THE WORLD « In Which It Was Due To Drugs And Denial »
Tuesday, May 20, 2014 at 10:49AM 
The Bubble
by MOLLY CAMERON
You might find this hard to believe, but there are actually some upsides to living in a hospital room while recovering from major injuries. Here are a few examples:
1) Much like being on an airplane, you can choose food from a small menu and get it delivered right to your lap. Plus: free, unlimited water in your very own pink plastic pitcher!
2) Your very own TV. Sure, it might be limited to only the very basic channels, but even PBS nature shows can be fascinating under the influence of heavy painkillers. Which leads me to…
3) Unlimited painkillers straight into your vein at the click of a button. Well, not totally unlimited, since you can only release so much over a certain time period. After you hit that limit it’s the equivalent of pressing the "door close" button on an elevator over and over - pointless, but still satisfying.
4) Unlimited naps. Even if people come to visit you, it’s perfectly acceptable to close your eyes and take a nap while they’re talking because you’ve been under a lot of stress and they understand.
5) Weight loss. It’s totally possible to lose eight pounds in, like, ten days! Without moving! Heavy painkillers are very effective appetite suppressants. And it’s ultimately good to have less food in you because heavy painkillers also make you completely constipated.
6) Never having to get dressed. Occasionally a nurse might find it necessary to change your wispy hospital gown after giving you a sponge bath, but for the most part you’re just going completely commando under a thin layer of green cotton.
And that’s about as far as I can stretch the positives. The rest is pretty terrible — because, of course, you’re in a hospital, not a luxury hotel — but I found ways to get used to it.
I checked into St. Vincent’s in the West Village thanks to misunderstanding between a firetruck and a Chevy Suburban. It was October of 2006 and I had just moved to New York City from a tiny town in New Hampshire, fulfilling a lifelong dream. To say “moved” is really stretching the truth, since I was sleeping on a futon in a friend’s living room and the only job I had found was a part-time reception gig at a small theater company. But like most people who find themselves moving to New York, I was pushed by my own naive dreams and the allure of a city where I could “make it.”
That one particular grey October afternoon, as I unknowingly strode towards something terrifying, I was hungover. My friends had a fresh, young theater company — as so many twenty-something New Yorkers do — and the night before I had helped them with the opening night of a set of short plays. It was the kind of carefree celebration that comes easily when you're making art with your best friends and feeling on top of the world because you haven't had enough rejection to be cynical yet. I ate a lot of cake - well, specifically, a lot of frosting - and drank a lot of cheap white wine. It was glorious until that next grey day.
So when I strode down the sidewalk of East 8th St, I was enjoying that slightly-chilled early autumn on my face like a dog on the back of a Jeep. I was refreshed, I was confident, I was in New York Fucking City. And then I heard a siren and I looked up. And then a big vehicle was flying through the air, like something out of an action movie. And then that vehicle hit me.
This is where I'd like to say I suddenly flashed back to a fond memory from my childhood, like my fourth birthday at Chuck E. Cheese’s or the dance recital where I first got to wear lipstick, but I didn't. I didn't see God or Mohammed or any kind of fancy white light either. It was just siren, flying car, impact. Boom. And then I was in an ambulance, totally confused.
According to the police report that I later got a look at, there was only one witness to this entire incident. I find this a little strange, since it was early on a Friday evening and I was one block away from Washington Square Park. But based on the tiny bit of information that they did gather and based on my injuries, this is how we can surmise that it all went down:
At approximately 5:15pm on Friday, October 20th, 2006, a firetruck from the West Village sped down East 8th St in response to a call of a fallen scaffolding. At the same time, a rabbi was driving a black Chevy Suburban southward down Fifth Avenue. As he approached the lights at 8th St., he did not slow down. Neither did the firetruck. The firetruck hit the Suburban, causing it to fly onto the sidewalk and hit me. The vehicle struck my lower left side, breaking the smaller bone in my left leg and the left side of my pelvis, plus my pubic bone (crotch) and sacrum (ass). It also splashed some kind of car chemical onto my left leg that would sink through my jeans and into my skin and eventually cause a third-degree burn. I then somehow bounced against the building beside me, which smashed the crap out my right arm, shoulder, collarbone, and part of my right leg, plus gave me a little bonus fracture in my jaw. My front teeth were a bit mangled and my body was scattered with the type of smaller scratches and burns that come naturally after a collision with concrete. Conveniently, there was already an ambulance behind that firetruck. I guess they gave up on the downed scaffolding after the collision (I sure hope those people are OK). Despite this laundry list of injuries, when the EMTs got to me I was lying conscious on the sidewalk and had no injuries to my spine, neck, or head.
So by the time I was considering my free water pitcher as a nice perk of this living situation, I had already been wheeling around the place for a few days, staring at endless ceilings. I had spent some time in intensive care, where I got my face stitched up and got a titanium rod in my arm, and once I was stable, I got moved to a “regular” room. Thanks to the morphine fog and the overall trauma, my whole sense of time was off. It was unbelievable to think that just over a week ago I had been standing, laughing, walking, dancing. And now I was permanently horizontal. This was my new life. Or at least it’s how I felt it would be.
My morning routine was getting pretty predictable: I’d get awoken by a nurse who would give me some cocktail of pills and check my temperature, I’d poke at a sad bowl of Cream of Wheat, and then watch the door and wait for a visitor. One of my parents was usually first to arrive. They had driven down from New Hampshire the night of the accident and were staying with a family friend, since they weren’t allowed to stay in the hospital. I also had a fair amount of college pals visit, since many others had also made the move to the city from their respective suburban towns.
It was nice to see people I hadn’t seen in awhile, but it made me feel a little weird about how I had earned the attention. It was like getting three hundred posts on your facebook page just because it’s your birthday. I was the female Harry Potter: “The Girl Who Lived.” Although I didn’t do anything valiant other than bounce upon impact. It was impossible to have a normal conversation about what they were doing in New York and where they lived and what train the rode and all that. They wanted to gaze wide-eyed at my bruised face and gigantic, swaddled arm. They wanted gory details about what I remembered about the impact and how much blood there was and what hospital food was like. I would indulge them for as long as I could handle, thank them for visiting, and then close my eyes and take a nap.
If that hadn’t made me feel like enough of a circus freak, then the consistent tours of medical students sealed the deal. St. Vincent's was a teaching hospital and I was a med student's dream: eight broken bones, stitches, and a Terminator arm. Four or five of them would come in at a time, accompanied by a doctor who would pick up my chart and summarize the injuries. I was right there in the bed and - despite the tiny jaw fracture – I could still talk. I could have given them a riveting first-hand account. But no, they preferred to hear it from their tour guide and scribble furiously in their little notebooks like I was a rare work of art and they had to remember every detail. I eventually got so used it that I would just retreat inside my little morphine bubble and stare at the TV with my best Mona Lisa face.
There was another everyday reality that became my least favorite part of the whole hospital experience: peeing in bed. I don't mean wetting the bed, like a child or a blackout-drunk adult, but I mean the next closest thing – peeing in a bedpan. The bedpan experience was the bridge into true hospital living. Once I crossed over there was no going back. Sure, I had already swapped my clothes for a thin cotton gown, I had some tubes in my arm, and I got sad thrills from playing around with the incline of my bed. But I didn’t truly give in to this reality until that first time that I released the contents of my bladder into a hard plastic disk placed strategically between the mattress and my bare ass.
With that first piss into the bedpan, I lost all modesty, all inhibitions, and, really, all hope for even a tiny bit more comfort in this medical experience. But after the fifteen seconds or so of shame that came with a stranger wiping my nether regions and then emptying my pee from the bedpan into a toilet, there was another feeling: complete resignation. It was clear at that moment that if I was going to have to rely on other people to even help me pee, then I was probably not able to do much of anything by myself. Sure, I could move my left arm arm to transport all that free water to my mouth and I could operate the TV remote and press the buttons to pump morphine and move my bed and call nurses, but there was no likelihood of me jumping out of bed and running around anytime soon. I was at the complete mercy of hospital staff and visitors. The first time was like a bad dream – like one of those nightmares where you’re giving a speech to your entire high school and you suddenly realize you aren’t wearing pants – but after a day or two, it was just another part of my new reality.
Somewhere around this time is when I first got a look at myself in the mirror and it was… not good. The opportunity came from a rare light-hearted moment where my mom tried to fix my hair. A few weeks earlier I had dyed it jet black, as an expression of impulsive recklessness on my 23rd birthday. While it looked cool at the time, six days of no showering made it real gross real fast. My mom’s solution was to flip it into a weird ponytail-bun on the top of my head which she thought looked hilarious (although, really, I have to give her credit for anticipating the popularity of the topknot). She gave me her hand mirror so I could take a look and while, yes, my hair looked ridiculous, I was more shocked by something else: my teeth were black. Not all of them, thankfully, but three in the very front were almost entirely black and blue like bruised skin. I freaked out.
- A bandage around my head, Jacob Marley-style, purportedly to help my jaw but really just making me look ridiculous
- Stitches on my forehead, chin, and lip, leaving just one side of my bottom lip looking like Melanie Griffith
- And then, of course, the black teeth
I just couldn’t win.
Around this time both my sister and my brother arrived. They are about seven and ten years older than me, respectively, and although we’ve always all lived very different lives, I still felt so relieved and soothed to see them. Having my whole family around made me feel safe amidst the chaos, if only for a little while. After all the years of getting pushed around as a little sister, it was strange to suddenly have them able and willing to do things for me. Once, when I said offhandedly that all I felt I could stomach was popsicles and toast, my sister appeared in a flash with a box of frozen fruit bars and buttered toast wrapped in aluminum foil, fresh from a nearby deli. My brother and his wife came bearing a Discman and some new music, plus an abridged CD version of The Nanny Diaries. It was something I would scoffed at weeks ago - I mean, it was 2006, I had an iPod already - but they became my saviors during the sleepless nights.
Suddenly, my doctors and my parents started to talk about me “going home.” I was confused. I was home. New York was my home now. Sure, I had broken some bones but give me, like, another week in this place and I’d be back at work… right? No. Not right. I knew I was in bad shape, but I didn’t quite understand how bad until everyone started talking about my recovery in terms of months rather than weeks. Now that the hospital had done their part by putting my arm back together and pumping blood back into me, the rest of my repair no longer fell under their jurisdiction. The doctors and parents all decided that it would be best for me to go to a physical rehabilitation hospital, where I could still get the same kind of rest and medication and care that I was getting in the hospital, but also with some real hands-on therapy to get my body working again. And it would be best for me to do that back in New Hampshire.
Maybe it was the drugs, maybe it was straight-up denial, maybe a little bit of both, but I truly had not considered that I would have to leave New York. I had a job and I was settling in. I didn’t have a permanent place to live yet, but I was working on it. I was working on being a real independent adult and now here were my parents by my bedside, telling me that I had to leave it all behind. I cried, but more out of defeat than out of protest. There was no other option. I realized was actually going to miss that little corner of a room, those green cotton gowns and pink plastic water pitchers. They were my last New York belongings, my last footholds. I left on a sunny Sunday morning, bundled onto a stretcher and squinting at the changing leaves. It had so suddenly become fall.
Molly Cameron is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. You can find her website here. She last wrote in these pages about a closet full of sweaters. You can find her twitter here.
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