Arguing With Myself

One of the strangest things about dying is it doesn’t hurt.

Not always. Not for me.

I didn’t feel a thing during my accident that I recall. Fear, sure. Then mild discomfort that turned to giddy euphoria as I slowly bled to death. Sick as it seems I’ve never felt a better high. Even the morphine they gave me didn’t compare to slowly bleeding out. I don’t remember feeling the IV they inserted after they carried me into the surgical tent. I don’t remember feeling much of anything but cold. Something about my left hand was amusing, but hell, everything was amusing. And then everything was dark.

In that darkness I experience the sharp pain of needles tearing my flesh over and over again until I wanted to scream for mercy but I couldn’t open my mouth. In that darkness I experienced the choking agony of a plastic tube down my throat and the horror of gagging and vomiting and silently drowning on my own sick, saved only by a red headed nurse in blue scrubs applying suction. In the gray space between alive and dead, where angels and demons gathered around my bedside as the world was rebuilt around me I experienced the agony and then immense relief of having that hated tube ripped from my lungs. It tasted of snot and plastic and burned my throat like cheap gin as it came out.

Living hurts like hell.

The horrors of the darkness were nothing compared to the dull, throbbing, ache of those first few days of consciousness in the new world that had appeared around me. There is no break from the discomfort of the ICU, just endless throbbing pain punctuated by sudden bursts of sharp agony. The worst were daily dressing changes. The wounds in my abdomen and anus were packed with wet gauze that was allowed to slowly dry. Once a day the dry gauze had to be replaced with fresh, wet, gauze. I won’t go into the gory details, this tale is graphic enough as is, what is important is that the process of changing dressings was one of the most intensely painful things I’ve ever experienced. It felt like having my insides ripped out and fresh organs roughly crammed back in.

To help with the pain doctors prescribed an extra dosage of pain medication. A LARGE dose of pain medication. Fifteen minutes before my scheduled dressing change a nurse would bring a syringe full of clear liquid that they pushed into my IV and by the time the wound care team showed up with their gauze and saline I was floating. Removing the dressing was still painful, but in a distant, disconnected sort of way that was almost amusing, like my left hand in that surgical tent in Uzbekistan. They’d remove the old dressing and reinsert fresh gauze and all the while I ignored the burning pain and the red meat smell and the blood because I was amused by a spot on the ceiling or the way my right knee looked. Strange word, knee. Why is there a “k” in there? Shouldn't it be "nee"? English is weird.

These dressing changes were neither comfortable nor fun, even with the medication, but as my health improved and I was moved onto a normal ward they became the highlight of my day. I liked the wound care team and dressing changes meant visitors. They meant I got a shower. Later, once the doctors had given up on getting my pancreatic enzymes back to normal levels, dressing changes meant it was almost time for lunch. They also meant that the worst of the day's pain was over. There’s always discomfort in the hospital, there’s always pain and misery, but nothing came close to the burning, tearing, bloody, pain of those dressing changes and once they were over I had a 24 hour reprieve.

Dressing changes also meant I got high as fuck. I am a weak man with many vices and there’s just not that much to do in Ward 68 or Walter Reed Army Hospital so I looked forward to my daily dope hit. I liked floating.

At the time I was the first casualty of the war on terror and something of a minor celebrity in the hospital. I had near daily visits from general officers, politicians, and admin officials ranging from the retiring Chief of Staff of the Army General Eric Shinseki and Sergeant Major of the Army Jack Tilley, to Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld. VIP visits became so frequent that they began to interfere with the day to day routine, to the point where the staff had to hang a sign on my door that read “Dressing Change in Progress Do Not Enter.” But the thing about VIPs is they're not used to following orders. They’re not easily deterred by signs. So one day, as I lay high, naked, and bleeding on a hospital bed with my legs up like a woman giving birth while a nurse pulled a pound of bloody gauze from the hole where my ass used to be Secretary of the Army Thomas E. White chose to ignore that sign and barged into my room.

My dad and I had a pact that we’d made days before. If ever a VIP interrupted a dressing change we would do everything in our power to make them stay and watch the whole gruesome process. If they wanted to see then by God we were gonna let them see. So when Secretary White turned white, then green, and turned to flee the room we both smiled and told him to stay. “Oh it’s fine sir. We see it every day. Stay. Stay.” And to his credit he did, though you can see in the picture that someone took of the moment he was far from comfortable. The medics covered the worst of the gore and he muttered platitudes before beating a hasty retreat. All I remember of the visit was his obvious discomfort and how much we all laughed once he was gone. I wonder if he learned his lesson about ignoring warning signs.

As my conditions improved the number of medical apparatuses strapped to my body decreased. The oxygen mask, blood pressure cuff, and hated compression boots were taken off by the time I left ICU. By the time I arrived in ward 68 the electrodes that monitored my heart rhythm were gone. After the turkey sandwich incident didn’t kill me, my feeding tube was removed. Slowly the number of bags dangling from my IV stand dwindled until only 1000ml of Ringers Lactate was left. But the dressing changes and daily dose of pain medication remained the same. This proved to be a problem on the day the doctors ordered me off of IV fluids.

I’m not a doctor and I don’t understand the science but I can deduce what happened. The dosage of pain medications was formulated with the understanding that it would be pushed into my blood stream with IV fluids. A miscommunication between doctors meant that the IV fluids were removed but the narcotic dosage wasn’t changed. They’d inserted a picc line in my left arm, essentially a plastic tube running from my left elbow directly to my heart. It was still in place, so the nurse didn't notice there were no IV fluids running into it. They pushed that syringe full of dope just like they’d done every day for weeks and it went undiluted directly to my heart and into my blood stream and initially no one thought anything about it.

Least of all me.

I’d taken that same dosage for weeks and thought I knew what to expect.

I thought wrong. That undiluted dose hit me like a freight train. It slammed into me like a tsunami. That shit felt AMAZING. It felt like the euphoria of dying.

But something was wrong. Suddenly everyone in the room was looking at me with the kind of worried looks that I’d learned to hate over the previous weeks.

“What?” I asked.

“Hawt” someone mocked me.

The medical staff began talking among themselves in hushed but hurried tones. A decision was quickly made. Someone rushed out of the room. Everyone else looked at me with worry written across their faces.

“Look man, what the fuck is going on?”

“Okol nam tahw eht kcuf si ogign no?” that motherfucker mocked me again.

“How do you feel?” someone asked.

“Fine.” I answered.

“Einf!” my mimic said.

“Why don’t we lay you back…” a nurse suggested.

“Why don’t you tell whoever is picking on me to shut up?” I demanded, irritated at the strange mockery.

“Yhw tond ouy letl…” I couldn’t see who was talking but I could hear them clear as day. Someone, somewhere was repeating every fucking word I said as gibberish and between it and the panicked looks of everyone else in the room it was wrecking my high.

“Knock it the fuck off!” I ordered.

“Kconk ti eht kcuf fof!” my tormentor replied.

I looked around the room to find the source but the only people there were my parents, and an extremely nervous nurse. All staring at me like I had a dick growing out of my forehead.

“You feeling okay son?” My dad asked.

“I’d be fine if this motherfucker would quit mocking me.”

“Di ed nefi fi shit fumoterther…”

“KNOCK IT THE FUCK OFF!” I ordered in anger and frustration.

“KONCK TI HET…!” my mimic began.

Except I was looking at everyone in the room and their mouths weren’t moving. No one was talking.

No one but me.

“Son of a bitch.”

“Ons fo a cibth.” I heard out loud.

“Oh I am high as fuck.”

“Ho I ma high sa kcuf.” I heard my own voice reply clear as day.

“Oh something is wrong here…”

“Ho meonsthig si…” my own voice repeated back to me.

And it was then that I had a moment of clarity. It was then that I realized what had happened. I was indeed high. I was dangerously high. I was so fucked up that the voice in my head, that internal dialog that we all hear before we speak had somehow become disconnected from my voice. When I spoke it was like a taped delay, or a broadcast into deep space, I heard the thought in my head clear as day in my own voice and a second later the words came out of my mouth garbled and incoherent.

“Hey I may be a little fucked up.”

“Yeh I aym eb…”

Suddenly I was dizzy. Suddenly I was hot. Suddenly I was tired. Suddenly the drugs weren’t fun anymore.

Think I’m gonna lay down. I thought, for the first time recognizing it as a thought.

“Khint mi anogn yal nowd.” My voice announced to the room a second later.

Oh shut the fuck up.

“Ho thus eht…” apparently I also couldn’t keep my thoughts from being spoken out loud.

I lay my head back and the room began to tilt. I closed my eyes.

The nurse who’d fled returned with IV line and a bag of ringers and they quickly attached it to my picc line. A few moments later a doctor appeared with some more drugs. I lay near comatose, staring at the ceiling, willing myself not to talk lest I end up arguing with myself again, while they checked my vitals. Slowly, ever so slowly, my high began to wane and I began to feel closer to what passed for normal in Walter Reed.

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay.” I answered, but I waited a second, just to make sure I wasn’t hearing the voice in my head, just to make sure I wasn’t going to mock myself with gibberish.

Everyone, myself included, breathed a sigh of relief when the words came out right.

No one admitted their mistake. No one mentioned the incident again. I went through the familiar routine of dressing removal, shower, dressing insertion, lunch and went about my day with no ill affects from the largest dosage of opiates I’d ever received before or since. Notations were made on my chart, procedures were changed, and the next day they brought a smaller syringe when they came to give me my daily pain medication. The drugs still felt good, but nowhere near as rapidly euphoric as they had the day before, nowhere near as good as they felt while I was dying, but they didn’t leave me arguing with myself and soon I wouldn’t need them at all.

Six months later, in the spring of 2002, I was still going through the routine of removing dressings, showering, and reinserting dressings, though by then the process had become routine and mostly pain free. The only discomfort was having to have my mom's assistance to reinsert the fresh dressings. Each day I’d take the dressings out on my own, I’d shower, and then I’d have to lay on my bed in my childhood bedroom with my legs up like a pregnant woman giving birth while my mom shoved gauze into the hole where my ass used to be. I was twenty-three years old, an Infantry sergeant, and yet I lay there every night, naked and helpless, waiting for my mommy to shove gauze up my ass. It would have been humiliating but I’d grown used to the ritual.

Except that night things didn’t go as planned. I finished my shower, made my way to my bedroom, lay on the bed and waited but no one came. My brother was home on leave and through my closed bedroom door I could hear the sounds of his girlfriend arriving and my mothers voice greeting the unexpected guests. I lay, naked, bored, and impatient, as I heard my mom usher my brothers guest into the living room and then I sat and angrily listened to the silence as they chatted too far away for me to hear. One minute became two. Two became five. Five became ten and I began to get genuinely pissed because I was stuck. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t do anything until my mom came to replace my dressing. I was trapped, naked and alone while every one else chit chatted in the living room and I was more than a little unhappy about it.

Eventually she came and eventually the dressing got changed. I was angry at the wait, livid that I’d been abandoned to welcome my brother’s girlfriend, but I pulled on pajama pants and a t-shirt and limped into the living room because it would be rude not to tell my dad good night. It was there that I first saw a pretty brunette sitting on the opposite end of my parents couch from my brother and his girlfriend. I don’t remember what she was wearing, just that she had long, tanned legs, dark hair and sparkling dark eyes. I don’t know if we spoke that night. If we did it wasn’t more than a word or two. I gruffly said my good nights and stomped back to my room and read until I fell asleep having no clue that I’d eventually marry that pretty brunette and twenty four years later she’d still be my wife.

No deep thoughts to close this out today, just Sturgill Simpson singing about getting high.