Photo credit: Jen Eudy
I was in the hospital last week with a septic infection. This means that bacteria jumped to my bloodstream and the doctors pounded me with high-powered IV antibiotics in an attempt to protect my life. Sepsis is a slippery slope where patients can, in a matter of hours, fall into a coma and die. I caught my infection relatively early so I was really sick but never in an acute battle for my life. Still, with every fever spike, the threat was in the faces of my caregivers. This unsaid tension was present for all of us to drink. In this severe place, a clarifying and insightful vigilance took hold in my mind. I was aware of the smallest fluctuations in my bodily state, but also of beauty and hope and purpose. I would swing from the powerlessness of watching my rising high blood pressure, pulse rate, and body temperature to weeping in the next hour while listening to David Bowie deep, haunting voice sing a line from his song, Sound and Vision, “Don’t you wonder sometimes about sound and vision.” I was popping with the expressions of both fear and gratitude.
I had great nursing care while at Methodist hospital, including Shannon, Angie, Caitlin, David, and Timeus. There was also a nurse named Walter. He was from Kenya, having moved to the US after high school. Now in his mid-thirties, Walter was quiet, strong, hardworking, a husband, and father of two. He spoke with an accent and a sparkle in his eyes that was clearly not from this country. I was lucky to get him talking during his double shift with me. Once fully heard and truly acknowledged, Walter lit up with stories.
I asked a standard question and received an unexpected response: What do you miss most about where you’re from? Walter’s eyebrow rose as well as his eyes as his gaze met mine. Now for the first time, two humans beings were truly making contact. He said, “Really?” I nodded. Then with a smile and a laugh, he said, “Okay, let me think about it,” and he left the room. He came back a couple hours later and said something like, “Don’t take this the wrong way but…this is a country of opportunity and I love it here, but this is not a country of freedom.” As he said this, he looked away from the IV tubing and saw the quizzical look on my face. He continued, “It has taken me years to figure this out, but what I really miss is the feeling I have when I land back in Kenya. When I step off that plane, I feel freedom. I do not feel that freedom here.” Clearly, the puzzled look remained on my face. He laughed again. “You have so many rules here, both visible and invisible…who you can talk to and who you can’t. Everyone is so distant here, so occupied. And everything is monetized. Everything costs. I have to pay for more things here than I ever could have imagined.” He looked away and said, “What I truly miss is a simpler life.” And yet Walter said he would never want to move back to Kenya.
There are so many unspoken, invisible, intangible rules, nuances, and labels that constrain our lives. Later in the evening, Walter rhetorically asked me, “How can a number tell you who I am?” He was referring to a credit score.
In the clarity of sepsis, I thought about the sensation of freedom. Here I was sitting in a hospital bed with the protection of my own life seemingly out of my control. I stared at the plastic IV bags, the bruises on my arms from failed blood draws. I felt the cold saline solution entering my veins. I looked at the call button and the control panel that raised and lower my bed in a myriad of directions. I felt my heart racing from the sepsis and the fever coursing through my body. Underneath all this, I started to feel an ease, a lightness, an ambiguous mixture of possibility and hope. I remembered like falling into bed that I preceded it all….me, my hum, my boundary…me. I imagined Walter stepping off that plane into the African sunlight.