Saturday, February 4, 2017
On Saturday, they placed me in an isolation room in the hospital.
An isolation room is a strange thing.
As you sit in your bed with the negative air pressure, you realize that by placing you in that room, they are declaring you to be dangerous to the rest of the world. You assume you are in the hospital for your own benefit, but they don’t design an isolation room to protect you, but rather to protect the rest of the world from you.
Think on that one for a moment…
While in the isolation room, the doctors and nurses would come in, all dressed in gowns and masks and more as a means themselves from the dangerous patient.
I can tell you, that’s an odd feeling!
One new thing I learned in that room was that the hospital had a policy of giving belly needles every day to patients.
This may not seem like a big deal, but every morning they would come into my room around 6:30 am and drive a needle into my belly. It hurt—a lot!
Every day I would dread the thing, and I think they kind of enjoyed it. I don’t want to speak ill of them, but I suspect they looked forward to my cry of pain. I’ve talked to other people about a needle in the belly, and they didn’t seem to think it was that big of a deal, but for me, it really hurt!
Every… single… time!
But belly needles aside… in that room… the isolation room… I suddenly faced time alone with my thoughts.
Aside from the steady hum of the filters working to protect the world from its newest threat, a growing realization took root in my heart. The encephalitis diagnosis was serious.
Very serious.
Unfortunately, the doctors hadn’t given me much information. There are two reasons for this: first, most doctors don’t know an awful lot about encephalitis; second, even if they do know something about it, they don’t know what the results will be until they happen. They knew I had a virus wreaking havoc in my brain, but there was no way to know what the result would be for me until it all worked itself out!
What I faced (Zoster Encephalitis) was a viral infection in the brain. That meant that I might walk away relatively unscathed, but it just as easily meant I might never walk again. Encephalitis can leave you crippled, unable to speak, unable to think straight, or it can take your life.
The doctors had no way to know what might happen to me because only time would tell how badly encephalitis would hit me. All they could do was get the antivirals in me and hope for the best, hope that they had started the treatment early enough.
I was 40 years old when this all happened. I have a young wife who somehow remains in her early 20s despite the ravaging of time that attacks my weary, troubled body. My sons, Liam and Ezra, were young as well (13 and 7).
And suddenly, there I was, laying in the hospital, facing what may be the last few days I’d ever walk again… or perhaps the last few days of my life.
When you come face to face with your own mortality, part of what makes it so hard is when you think of those you love. For me, I didn’t want to leave my wife a widow, and I didn’t want my boys to grow up without their dad.
It was during this time in the hospital that I had to face some painful truths about how uncertain my future was and how it was all entirely outside my control.
On that Saturday, if I remember correctly, that’s when I started to write.
Over the years, I often made up bedtime stories for my sons. That was a special time for me as a parent, and I feared those days were at an end. So, while I lay in the hospital, I wrote a bedtime story for my boys. I thought that if I died, I wanted my sons to have a fun story they could read to remember me by, to remember our time together at bedtime.
I figured if I didn’t make it through, my wife would be the one to read it to them, and I found joy in putting a story together for them.
I set out not to write a short story, but an entire novel. I wanted them to have something they could enjoy over many days.
In time, I learned that writing is excellent therapy for the brain and doctors have encouraged me to continue doing it, but at that moment, the motivation wasn’t therapy as much as a matter of inheritance.
So, that’s what I did. I poured myself into this story. An experience that turned into a passion and has continued to this day.
To be continued…
