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A welcome distraction
Friday, December 16, 2022
Keith Braxton was beginning to get a bad feeling about this.
He knew what was written on his chart—respiratory distress syndrome—but that was only what had gotten him admitted. What had led to his present condition went back three years, and he knew the name off by heart.
Guillain-Barre syndrome.
He also knew the list of possible symptoms and they made for depressing reading.
Breathing difficulties. Residual numbness. Blood pressure fluctuations. Cardiac arrhythmias. Bowel and bladder function problems. Blood clots. Pressure sores.
And let’s not forget the one symptom that pervades my every waking hour.
Pain.
He’d been in that hospital bed for over a week, but at least he didn’t require help from a machine to breathe.
Not yet.
The nerve pain, however, was proving more problematic to treat, and the meds only went so far in alleviating it.
Nights were the worst. Every few hours a nurse would come to reposition him, in an effort to reduce the likelihood of bedsores.
Sleep? What’s that? It was beginning to feel like a distant memory.
And all because his body’s immune system had decided to attack his nerves.
Most people recover completely, the first doc said. Even if that may take several years, leaving them with weakness, numbness or fatigue.
Keith suspected he wasn’t most people, not with his medical history. And if that were true...
This could be fatal.
He couldn’t ignore the possibility. So what if he was only fifty-five? Death comes for us all, right? It’s no respecter of age. It takes old men and babies with equanimity.
Except the longer he spent in that bed, the more he believed he wouldn’t make old bones.
“Hey.” Heidi’s soft voice broke through, bringing him back into the present.
Keith blinked. “Hey. Is it that time already?” His sister had visited him every day since his admission, two o’clock on the dot, and she usually stayed for a couple of hours. Sometimes she brought her husband Richard, and occasionally Keith’s nephew Darrell and his niece Winona. The hardest part of those visits had been watching them trying to school their features, trying not to show their distress at his condition.
They know too, don’t they?
They know I won’t be leaving here, except in a pine box.
Then he reconsidered.
The pine box comes at the end. The body bag is first.
Such morbid thoughts seemed to plague him with increasing frequency lately.
Heidi pulled the chair closer and sat beside the bed. “How are you today?”
He chuckled. “You ask the same thing every day, and every time I give you the same answer.” He winced, forcing himself not to moan from the sudden crushing pain that spiked through him.
Lord, I hate these cramps.
