Precursors to death

‘All Stubborn acts are childish acts.’ Hanya Yanagihara

Was it stubborn of me to insist we hike over to Office Works that day in search of a chair mat for underneath my writing desk. Something inspired me and although time was limited I had it in mind I needed it that day. A spring day with the first promise of warmth peeking through the clouds. And my husband, who like me relished a trip to office works as much as any one of us stationary fashionistas was keen to come along. 

We located the section where they sell desks, and office chairs, all the bric-a-brac of secretarial life office managers dream of, at the back against a wall. There underneath one of the desk chairs someone had piled three thick sticky floor mats alongside a loose one already dragged out. 

I made the mistake of standing on this loose mat not realising it was upside down. Its rubber lumps giving the mat suction on hard wood floors were to the surface under my feet while the shiny plastic surface, slid against the floor with me perched on top. 

I toppled and fell. As you do in such moments I flung my left arm out to cushion my fall and it buckled under my weight. I didn’t hear a crack but felt it. Nine out of ten on the pain scale and I knew my arm needed attention.

It was late Saturday morning and busy enough, but the streets were not clogged when my husband bundled me into our car and we hop frogged between traffic lights all the way along Bridge Road as fast as we could to the Epworth Hospital and emergency. 

There was no delay once the triage nurse took one look at my wrist. 

‘Get those rings off now,’ she said and helped me peel off gold wedding and eternity rings, as I winced in pain.

‘In another five minutes, we’d be cutting them off,’ she said. Handing the rings to my husband who pocketed them, as if they were left over change. 

My fingers had morphed into fat pink sausages with purple threads swimming in all directions across my wrist and I had no energy to ask him to take good care of my rings.  

A doctor came by. An Xray later and he said kindly, as if talking to a small child, 

‘We’re just going to give you a quick something. You won’t feel a thing. We’ll wrench your wrist back into place if we can. And if that doesn’t work, you might need surgery.’

I didn’t even have time to hope for the best when the procedure was over and done.

‘It didn’t work,’ the doctor said. ‘We’ll admit you now. You’re scheduled for surgery this afternoon. Three o’clock or thereabouts.’ And he was gone.

The wait passed in a fog of pain and apprehension. Then as predicted a tall smiling orderly came by my bed and wheeled me into the waiting room for surgery. My husband left soon after I was settled in the ward and I had left my phone behind with my valuables locked in a nearby cupboard. Now out of range of loved ones and reassurance. 

I figured it would only take minutes but as they ticked away I could feel my panic clutch at my throat. There was a huge television screen overhead featuring a David Attenborough special. No volume so I could only imagine the story from its action. 

I’m not snake phobic but there on the screen a writhing sea of black snakes, their reptile skins slick in the sunlight were coiling and uncoiling nearby a small mound of what looked like fresh soil, enough to make me gag.

From underneath this mound one after another, A series of tiny baby lizards popped out, just hatched from eggs, and were skittering across the ground in search of safe haven. As soon as one appeared the snakes uncoiled and were after it. It bolted away on its tiny legs and the chase was on. 

Even freshly hatched into the world, it was as of these tiny creatures had a sixth sense on how to evade the creatures trying to eat them. They swirled and swung, then wheeled into a corpse of bracken and disappeared. And we viewers could sigh the relief of those saved from death. They were safe. 

Then the next and the next. I watched in horror. David Attenborough’s usually genteel show, even when he portrays the seeming brutality of the animal kingdom, was never as much a horror show to me as that day when one after another of the lizards came into the light for the first time only to be greeted by those ferocious predators. 

If they were human their cortisone levels would be full up and they’d be traumatised for life.

Time passed and a young woman was wheeled into the pre operative area and then out as I waited my turn. Eventually a nurse came by, and I asked why it was taking so long. I asked as politely as I could knowing the way hospitals work and how it does not do to become a difficult and demanding patient. You get a better deal if you’re docile, even if it means you’re more invisible. She shook her head and went to check her notes. 

So, I waited, and despite myself, tears trickled down. I let them fall, a measure of my misery and wondered whether the nurse might notice and offer me a tissue and words of comfort. 

She did not. By the time David Attenborough had finished speaking at the end of his program, not that I could hear his words, but the credits were rolling, the nurse came back to me.

‘The person before you broke both wrists after he fell from a roof  and it’s taking longer than we thought it might. You’re on next though.’

I thought of my mother who lost her last baby at 43 years of age. Her eleventh baby and only her second one who did not make it past infancy. A still born girl she called Anne Marie. My mother told me the story years later. How soon after the baby was born they moved her into a room with another bereft mother, a girl whose baby had been taken from her at birth because she was young and unmarried. 

My mother felt so sorry for this young woman that she could not complain too much about her loss. After all she had another nine healthy children back home. 

How could I complain of a short wait on the surgery floor when in time a doctor would tend to my broken wrist, and all would be well?

The same tall orderly arrived at last, still smiling and wheeled me along white corridors with dazzling lights over head into the operating suite with even more dazzling lights not only overhead but on all sides, as though we were in a photography gallery with cameras poised high on tripods in every corner ready for action. 

A nurse tapped my arm seconds before the anaesthetist jabbed something into my arm, ‘Your blood pressure is at 200,’ she said, and before I could respond, What can I do about it? I was asleep.’

Where does stubbornness come into all of this? My fall and broken wrist, a punishment for my haste or something else. I know many stubborn adults, I would not think of them all as childish, but Yanagihara is right when she allocates the sensation to a quality of childhood. 

I think again of those baby lizards determined in their stubbornness to survive and the swirling black snakes equally determined in their hunger to be fed. 

It’s not always such a bad thing to be stubborn unless your refusal to budge off course is accompanied by a will to refuse life and push in the direction of death. However much the act of death is the most stubborn move of all. It will not let us be.