I spent a large portion of my Memorial Day holiday weekend at the hospital.  It started on Saturday afternoon when I fell deathly ill at home, my belly swelling up as though I were 9 months pregnant and continuous trips to the bathroom and back to the couch.  I was alternating between fever and chills and literally didn’t move the rest of the day or night but rather stayed curled up in a tight ball under a blanket with the a/c set to 85 degrees, shivering.  By 10PM I was calling my mom up in Dallas and telling her that I was going to the hospital on Sunday morning so that somebody would be aware of what was happening.  By the time I dragged myself out of bed early Sunday morning mom was already crossing the Austin city limit line and was near my front door, something that I didn’t know she was doing but that I was grateful for.  We headed to the ER at St David’s Medical Center in Austin.

It was a quiet Sunday morning in the ER.  I was ushered in quickly to a room and put on a hospital gown.  I laid down on the table and waited on for what I pictured would be a sweet, elderly Santa Clause looking doctor to come in so that I could comfortably confide in him about my green, explosive diarrhea that had formed over the past 24 hours.  I figured he would chuckle and say something wise and maybe offer me a peppermint or some other sweet, grandfatherly piece of confection and then he could pretend to pull a quarter out from behind my ear while writing me a prescription for some powerful commercial grade Imodium and I could continue on my merry way with my many fun, holiday weekend plans. 

Robert Burns, the Scottish poet known in the world of poetry as the ‘Ploughman’s Poet’, once wisely wrote:  “the best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry”.  I wasn’t going to get to go on my merry way with my Memorial Weekend.  And my doctor wasn’t going to look like Santa Clause.  He was going to look more like Dr. McDreamy, with jet black hair and piercing blue eyes and a nice smile.  And he was going to have to touch my swollen tummy while I howled and he was going to have to order stool and urine samples, and the male nurse that came in to draw the blood and hook me up to the IV was also going to be just as equally gorgeous AND really clever to boot.  He gave me the pan to collect the samples in and told me to let him know when it was ready so that he could get it sent over.  And for the rest of the Sunday of Memorial Weekend my mom and I stayed at the hospital while I got medicine and fluids via IV and we waited on the test results. 

The band Cold War Kids have a really profound song about being in a hospital called “Hospital Beds”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyhkQzPLjcA

What I love about the song is the vulnerability of sharing the experience of sick with unknown others in the same place.  If you don’t have your health of your body you don’t have much of anything.  And in many cases the illnesses and afflictions that land you in such vulnerable positions with other strangers come unexpectedly.  Just like war.  Illnesses can come on sudden or gradually and pin us down and trap us into a place of pain and uncertainty that we are forced to cope with, a vulnerability so real that our almost immortal sense of self is shattered and we need people, and we need faith and trust and healing while we fight the enemy.  It can be the most transformative of battles and not everybody “wins”.

In a fitting tribute to Memorial Day weekend I happen to be reading a book about war while going through my own private health war.  It is called The Last Full Measure: How Soldiers Die In Battle.  It sounds like a morbid read, but the purpose of the author’s writing and the purpose of my reading the book doesn’t have to do with anything dark or ugly but rather the humanity and grace of this situation that so many young men have been put in over the centuries mostly against their will.  From the book, a poem written by a German soldier heading off to war in 1914:

“Before dying I must write my poem.

Quiet, comrades, don’t disturb me.

We are off to war—death is our bond.

Oh, if only my girlfriend would stop howling!

What do I care? I am happy to go.

My mother’s crying; one needs to be made of iron.

The sun falls to the horizon;

Soon they’ll be throwing me into a nice mass-grave.

In the sky the good old sun is glowing red;

In thirteen days I shall probably be dead”

He was killed later that year.

Last year I was chatting with a customer in her mid 60’s about her family and she mentioned that she used to have 2 brothers but now only has one.  Thinking that one had recently passed I asked what happened to him?  She said that he died in the Vietnam War.  He was the baby brother, and her parent’s favorite.  When he got his draft notice they couldn’t bear to drive him down to the bus station to leave for the war so she drove him down and waved him good-bye.  And when they got the notification that he had been killed in action it was she that flew to Dover and picked up his casket and brought him home.  As she recanted to me this story, standing in her front lawn in Euless, Texas she was bawling, over 40 years later.  And all I could offer in comfort against this ancient ugliness was tears of my own and a hug.  It brought back memories of the day I eloped at age 19, standing in the back office of a plant farm in Joshua Tree, California.  The pastor that owned the plant farm who was marrying me and my then-husband was a retired Air Force chaplain.  One of the vivid memories of that day was a large mural hanging on the wall of his office, with newspaper articles and letters and black and white pictures.  It was a mural to his son killed in Vietnam.  He wouldn’t talk about it.  I’ve never forgotten the impact of that tribute.

On Friday, the day before I got sick, I was at the Paramount Theater in Austin watching a rare, 35mm print screening of Frank Capra’s 1933 film Lady For a Day.  The film was being presented and discussed by special guest Leonard Maltin, a famous film critic.  The moderator doing the Q&A with Maltin pointed out the obvious unrealistic story line on the film plot of this film, but Maltin disagreed.  Instead of calling Capra (famous for sweet and gentle film classics like It’s a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes To Washington) naïve, Maltin argued that he was the kind of film maker who chose to treat his subjects with dignity, something you don’t see much anymore in film making in the era where everything has to be ironic and tragic.  

It’s no secret that confusing wars that have sprung up since Capra’s time like Vietnam and our most recent Middle East wars have caused a jaded generation of souls eager to identify with the art forms of irony and tragedy.  Yet we are here today exactly where we are because these people, willingly or not, strangers amongst strangers, went to battle and some won and some lost.  This is the reflection of what Memorial Day is about, as we are all in this together, generation connecting generations long past.  It is a gratitude that we all owe as we ride our jet skis and kick off the summer season .  Or lay in a hospital bed sharing joy and misery with fellow ill combatants. 

I ended up being diagnosed with a specific bacterial infection that was brought on by recent antibiotic use, and the only way to go to war with this infection will ironically be with more (different)  antibiotics.  This is something a bit hard to swallow for me as I hate prescription drugs and am rarely sick, but I will fight it to the end with the help of the drugs and support and understanding of friends and family, and secretly too in my own heart the ghosts of those who have passed on, who gave me the privilege and freedom to have this little infection battle to begin with.  Because I know if they can do it, winning or losing, big battle or small battle, I can do it too.  And as Bob Marley, who lost his own fight with cancer at age 36, says:  “Don’t worry ‘bout a thing cause every little thing gonna be all right”.  Much love and thank you to everybody on this fun adventure with me, strangers and friends alike.  I wouldn’t change a thing.  Except for the fact that maybe the next time I need to give a stool sample my doctor and nurse don’t have to be so gorgeous.