Sixty: The Hidden Years

By Micah Keeley

Sixty:The Hidden Years, is at once a look back on a life of fear, hospitalizations, abuse, eating disorders, mental illness, and the wrenching attempt to make change. It tells of a life unraveled, hidden, disoriented and cruel. It speaks to an indomitable spirit not quashed, nor ruined, as it weaves the history of a woman from early childhood to the age of sixty. It is a book, in the end, about courage, understanding and acceptance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483523446

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Sixty: The Hidden Years

Copyright © 2014 by Micah Keeley

All rights reserved under Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including electronic or digital means, storage and retrieval systems, recording, or future means of reproducition, without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

ISBN 9781483523446

Copyeditor: Debbie Ward

Editor: Kathy Cowan

Cover photo by Richard Cowan

Dedication

To my one sister who knows me most and loves me

To all my sisters keeping me in their lives

To Laura

Acknowledgment

Thanks to Debbie Ward for her loving and untiring support, her complete and utter approval and non-judgment in the face of what I've written. Thanks to my husband, who perhaps does not always understand but remains with me, and has pushed me to complete and publish this book. Thanks to Kathy Cowan, my teacher, my great encouragement, and my editor. Thanks to my children who shared the years with me and do not blame, but only love me. Thanks to that part of me willing to tell.

There are threads attached to the words I have braved here, so they will be pulled along on the same road, will travel the same route, will wind through underground tunnels, and rise to a shallow surface.

Suppose we could give away time, like a sparkling bracelet.

Sena Jeter Naslund

Abundance, A novel of Marie Antoinette

Sixty

My story is my own. It is mine. It is important to me. As were my bones when I was in my late thirties and weighed 72 pounds. That was half a lifetime ago. My bones had been of the greatest primal importance to me, and I was petrified to lose them ─ to gain weight. Petrified. Even though I could hardly think. Even when it was dizzying to stand, a blur when walking and near fainting when climbing stairs. Even though I was losing my hair and my teeth, still it was more important to me to have my bones. With emaciated fingers I would grasp my collarbones or my hipbones, holding on to them as my most precious possession. This was Me. These bones were Me. Don't take them away, I would chant. I would cry. They were something I could finally grab onto, something I could hold, a solid, physical thing that gave me identity. I am my bones, I would think. My mind wrapped around the idea like a life-preserver around a drowning swimmer. I was drowning, but my bones would save me. My bones would save me.

That was a time in my life that I look back on now and see as part of a long unraveling, a long road with pieces of myself left behind like breadcrumbs to follow later, to track with professional help. I was lost in the woods of my life.

I am sixty now, and at this age I have a pressing desire to write my story. Why? Do I have to know why? Is it okay if I don't know why? Is it enough that telling my truth is a drive within me, an incessant push that keeps interrupting me as I walk through my days? Is it enough? Am I enough? Is it all right for me to tell?

I have started so many times. I have volumes of starts. I have tried to find the words and follow their path to tell my story. I have tried to put my story in order, to tell it historically, but maybe my story doesn't need to be told in chronological order, but instead scribed as I am inundated, as I am interrupted, with memories. They come fitfully, demanding, in their own order, in their own fashion. Perhaps I should write as the memories come. Perhaps

I have always lived in questions and doubts. Mine has been a long journey of questions with so few answers, so little understanding. But I am sixty now, and certainly at sixty a person should have some grasp of who she is. I have made progress. I tell myself this. I am living day-to-day and interacting with my life as it opens up each morning. But it is not easy. It requires great diligence on my part as well as coping mechanisms and strategies that I have learned in my many years of therapy. Top this with psychotropic drugs and yes, I am making my way day to day. I can even say that I have so many blessings in my life, but at sixty, I have so much more expectation of myself. By this age one should know how to be in the world. Isn't that so? Doesn't everyone believe that? Don't I?

I can go back (and I will) and cover the life I have lived, but I also have to make it through each day as it comes now, in this present time. It remains a challenge for me. I am doing it. Perhaps I could do it better. Yet, for me I must be grateful that I am doing it at all. I never thought to live this long. I never thought to live to the time when I would say: I am sixty.

A Sickly Child

I guess I must have been a sickly child. That is how they might have phrased it back then, but now it might have other labels. I was the child who didn't readily talk but drew pictures instead. I was the one who bounced on furniture and banged my head on walls for long periods of time. I used to sit on the couch in our living room and bounce for hours, watching the changing of light and shadows out the sliding glass door to the backyard. I bounced in the car, in spite of complaints from my siblings. I had to. I bounced my head on my pillow each night to fall asleep. I did this as a child and through my teen years and into my adulthood.

I would walk in circles, round and round and round and round, until I didn't have the energy to keep going. Round and round in our unlit kitchen, in a dizzy monotony that kept me inside my silent world. Bouncing and circling were my own rhythm. They replaced my heartbeat. They replaced the world I was living in. They were my hiding in motion.

I was always hiding. This is still my life challenge. Being seen takes great courage, but at sixty I must keep pursuing such bravery. At sixty I must make changes. I still struggle most days to step outside my front door. It can take hours and great effort to be so grown up that I can go out, get in my car, and head off to do errands or head to the ranch where I spend time each day with horses. Errands lose their priority and I procrastinate until it becomes a necessity that I go to the store or the bank or the post office. Then I am, finally, forced to go outside.

As a child I always had a place to hide; in bushes, under beds, deep in closets, in, under, or up in trees. Wherever I was I made sure that I had a hiding place, and I treasured each and every one. They were comfort spots, places where I was safe. They were imperative cocoons for me. I loved those places.

Under my parent's bed was one such hiding place. Their bed was the type common in the 1950's―a double bed on a grey steel frame with casters as feet on each of the four corners. This bed was literally inches off of the floor, yet as a child I was small enough to hide under it and not be found. I did this for a very long time. I could hear family members calling for me but I remained silent and hidden. I would listen to my parents asking if anyone had seen me or knew where I was. Still I would remain silent and hidden. There were even times when someone came to peer under the bed and I would scootch to the very top, against the wall, and at the very center, where I would hold my breath, trying to stop the beating of my heart. I felt marked panic. I could almost stop my life to ensure that I was not found.

No one ever got down far enough to see the whole underside of the bed. They would lift the dust ruffle, and peeking under, into the darkness, I expect they could not imagine my fitting into such a small space. It worked for me. It was another reason being small was so important to me, and part of the reason I chose not to eat.

Outdoors I knew each bush and hedge or tree to hide behind should a car come down the street, or a neighbor step outside their door, so that I could keep from being seen. This was sometimes paramount for me and I was a master at hiding from others. There was a particularly beautiful trio of white birch trees in the landscaped yard of a house across the street from ours and I cuddled down into the center of them, behind the other greenery. That was an especially comforting hiding place for me. It felt deep and quiet and I could sit and marvel at the peeling white bark with its dark crusted striations. I loved those trees rather like someone loves a pet, they were that special to me. I had my own relationship with them. I adored them.

Hiding places were sanctuary,whether they were real, physical hiding places, or places in my own mind, where I could hide in silence. I could hide behind my eyes. I could hide in plain view. I could hide staring at someone.

Sometimes I burrowed myself into back corners of deep closets. I would drop hung clothing, and, along with shoes or whatever else was on the floor, pile it over myself until I was sure that I was not visible. I don't do this at age sixty, but I did it as a child. I did it in my real life and I did it in my dreams. There are so many ways I have learned to hide. I have carried them through my life with me. I don't think there has been a day in my life that I have not felt the need to keep hidden.

I have always lived a fearful life. It seems I was born that way. As a child, when I bounced or banged my head, I would daydream of being killed in savage and torturous ways. I would envision myself being tied to opposing bent trees that when released would split my body down the middle, or be ripped apart by ravaging dogs sicced on me by people who wanted to torture me. These were my vivid and horrific childhood daydreams. I had so wanted to die. Yes, from my earliest days I remember wanting to die.

An Era of Fear

I also grew up in an era of fear. I was born at a time when the nation was in the process of developing nuclear armament and moving into nuclear energy. It was the beginning of the Cold War. It was a time when people were actually building underground bomb shelters in hopes of safely surviving nuclear fallout. Our schools were developing strategies with air raid sirens and duck-and-cover drills. The nation was obsessed with government actions to find and rout out commies.

My mother was full Russian. It was important to keep that secret. This even after she had helped found a hospital in Yokosuka, Japan, after the war. My mother, I imagine, would have had to keep a kind of hiding herself. Ironically she was married to a Naval Officer and was Russian in a time that engendered suspicion of anything related to Russia and the Communist Party. It was the era of McCarthyism. So, there was my personal oppressing fear and need to hide, in a time of secrecy and hiding.

Under the Car

Once, just out of high school, I ended up spending the night under a car in the coastal village of Capitola, outside of Santa Cruz, California. At the time I was living in a house with other people It was the age of hippies and Santa Cruz proved a mecca for them. I rented a makeshift room, which I shared with my husky dog. The room, originally a back porch, was sometimes used by others to access the kitchen or the front of the house. There was no lock on either door, the one coming from outside, or the one from the kitchen, so there was never a real sense of security or privacy.

My room, with its dingy, peeling, sheetrock walls, was furnished with a mattress on the floor, covered with handmade batik cloths and an old, army-green, wool blanket. I stacked wooden fruit crates, covered in elegant shawls, to hold my personal items and clothing. There was no closet. I had no dresser. It was a base and seemingly disparate room, but I kept it attractive with the fabrics, textures and beautiful items that were meaningful to me at the time. I had a collection of small stones, necessarily round and smooth, that I hunted from the northern beaches. I displayed nature finds of dried kelp heads, bird feathers, sand dollars and unbroken seashells. I had a lovely bedside lamp─a thrift store find. A small copper pitcher held my toothpaste and toothbrush. My boar bristle hairbrush and old-fashioned hand mirror were kept in an imported wooden tray, hand carved, with a bone inlay design.

Though I had this room to sleep in, I spent a good deal of my time in my car, a two door, 1960 Ford Falcon, sun-worn pale blue, with big windows and round taillights, or in the places that my car took me. I would pack my dog, and drive to the far away, desolate beaches, or up into the mountains along Highway 9, where I would trek into the deep forest, or hike down to the San Lorenzo River, where sand beaches were pocketed among boulders the size of small cars, and there were crystal clear pools that I waded in to cool off in summer's heat. I sometimes trailed the river, scaling boulders all along the banks, either upstream or down.

I found it very difficult living with other people. I was crazed with fear most of the time. I lived in what I still call my white noise, rather like the static that filled our nineteen-fifties television screen when shows went off the air, but with the volume at its loudest. With such fear of people, I kept to myself to deal with the screaming in my head. Yes, I lived in close quarters with others, but it was terrifying and I had to overcome that to get through each day. So I sometimes smoked pot and I drank, but mostly I spent time with my dog, and mostly away from the house. I was always a loner.

Being with others meant that I had to be vigilant with how I looked. I knew from childhood that it mattered how you looked, and that in itself was another way of hiding. I could impress people by how I looked and keep them from knowing any of my dark truths. Looks can be deceiving and intrinsically powerful. I dressed as others dressed―bell-bottom pants, flowing tunics, sandals, and long, sun-bleached hair. I could look like anyone else from the outside, that was my camouflage. Looking like everyone around me hid what I considered my insanity.

I was pretty, not beautiful, but attractive, lean and lightly beach-town tanned. I was athletic and active; hiking, beach walking, or riding my bicycle. Pretty can open doors, and I took advantage of that. My lack of social skills was overlooked and acceptance did not depend on my personality, which was generally aloof, quiet and reserved. I was invited into relationships I think, not because I was particularly fun, but because I had a pretty face and a fit body. People view pretty through a filtered lens, and I hid behind that. It allowed me to be among others but live in my own silence; silence gotten by shutting down to the minimum of a heartbeat and a view of the world from behind my eyes. I went deep to keep sane. I never got to know the people around me and they could not know me.

This has not much changed. Even now, at sixty, I find fear of people keeps me at a distance and I don't let anyone really know me. I have made great strides in this sixtieth year to change this. With exacted effort; I do see some progress. Perhaps that is what is allowing me to pen my stories now.

There was an older man, probably in his thirties, living in that house in Capitola, who was a released convict for felony assault and battery. A recent Vietnam veteran, he had piercing eyes that shifted when he talked and he was quick to look away. He was large with thinning long stringy hair and pocked skin. He was very strong and wore string tank tops that showed his bulging muscles. He was interested in me. I was terrified of him.

He was volatile, easy to anger, and one night he got into a fight with another older man in the house; a man in his forties who looked like Tom Selleck and who was dating a buxom blond twenty-two year old young woman from Los Angeles. Their dispute had to do with me, but I could not tell you why. I was not even in the living room where the fight began, I was in my own room, lying on my bed reading. They were drinking and yelling, threatening one another. I got up, scared, when I heard others in the house loudly yelling, pleading, trying to talk them down and physically restrain them. They wrestled into the kitchen, adjoining my bedroom, clearing the counters and sending plates and glasses to the floor, shattering them. They were having a fist fight, violently punching one another. I stood aghast, as I saw both men bashed and bleeding, one from an obviously broken nose. When knives came out I ran. In the dark of night, I ran street after street, until I was exhausted and needed to stop. I needed to hide. My mind was again screaming. My heart beating ferociously. I was in panic and needing to find silence. I crawled under a car. I lie there on the cold dank cement praying that I would not be found, would not be seen.

I stayed there the whole night, preferring the frigid, wet, filthy ground under the car, over returning to that house. I didn't know how I would do that. I shivered all through the fog blanketed night, having not taken any extra clothing with me, only what I had on. Cuddling with my dog, who loyally followed me, was my only source of warmth. I wanted to disappear from the earth but those prayers were never answered.

As the light eked out in the early morning I wracked my mind over how to get out from this hiding space without being seen, and make my way home. I was torn between the security of where I was, no matter how uncomfortable, and the fact that with morning someone would likely come out of the house to get in their car to drive away to work. What was the greater panic? To be found by the car owner who would be shocked that a young girl would sleep under their car, or the people I would have to face back at the house? I eventually locked myself inside my head, crawled from under the car, and anxiously found my way home.

I stood outside the back door to my room, listening for any stirring, trepidations about entering the house. It was quiet, no one was up. I cautiously opened the door. My room was not disheveled, but I could see into the kitchen where the floor was still littered with broken plates, glass, and a couple of the chairs upended. I gathered up a few clothes, and called for my new manx cat, Porsche, knowing she must have hidden with all of the commotion the night before. She ran to me from the backyard, and I packed her, my dog, and clothing into my car, and left.

When I next returned, a day later, I learned that the police had been called and the convict was again in jail. The others in the house, including the man who had been in the fight with him, though shaken, were resuming their sloven lifestyle. They had gone back to drinking, smoking cigarettes and pot, and doing not much more.

Hospitals

I was hospitalized often as a baby and small child and this was absolutely traumatic at times. Because my father was newly retired from the Navy, my hospitalizations were always at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, California, where I had been born, about an hour's drive from our home. This meant that hospital stays were long and my parent's visits were only on weekends, and I don't think they were able to make it every weekend. After all, my parents had my siblings to tend to.

I was quite small for my age, and always fed intravenously in the hospital, which meant that I was bed-bound, the IV bag constantly hanging from a metal pole apparatus over me―my life-line. It also meant that, as I got a bit older and out of diapers, I would need to use bedpans.

Often I was the only patient in a long room full of rows of steel hospital beds. I don't know why. It meant I could wait a long time before anyone came around that I could let know that I needed to go. I didn't speak, so they would see me sitting on my feet and tortuously wriggling to keep from relieving myself. I was afraid to pee. They would ask if I needed a bed pan. I would stare at them with the word yes in my mind. My language stayed behind my eyes.

Then I would have to wait and wait and wait before someone would show up with a white enameled, or stainless steel bedpan. While waiting I continued to sit on my feet and wiggle and beg within myself to hold it. I would wrench and cry inside and go first behind my eyes, or I could watch everything happen from up in the air above me. I watched a lot of my childhood from ceilings, and corners of ceilings. Watching from outside allowed silence and a stopping of everything in my world.

No one liked bringing me a bedpan and I never wanted to use one. A nurse would bring it, and, lifting my small body and adjusting the tubes attached to my arms, help me get situated on top of it, the frigid cold metal shocking my buttocks as I sat. Even though I was desperate to eliminate, I still could not do it in front of anyone. I would have to wait further until the nurse was out of range to hear, for the bedpan amplified the sound.

Then the next wait would begin. I had to sit on the steel bedpan with pee and b.m.'s as they were called, feeling wretched over my eliminations and the smell emanating from me. I would wait and wait, a seemingly endless time, for someone to come and lift me, clean me and carry my excrement away. Silently I watched their revulsion.

There was nothing worse than the bedpan, but another torture was wetting the bed. This was my experience at home as well, when in the night I needed to pee but was terrified of what was under the bed, for I knew that whatever it was wanted to grab me. I couldn't even imagine what would happen then. Or whatever was in the closet, watching me, waiting for me to be desperate enough to leave my bed and run down the hall to the bathroom. These were my silent night terrors. Sometimes I did make that treacherous leap from my bed, running as quickly as I could, but it took such bravery that there were times of wetting my bed instead. First I would endure the hot wet seeping between my legs as I relieved myself in slow, minute increments. Then I lie in shame and silence, feeling despicable and dirty.

Wetting the bed in the hospital was even worse, for there strangers would have to come to clean up my mess, working around my small attached body, they would roll the army-green, scratchy wool blanket from over me and then pull, first from the top of the bed, then from the foot, the now yellowed starched white sheets. Then they, with great precision, rolling me from side to side, replaced the sheets under me, and pulling tightly they tucked them in, making the infamous hospital corners.

When my parents came to visit me in the hospital, they brought me coloring books, for that was what I did with my time in the bed. I colored beautifully, staying within the lines and even shading my work (which remains my forte' to this day). They would look at all my coloring and ooh and ahh over what an artist I was. So coloring was my communication. I didn't talk with my parents; I don't ever remember any hugs either, (or I didn't recognize them), when they arrived or when they departed―only the admiration of my coloring. I loved to draw and color and I was excellent beyond my age. I was an artist. I could hold on to that. That was someone I could be. If I colored well enough I could be loved, even past my disgusting body.

There were morning rounds at the hospital, though I think not daily. I would first hear the doctors approaching, some shuffling their feet, others with shoes tap, tapping, the sounds escalating and echoing as they walked the polished tile floors, the floors that were mopped and buffed with giant machinery each morning before daybreak. As they neared my metal, guard-railed bed, I would lie there, frightened, yet resigned, wide-eyed, as a group of what seemed to me, giant men in white coats, worn over what were obvious uniforms, with military insignia pins on their collars exhibiting their rank, entered the cavernous room. Clipboards in hand they gathered at the foot of my bed, mumbling quietly as they discussed me and what was wrong with me. They would lift the clip of papers hanging at the foot of my bed and I saw their mouths moving, but could not hear their quieted words. Some would write things down, nodding their heads. They would order new tests and x-rays, (I have had hundreds of x-rays). They never interacted with me. They didn't come and pat my head, or hold my hand and say, how are you? They simply conversed among themselves in their professional whispers. I felt like an object under their managed scrutiny, and an object that was defective. There was something wrong with me, that was certain. When finished they would all leave, slinking as one group, like a caterpillar, and I would close my eyes and listen as they distanced, their shoes again shuffling or tapping down the hallway.

The doctors' orders included blood work each day and my tiny feet and hands became deeply bruised pincushions that the nurses prodded for new access each day. Tiny holes formed in each piercing. Even the needles stuck into the inside of my elbows, or at my wrists, the needles that carried the IV fluids, had to be changed with the emptying of each bag. I watched as they poked each vein, looking for new access around the swollen, red piercings. I stared at the nurses, I stared at the needles, I stared at my limbs. Pain was my intimate dweller. I could count on pain to be there for me.

I had many tests done in the hospital, all frightening, and I was alone to face them. I would be transferred from my sterile, white sheet, steel-barred bed, to a narrower metal gurney with a cold, gray Naugahyde mattress. They would arrange me, placing my taped arm with the attached IV tubing sticking out from inside my elbow or my wrist, to a metal pole that attached to the gurney to travel with me. Sometimes they used a separate pole, with the hanging bags on castors that traveled alongside my makeshift bed. We lumbered down corridor after corridor and sometimes out of one building and into another. I watched the ceiling passing overhead, marked with long fluorescent bulbs. I listened to the rollers passing over the grey and green tiled floors, clickety clack, clickety clack with each tile edge. These sounds gave me a rhythm to grab hold of. Clickety clack, clickety clack, over and over and over. Sometimes from the ceilings I looked down on my body as it lay on the gurney, traveling with all this cadenced sound and all this fear inside. I would watch. I could not do more.

X-ray machines in the naval hospital in the 1950's were housed in huge rooms that were suffocatingly dark and very cold. Often they would lay me upon a frigid, hard, metal table and then adjust giant steel-framed x-ray apparatus above and below me. The attendant would position me in whatever way was needed for the particular x-ray; a line of light scoping the spot on my body, and then tell me I must be very still and not breathe while the machine took the pictures. Terrifying! Terrifying! What if I move? What if I breathe?

The x-ray films were some three inches thick with steel framing that made them very heavy and I think this was why the technicians were always men. Big men with scary faces, hard voices and giant hands in the eyes of a child. The technician would go behind a wall, where they were safe, and I was not. They would call out to me again, ordering me to be absolutely still and not to breathe until they say. And my heart would race and panic would rise and I must be still and not breathe, and the gigantic, loud machinery, clicking and wheezing and sharply tapping, went on for what felt forever. I felt each mechanical sound down to my bones.

I was not safe, I was being seen deeply. They were looking at the insides of my body. I was petrified each and every time. I was alone each and every time. I was a small child with huge fear and nowhere to put it. The machinery was bigger than me, the people were bigger than me, and the terror was bigger than me.

I had to watch from up above or I would feel the fear and panic. Even now, at sixty, as I write this, my insides rise in abject distress. My eyes widen, like a trapped animal. I quiver so slightly under my skin and feel myself tense up to keep it in check. I rock in my chair. I swallow hard and wonder about that child. All these many years later, even the memory can bring up these strong reactions.

One time there was a unique medical procedure, I was four or five. I was rolled, again on a cold gurney, outside, to a different building. The sunlight overhead was shocking and I blinked my eyes closed, listening to the sounds around me. Apart from the rasping and racket of the gurney and IV pole along the cement sidewalks, I could hear birds singing, planes flying, and intermittently, road traffic.

The building we entered seemed dark, cold, and smelled of oil, metal, medicine, bleach and coffee. I felt sick to my stomach. I was taken into a stark, vacant room with one large chair in the center of it. The room had a wall of glass that looked out to the next room. The attendants, big and brusque, with military v-necked uniforms, propped me up in that giant chair and began, one by one, to apply tiny needles with boxes on them all over my head. Each needle and box had a wire that connected to a contraption above my head. I was petrified and alone. I was frantic with fear and I flew to the ceiling corner of the room on the other side of the window and watched myself through the plate glass. I don't know what that test was, but for a small child, all alone, it was pure terror. Terror I kept silently within myself. Behind my eyes.

Behind my eyes is how I related to much of my young life. I remained an observer, a witness, who traveled to that deepest space to view things objectively, remotely, without the sensations of my own body. I watched from behind my eyes as if I were watching a movie, a play.

Punishment

I was 6 years old when I slipped into our unlit, claustrophobic kitchen and stole some grapes. I snuck through the back yard, and rounding the corner, crawled behind the gate on the far side. There I crouched beneath some verdant flowering bushes, to secretly savor these green gems stolen from our family kitchen. It was a punishable act, stealing, and even worse to steal food. As I pummeled them into my mouth, hidden where I thought no one could find me, I started screaming with excruciating pain. I couldn't know that my appendix ruptured, right there as I was committing such sin. I screamed and screamed, afraid that no one could find me. I screamed and screamed as I heard people searching. I screamed with the pain that I thought unbearable. Finally I was found and rushed to our car where my parents laid me across the back seat, to make the trip to the Naval Hospital in Oakland, a little over an hour away. I could not scream anymore. I went silent with the pain.

When I next woke up it was to sharp, debilitating pain. I was in the hospital again. I was in a metal crib with metal guardrails in a room unknown to me. I was alone and I was bewildered. I was stunned. Where was I? What had happened? What was going on? I felt like a trapped animal. My torso was wrapped and I looked down from the ceiling above and saw blood. I was afraid. I cried silently. You must be silent in the hospital, I already knew that.

I spent woozy days waking to pain, sleeping again, then again waking to such intense pain that I could not think. Awake, I found myself again with needles stuck in my arms and tubes attached to hanging bags, IV fluids running with medication and sustenance. A nurse came to dress the wound, and as I