thank you notes 2/18

i'm thankful for the nice conversation i had with my first nurse about how she's taking her first trip to florida in april and about a trip she once took with her sister to maine in the fall, which was cold but which offered a cornucopia of gorgeous foliage. i'm thankful for my second nurse, the one who put in my IV, for how nice and efficient and warm she was and for how she reminded me of my latin teacher in tenth grade, who the class was always so mean and abusive to even though she was very sweet and one day she brought us japanese gummies (i'm thankful i do not remember what this had to do with latin). i'm thankful for my final nurse, the one who wheeled my bed to the operating room, who was a male nurse with an affect that reminded me of the denis johnson story "emergency" but in a way that i luckily found charming rather than frightening. 

i'm thankful for the pattern of my hospital gown, each individual unit of which, up close, looked like a tiny angry face winking. 

i'm thankful for the strange feeling of being wheeled in a bed down a hospital corridor, which feels like some kind of slippage between the real world and the visual tropes of television and movies, like i'm riding on a dolly and my eyes are the camera of the movie i am at the same time watching. i'm thankful for another thing which felt like a TV show, which was having this team of medical professionals all concentrating on me, which made me feel like a kind of celebrity, in a way. i'm thankful for how cared for i felt. i'm thankful for the mousy anesthesiologist, who smiled and patted my shoulder and said "okay, i'm just going to give you a little versed now!" and thankful that soon after i slipped off into blissful nothingness (i'm thankful for versed). i'm thankful that i have no memory of waking up in the middle of the procedure with a tube down my throat, which is an experience a faculty member described to me in a horror story this morning (i'm thankful he took care to wait until after i had the procedure done to tell me). i'm thankful that when i woke up, i felt really relaxed and d was there waiting for me with my clothes and my phone in a big white plastic bag.

i'm thankful that when we left the hospital at almost 4:30pm and i felt weightless and starving, because I had not eaten since 6:30pm the previous day, we went directly to the wendy's two blocks away for delicious bacon cheeseburgers, fries, and chocolate frosties. i'm thankful, even though i could feel the sensor capsule in my espophagus and it was kind of painful, to have been able to eat food.

I'm thankful that halfway through our meal, an alarm went off on the small plastic monitor, which looks like a toy pager you would give to a child crossed with a first generation MP3 player, that reads and logs the data from the sensor capsule in my esophagus. i'm thankful that despite the versed, i had paid attention to and retained the instructions the nurse gave me about the monitor, which was that the alarm would only go off if the monitor got too far away from the sensor capsule. i'm thankful i was, therefore, perplexed, because the monitor was within a foot of my esophagus, which was supposed to be well within range. i'm thankful for my sense of curiosity about the alarm and about why the monitor light was now blinking red rather than green drove me to call the hospital, even though nobody answered and i had to leave a message. 

i'm thankful that the nurse who returned my call this morning was named the same nickname that i call my mom and that she was a nice person and, when i described the behavior of the sensor, she paused and then chuckled and then said "well, that's never happened before." i'm thankful for her candor in revealing to me her theory that the capsule had "detached prematurely" while i was eating and traveled through my stomach to my intestines and this was the reason the alarm went off and the light changed. i'm thankful, even though i thought her voice sounded like she didn't believe it, that she still offered hope that the data that was supposedly being logged was being logged and i would not have to repeat this procedure again next week. i'm thankful for her empathy when i told her about how it was kind of painful to swallow, about the burning and the pressure, and how she seemed very invested in my experience and my issue. i'm thankful for how she called me back again ten or fifteen minutes later, unprompted, and was clearly deep in the manual for the device, trying to figure out whether my problem was caused by radio interference from nearby machinery. i'm thankful, in the spirit of giving me agency and trying things, that she recommended that instead of wearing the sensor on my hip, as i had originally been told, i attach it to my shirt pocket so it would be closer to my esophagus. i'm thankful to have tried this, even if it doesn't seem to have made a difference in terms of the red light and even though this meant that i could no longer turn away to hide the sensor from people at work and so had to have a conversation about the state of my esophagus with many many many people for the rest of the day.

i'm thankful to have had a conversation about the state of my esophagus with you today, thankful to you for listening. i'm thankful to have had a space to write about this but also thankful to hopefully be able to write about something else tomorrow.