Because You Couldn't Eat, Giving Love

This I am afraid, a serious poem, about real life over a bunch of years. In my second year of sobriety, 1985, Ann (my one wife) started a long journey into disaster. It began with stomach pain that led to a diagnosis of gall bladder. She had it out but the pain continued and they decided ulcer. So they did that surgery. What happened next was seriously wierd. She healed, a nearly perfect result with one problem. It healed almost shut. This meant she couldn't eat, nothing could pass. So they solved it with a second surgery, not only the Bilroth I, but the addition of the Bilroth II. In the process, in case it was a nerve spasm, they cut the vagus nerve. This surgery led to complete disaster.

What should have been routine, better than 90% success with ulcer surgery, turned into the extreme wrong end of the curve. She never recovered. Next came several years of heavy drugs to deal with the danger and the pain, several years of hospital visits and all they create, which includes having her purse stolen three times. (She was not stupid, but they can't protect the purse either, not against staff and she would go to work, then to the hospital, or to the hospital overnight and then to work. Sometimes she didn't come home at all. I would often visit.)

The hospital visits were mainly for nutrition. Every few days for years, she had to have help keeping her electrolytes in balance, and often spent time on the heart patient floor because of dangerously low potassium. She was at the extreme end of bulimia, but it was iatrogenic rather than psychological, at least as far as anyone could see. She had beyond severe acid reflux disease because there was nothing to stop intestinal bile from climbing into her throat. They gave her viscous lidocaine to swig so that her esophageal pain would be anesthetized. Ann also got an unending supply of strong pain meds. There was no choice in this. She had several central lines. Used the way she had to, they fail, or get infected.

In the end, after eight years, the actual trouble began to quiet a bit, but the drugs broke her. She became a severe depressive and began a fall into alcoholism so severe that it was routinely life threatening. We would try alcohol treatment. We would try mental treatment, hospital stays. She had been in therapy for years, including the years before all this. She got me sober based on good work herself under a psychologist. She had looked for healing all her life. She began to try suicide. She wasn't good at it. She also tried to drink to death. There is a stage in that process that becomes terrifying to whatever still can be upright, not Ann. This would be the point where she literally couldn't drink any more. She never had memory of that stage. She was not there, but whatever was there would ask for help. This would be perhaps only hours away from death. A couple of hours in the hospital and the life threatening stage would be over, but the damage would be done, a little further.

Eight years, trying to get better, then eight years trying to die. She succeeded. This poem was written recalling a time perhaps six years into that first eight years, while she was fighting for life.

Because You Couldn't Eat

And I sat beside
You when they collapsed your lung
With the catheter
When you gasped in shock
At the change that made, breathing
Hurt so bad right then.

I ate with nurses
In the cafeteria
Aching for you, me
At this one more time
In this fucking hospital
Chipping more away
From you as if they
Hadn't taken quite enough yet
And I'm losing you.

January 12, 2009 2:29 PM

I wrote this poem in the comment section of Lucy's Box Elder site. Lucy's Tom was in hospital and she was running back and forth, and getting far too familiar with the hospital staff. Me over several years, I had that experience.

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This is a very different poem, thank God. I apologize for how heavy that all is. However I know I am not the only one who has had this kind of experience. On the other hand, I know I am not the only one like this next poem either. And what a hypocrite I am. I don't want to look at your kitten pictures but I of course would love for you to look at mine :P




When I see you coo
And purr over some picture she puts
In your face as you
Sit with her, she home
With new child, puppy, kitten
Or some such new life,
Or the photo is
Of another achievement
By the family,
When I see you then
I know you give love better
Than I can, me who

Shrinks back from all that.

January 13, 2009 12:33 PM