A Tinge of Purple

hospital days, part 3

In the days following my cataract surgery last week (the cataract formed as a result of the eye injury I had three years ago), evenings were tinged with purple. Is the sunset purple? I asked Carl, and he said, Uh, no. Sunset, sorbet, lilac, wisteria, whatever. Don’t lift anything or bend from the waist, the opthamologist warned.The day after surgery when the doctor took the patch off my eye, I saw with 20-20 vision in that eye for the first time in fifty-three years. My right eye will be corrected next week, and in the meantime I am relying on monovision which is very disorienting. Errant commas on the page and pauses in my step. A loopy vulnerability with doorways somehow narrower and my steps less sure. On Monday evening, I had to bring Sophie to the ER again, and she was admitted to the hospital with another bout of that vicious bacteria. I snuck that in there, didn’t I? Fortunately, it did not progress to pneumonia although we spent many harrowing hours in the ER with pro-Palestinian protesters who’d been beat up by the police. The nurses and doctors in ERs are always chatty with one another, just outside your room. They talk of their weekends and kid one another even as people are moaning in cots in the hallway. I guess that’s ok but at best, it’s terrifying, to tell you the truth. The world is ugly and the people are sad, wrote Wallace Stevens and I’ve always heard that, sing-song in the recesses of my brain, but I think he meant that the imagination, dulled, makes the world ugly. We will hopefully go home by the end of the week or over the weekend, maybe later because — well — hospital time. Sophie will be on a kind of prophylactic routine — a nebulized antibiotic, on for thirty days, off for thirty, etc. but she needs to finish the course she started on Monday, after which they’ll do a trial of the nebulizer thing to see what her tolerance of it is (tolerance being one of those words that doctors offer up in lieu of honesty, tolerance, like you’ll feel a pinch or that time in our apartment on 73rd between Columbus and Amsterdam back in the 90s when Sophie sat on the floor making a constant humming noise, her eyes glazed, drugged on Phenobarbital and two non-FDA drugs in what would become twenty years of utterly vain attempts to stop the seizures, but irritable the doctor back then said, is a hallmark of these drugs and even epilepsy and you’ll probably figure out what your tolerance for it is. Is at the end of a sentence leaves you hanging, no? I probably should have hacked off his head right then, but what did I know? I’m typing this blithely but of course I am far from blithe. Things are blurry, I have lots of thoughts, my ass is kicked, and I have at once not a bit of nuance in my judgements of things (perhaps woefully without nuance, a wonderful turn of phrase, according to a wise and beloved friend) and a welcome and hard-earned ability to dissociate from the horrors of the hospital and, yes, the world. I am, of course, tolerant if not clear-eyed or aware of nuance. I am trying to work, to be at the hospital and to deal with the numerous, endless doctors who call me with updates and questions and who have, it seems, finally realized that I am the captain now. I am trying also to recover from cataract surgery and to prepare for cataract surgery next week. I am wondering, much as my youngest son did so many years ago, what is it all about? and am grateful for the kind words of some doctor who answered, who called me today to give me an update and said he was awed by the care we give our daughter. You’re making me cry, I replied, and he said, don’t cry or I will, too. I feel as if I haven’t seen the moon this year. I feel pale in spirit and skin. I know the reality of compassion fatigue, and the silence is really fine, to tell you the truth. It’s humbling. It is perhaps good that the world turns a lovely shade of purple at the end of the day, now, an end of day tinge seen only by me through the hospital window, a shade of purple that could just as well be a weird and wonderful harbinger of a new one (day) just on the other side.