and looking like a hillbilly with one front tooth for a few days. I still have a lot of challenges, a lot of scars. But I have gratitude too. Oceans of gratitude instead of oceans of shame and despair.

Now when I look in the mirror, I can see the lines on my face, the remnants of pain. But I also see a twinkle in my eye.

And there but for the grace of God go I.







Friday, May 27, 2016

Center your power

Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri is a god-forsaken place in the middle of March. It's probably that way in July too, actually.  It's cold in a damp, bone-deep way.  It's barren. There is a lot of horizontal sleet and winds that can knock you backwards.  The whole place is ugly: all barracks and training buildings and dirt and cratered firing ranges where there is no shelter from the constant wind. The only part that might have been beautiful was the woods, but it was winter when I was there, so it was all naked trees and frozen mud and shallow foxholes.

It's where I spent my nine weeks of Army Basic Training.

I vividly remember one morning.  Like every day that wasn't Sunday, we were up and out and in formation at 0500. It was inky dark and freezing. My stomach felt queasy. I was struggling with a cold that I'd had for three weeks. (They call it the crud and everyone gets it. Too much sleep deprivation and living in close quarters, I suppose).  I felt lousy. The temperature was right around 20 degrees and there was a stiff wind that was blowing occasional bands of sleet right into my face.  One of our burly, seemingly non-human drill sergeants announced that in honor of the beginning of week 9, we were going to run to the airfield and back. There was a collective groan from the whole platoon. The airfield and back was a 10 mile run.  Since it was week 9, those of us that had survived that long were in great shape.  But I wasn't feeling it at all.

A little back story: we had started our training with sixty two women in our company. We graduated with six.  Of the 200 men that started, only 110 made it all the way through.  Those numbers launched an investigation that took two years and which ended in multiple dishonorable discharges and a conviction of soldier abuse against the Commander of the company I was in. We were clueless that anything we were experiencing wasn't what everyone experiences when they go through the hellish, "mind and body breaking down and building back up" process that was Basic Training before it became the kinder, gentler version they have now.  We were so exhausted and numb and cut off from the outside world that we just accepted it as reality, put our heads down and pushed through to the end so we could get out of there.  In the end, we endured a lot of things that other soldiers on the same base weren't experiencing and which we later discovered weren't in the Army's training doctrine, but a product of the mind of our ex-special forces commander who had a few screws loose.  It was unorthodox, but I have to admit that it made us tough in every way.  Looking back, surviving that really set me up for success in the Army  So much of my flexibility and ability to endure tough things; problem solving instead of breaking down;  a large part of my personality developed there. I still have my old battered Basic Training Soldier's manual and I had written on the side of it NEVER QUIT. And I never quit anything, until 81 days ago when I quit drinking. 

Ok, back to that dark morning.

I was shivering uncontrollably as we warmed up with some stretches. My drill sergeant stalked past me, stopped and said "Are you cold, Private?" Through chattering teeth, I managed to say, "y-y-y-es, D-d-rill Sergeant."  He looked me directly in the eyes. Though he was wearing shorts and a sweatshirt, he looked perfectly warm and unbothered by the sleet that was dripping into his eyes. He bellowed "Center your power."  And then he walked away.

I had a long ten mile run to think about what that meant, exactly.

And I don't think I really gave it any more thought in the many years that have passed since then. I'm not sure why it came to mind today, but it did. I used to think that it meant being strong no matter what; cultivating a core of strength that you draw from. I thought it meant never ever admitting weakness, ignoring the sleet, pushing through and never admitting defeat.

So, when it came time to finally surrender to my powerlessness over alcohol, to admit defeat and to finally say "I QUIT!!" it meant undoing a way of thinking I have believed was true for my entire adult life.

Mental toughness can't overcome hypothermia or addiction.  I used to believe I could think my way out of any circumstance, use my wits, my smarts to just overcome whatever was in my way. Unfortunately, alcohol didn't get that memo. And so I'm dragging myself up out of the abyss that my life had become and am stepping out into the light.  But I am not doing it alone.

When I think of that phrase, I think of it in terms of community. How community is helping to keep me sober.  The invisible army of other alcoholics that I am meeting on this journey are helping me to center my power, to grow, to challenge my thinking, to reframe external circumstances, to heal the gap between the person I feel I am and the person I became when I drank. To allow my soul to heal from the soul sickness and shame that have made the last few years so very dark.

Instead of drinking to numb my feelings, I am learning to feel them. I am willing to admit when I am weak, when I need help and when I'm freaking out, I can reach out to others who "get" it. They can talk me down, remind me of the good, the privilege of this journey. In giving up one thing: drinking, I get to change the ending to my story. A story that was only going to end in my premature death and an utter waste of life. For "just one more" drink. I am choosing a different ending.

I have the awesome task of rebuilding a life from the wreckage. Some days I am weary, tired of thinking endlessly about my sobriety. It's WORK. It feels like I am unbeaching a whale. But I have the privilege of taking on this challenge in the company of others who are wiser than me, who have had the way paved for them by others who went before them: a gentleman in my online sobriety support group calls it " an endless chain of souls all supporting each other no matter what."

My loneliness when I was drinking was immense and breathtaking and I just drank more when I would start to feel it. In sobriety, I am finding connection, community, and hope. I could never have imagined the life that I'm discovering, when I was in that hole. The changes are immense and the feelings are too.


But I'm finally learning to truly center my power.