Mornings are hardest here at the hospital. I usually have nurses visit around 4 or so. After they run all their tests and check all their machines, I just lay there surrounded with darkness and beeping monitors and thoughts I can’t shake. Falling back to sleep is next to impossible, so I stopped trying.
I have a walker. Yes, it’s true. Imagine the skinny 90-year old bloke with socks up to his knees in a gown that announces to the world behind him that he’s leaving. Yeah, that’s me. Only my walker has a broken wheel that is teetering on survival. I know at any moment the wheel could go careening off into the great unknown, sending this 38-year old bloke tumbling with oxygen tank hot on his heels.
Now that you have the visual, I want to tell you about the first day I dragged myself around the hospital hallways at 4 am. It rocked me to my core.
There are probably very few people in the world who have been pushed to the full threshold of the human capacity for physical pain. I’m not one of those people either, but I have experienced pain in my body to the point that I wanted to quit. Indescribable pain that pushed me to my knees in tears every day for weeks. I can’t tell you how many times my cousin Rock would have to pick me up and tell me not to give up.
I know. Everything I’ve been talking about with faith and how Ryan’s life as an inspiration for my own – and I’m talking about hitting the OPT OUT button.
What a hypocrite.
I dragged myself out of my hospital room that first early morning and into the halls I’ve come to despise – if I’m being totally honest. I was thinking about my physical pain and how it was just the start. They talk about a 6-week rehab just to be able to walk and sit normally. That alone seemed impossible. Then there’s the emotional toll of it all. Then spiritually, how do I hold fast to what I knew was true in spite of it all? Simply put, I was feeling sorry for myself.
My walk at first was painfully slow. I would have to actually focus on putting one foot in front of the other to move forward. I was caught up in my head when I passed a room a few doors down from mine. A man was calling out for pain meds. I saw a nurse scuttle past me and run into another room where a woman was yelling something, and she didn’t sound happy – at all.
In at least one out of every two rooms I passed on that hall loop, someone was in audible pain and calling for help. And with every call out, a nurse frantically ran to that person’s room to try and ease the pain of the moment. Then it hit me.
Everyone is in pain.
Pain is not exclusive to me. Fathers have buried their sons killed in war. Mothers have given birth to stillborn babies. We’re all broken in some way – a disease, losing someone close, not having someone close to lose – you just don’t get a free pass through this life without taking on some kind of scar.
The saddest part is, I rarely take my eyes off my own pain to notice that pain is universal. It’s threaded through humanity, and we all just keep yelling for our painkillers.
Why do I have to go through my own suffocating pain before I can see and feel the pain all around me? And you know I’m not talking about just physical pain.
I guess if there’s anything positive in my pain is that I’ll never look at the world through the same lens. I know what it feels like to suffer. But so does my dad, who has buried a father, brother, best friend and now son – all prematurely and tragically. Pain haunts the meth user, the stay at home mom, the 58-year old corporate exec, and the family going into bankruptcy down the street.
Now it just comes down to what I do with what I see.