or how an early-morning ER trip got me thinking
I am tired. I know you must be, too. Or maybe you aren’t! It seems like some people aren’t? But I’m fucking tired, tired, tired, and I wish I was the moon (the titles of gentle animal, if you haven’t already realized, are always song lyrics).
I was already tired before Monday. Over the weekend, I opened up a blank gentle animal post and tried to write, and…nothing. Nothing to talk about this week, nothing coherent on my mind, nothing but imposter syndrome reared up as I stared at the cursor blinking in the wide, empty sky of this newsletter. I started feeling burnt out around Christmas, from working all the time throughout the pandemic when all I wanted was to rest, from stressing out over shit that actually doesn’t mean anything right now while hundreds of thousands of people die and lose jobs and lose family and get sick, from watching part of the world plow forward with their trivial lives convinced that something about them means they’re worth more than the rest of us. I usually get around 8 hours of sleep every night, and yet 2021 has been mornings of exhaustion, no matter how much sleep I get. What are we doing all this for? my brain asks me. I have no answer.
I was extra tired after we went to bed late on Saturday night and I got less than 6 hours of sleep and I felt like shit all day Sunday, that kind of running-on-empty feeling where my eyes feel like black holes and I feel hungry and unsettled and vacant most of the day. Man, I thought, is this what getting older feels like? One less hour of sleep than usual and I’m a fucking WRECK. So M and I tried to get in bed early Sunday night and “get some good sleep.”
Sunday night—or, technically, Monday morning, around 12:45AM, M wakes me up. The volume of our white noise machine plus my body’s need for sleep leaves me discombobulated, but he is telling me he is in pain, so I have to zero in. M has a history of kidney stones, which, if you do a cursory google search, is one of the more painful medical phenomena out there—a lot of women who’ve both had kidney stones and given birth say kidney stones are more painful. “If it gets too bad,” he croaked, “you’ll have to take me in.”
I’m pretty good in a crisis; I hold it together, keep a relatively level-head, and try not to panic or let emotion overwhelm me. So I got myself ready to go, just in case, and I sat with him an hour in the bathroom, him kneeling at the altar of porcelain and pain and purging, me awkwardly bending over him to rub some tension out of his back and shoulders. It was hard to see him this way, to be able to do nothing but attempt to rub some tension out of his shoulders. Around 2AM we called it: he’d have to go to the ER.
Thankfully, there’s a big hospital less than a mile away from our new house, so we wouldn’t have to go far. I dashed around, dazed, trying to make sure I had everything: mask, healthcare card, wallet, water for Nugget since I didn’t know how long we’d be gone, driving carefully down our neighborhood’s shit pavement as every little jolt made M wince. I hadn’t even thought about what would happen once we got there.
What happened once we got there, I should have seen coming, but it hadn’t crossed my mind yet. M and I have been stringently isolating since the pandemic began, we are up to date on news and statistics and science, we curse the people who think they deserve special treatment while denying any of this is happening. I dropped him off at the doors, watched him hobble inside, parked the car, and hurried after him—but was stopped at the entrance. Only patients allowed inside the ER, period, even the waiting room. I wasn’t going to argue with them: I know why this protocol is in place, and I don’t think I’m the exception. But then confusion set in: how would I know what was going on, and now that I thought about it, I wasn’t sure M had his phone, and it turns out he didn’t, so I ran back to the car to find it in the front seat, and ran it back to the two masked healthcare professionals guarding the entrance so they could give it to him inside.
“It’s chilly outside,” one of them said, “so we recommend waiting in your car, or returning home if you live close by, until you know when he’s going to be release.” I nodded, still dazed, and made my way back to the car—it was chilly outside, and in our rush to leave, I hadn’t thrown anything over my sweatshirt—and I climbed inside and shut the door.
Bearing witness to M’s pain had been bearable, because I was with him. Now, though, I wasn’t. Now, though, he was in intense pain somewhere, and I was not there. Now, though, in the quiet hum of the car, 2:08AM on the clock, the adrenaline came crashing down on me and pushed its way out of my mouth in a sob. I didn’t have anyone to hold it together for anymore; M was alone, I was alone. I finally calmed my breathing—don’t want to scare him or make him feel bad, I thought—and called him. I know he’s in pain, I thought, but he’ll answer, he’ll let me know what’s going on.
But he didn’t answer. I tried again, no answer. Fine, texting then: “Call if/when you can and let me know what they tell you or when you can get in.” For now, our dog was panicked and at home less than a mile away, so I’d return there and…well, wait, I guess. I kept my phone open to M’s texts sitting between my legs for the drive home. The moon shone down on me; I was tired.
When I got there, still nothing from M. I tried calling again, and again—now it was taking forever for the ringing to start, and even then, it’d ring twice and go straight to voicemail. I felt a pit open up in my stomach—if I couldn’t get in touch with M, what could I do? I’ve been to the ER before, but what was the protocol now, during covid, if I couldn’t sit with him? The total blank on what to do made me panic and feel dumb; I found myself googling can you call the ER to get updates on someone? which mostly produced results about how to find out if someone was at the ER.
Thought it felt like eons had passed, it was only 2:30AM, so I called the hospital, got connected to the ER. “I just dropped my husband off there with kidney stones and I was wondering if he’s gone in yet or what the deal is or…” I didn’t know what questions to ask, what to do. I gave her M’s name; she, presumably, scanned her documentation.
“Oh, yeah,” she said casually, maybe even annoyed, “I mean, he’s only been here, what, half an hour? So he hasn’t gone in yet.” I stammered something about just not being sure how to get updates on him because of covid and thank you so much and okay goodbye. You probably should’ve mentioned he’s in excruciating pain, so half an hour is a long time to wait, I thought, probably should’ve advocated for your partner, probably should’ve taken a deep breath and asked her the best way to find out updates—now we know nothing, again, good job you idiot. I texted M again: “Front desk not helpful so check in with me if you can, even if it’s just liking this text.”
Nothing.
I called every few minutes for the next 40 minutes. Sometimes the call would take a lifetime to connect, the silence stretching out before me until the ringing began; still, phone calls were only ringing twice and then going straight to voicemail. I wondered if the guys at the door had actually given him his phone, wondered if they hadn’t been able to find him and still had the phone and were now silencing call after call from someone whose name they didn’t recognize. An eeriness set in for me: I was alone. There was nothing I could do. It was 3AM, and there was absolutely no one I could talk to without waking them up in the middle of the night, an emergency, my brain told me—but was this one? I read about whether people died from kidney stones; they didn’t, not suddenly, so that gave me some peace of mind. I kept begging my phone: please give me something from him, anything. I kept wondering what I would do, who I would call if this was actually an emergency at 3AM; in the age of cell phones, can you wake anyone in the middle of the night?
(I know you can. I know my father sleeps with his cell phone on his bedside table, volume turned up, just in case we need him. We do not, personally, sleep with our phones in the bedroom—and this was the first night that made me think maybe we should.)
Finally, at 3:10AM, an hour after I’d dropped him off at the ER and heard nothing, M texted. “In a bed on morphine. Test came back with one stone passing. No cell reception. Had to get guest wifi just to text.” The rush of relief, the moon’s bright face, my exhaustion transformed, for the briefest moment, into ecstasy; anger instead of fear at the thought of an ER with no cell service; the ability to laugh at M’s next text: “Tough to text on morphine.” I could finally rest my eyes—though I didn’t sleep, instead I lapped softly at the borders of it, thankful just for the room to relax—for the next hour until he was discharged and I picked him up again at the same doors I’d sent him through two hours before.
He’s still recovering; the stone hasn’t passed, or there’s another one. We have slept at odd times and never soundly enough. Having gotten a glimpse into what it must be like for anyone in the era of covid to deal with hospitalization of loved ones, I feel so humbled, so grateful to have only encountered it briefly. The agony of waiting outside, unable to follow someone through the doors, is the worst kind of tired, where you wish you were the moon.
a photo of my dog’s beautiful, dumb moonface, just for some levity
Will gentle animal ever not be (partially) a downer? Let’s find out.
Thanks for being here. As always, yours, ready to receive.
KM