Body Friend

I was in the hospital for five days. I thought of myself as a young person having an old person’s operation. I wasn’t yet thirty and my joints needed replacing. The procedure seemed to go as it should, and the pain, with the deadening of strong medicines, was surprisingly minimal. The transitions were difficult. Home to hospital. The suddenness of a thin hospital gown on a naked body. Pre-surgery and the last moment staring into the anaesthetist’s eyes, to the dissonant blur of awakening, stitched and raw. Horizontal immobility to standing, knocked by waves of low blood pressure. The surgeon ordered me to stay lying down for the first day after the operation, in case I fainted.

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Throughout the first night, the woman in the bed next to me moaned for hours and spoke constantly of her pain. I asked the nurse if there was a private room. There were none, she told me, not unsympathetically. The next I saw a young white boy, a teenager with blond hair, as he was wheeled post-surgery to the private room next door. I had missed my chance. The insurance to cover the surgery cost a hundred and thirty dollars a month. A person was required to be covered by the policy for one year—a year full of the constancy of painkillers, the limp I so hated—before claiming the procedure, and even then some extra thousands were to be paid directly to the surgeon, un-coverable costs, which I had in the bank only due to some book money, my first of that kind, and so I wondered if I’d been hoodwinked by this private insurance system with its surreptitious costs and unavoidable waiting.

Once, during those five hospital days, I had to go for X-rays. I had no idea what time of day or night it was. As I lay face up on the bed, skimming thoughts nowhere, two nurses came into the room and lifted me up using the sheets, one on either side to form a makeshift stretcher. They set me down on a bed on wheels and pushed it along the various corridors connected like limb and joint, turning wide and slow at each corner. We arrived in the X-ray area, signalled by ominous black-and-yellow signs with a windmill-like image warning of radiation danger. For whatever reason—perhaps it was a busy time—the nurses left me. I lay on the gurney, my palms facing up, in the empty corridor. Soon I was desperate for the toilet. I couldn’t get up, I wasn’t yet able to stand without help, and there was nobody nearby.

A terrible loneliness in that moment: fluorescent, whirring air; chemically sharp, clean floors; a body waiting and needing. When I was finally taken back to the ward, lifted again with the sheets and onto the bed, when finally the nurse brought me the bedpan, pulled the sheet across like a magician covering up a secret process, the pan was close to full and I was too embarrassed to ask for it again during her shift. I learned when the nurses stopped and started, when I should wait or ask for things again, so as to avoid seeming too demanding.

It’s frightening how quickly it became a home to me, how soon I was habituated to the cell of a bed, how it became a point of view in which I felt safe, the view of the tops of the buildings in Richmond, five days watching sunsets and reflected sunrises through glass, content that I would never be out there to see them. I liked the regularity of the early breakfasts, done by seven, the tea served mid-morning and then again mid-afternoon. The visits from various staff on their rounds—choose your lunch, your dinner, choose tomorrow’s breakfast—and how strange it must be, then normalised, for their daily tasks to involve seeing someone in their most vulnerable, unselfed state. The conversations that took place around me, beyond the protective white curtain. Time passed in small deep sleeps of journeys to an ocean floor, and in visits from family and friends during which I felt a fragile, strange specimen in a white cloak, surrounded by loved faces who brought in the weather—summer, warmth on their cheeks; who brought in eyes and purpose from outside; who were suddenly slowed by the steady, focused quiet, convalescence, fluorescence, astringent air and fetid beds, the rise-and-fall of the hospital. Perhaps the enforced enclosure and stillness of a hospital validates for a time so many of our subversive, subterranean longings.

I became so accustomed to the routines of the hospital, to the noises and unending light denoting a knowing presence, to the people, almost always women, who brought tea and cereal, tea and biscuits, lunch and then more tea on a tray wheeled in on a trolley, to the sealed view of an east-facing sky above the suburbs to my left, the thin white curtain making a permeable wall to my right and separating me in quite a pointless way (I could hear her breathing, her swallowing, her body’s fluid gurgling after eating; how did sight make a difference?) from the person next to me. I didn’t drink coffee for five days, my body didn’t want it, and I was entirely dependent on others.

I was told that I was ready to go home, after the five days my surgeon predicted.

Tomasz helped me into the car, I used the crutches we had purchased because to hire them would likely end up more expensive, a fact I railed against, while Tomasz told me it was fine, relax. And who knows, said the consulting physiotherapist, you might need them again someday, a statement I likewise resented and repeated to Tomasz after the woman left. Outside, the day was bright and I noticed the fresh air, the smell of jasmine and exhaust fumes. A kind of jet lag, and strange, to be in a different time from others going about their workdays. I was removed from all that, a state both freeing and constrictive, bound up as it was with my ideas of choice and control, how illness could come through and steamroll both things, while perhaps shedding light on other truths, and how there may be a hesitant freedom within yourself in this state while you nevertheless try to operate in the more restrictive structures of society and economy around you. I think all this in retrospect, of course. On that trip home I contemplated only banalities: the steep stairs in the house; whether I’d be able to sleep; how long Tomasz would stay home with me while I recovered.

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From Body Friend by Katherine Brabon. Used with permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright © 2024 by Katherine Brabon.