One to Ten, How Much Does It Hurt?

 Pain Happens
Michael Sedano

July 2014, a week after the Fourth, I lie feverish, in pain, not acceding to Barbara’s demands she drive me to the emergency room. I am enjoying jubilant sounds out there, kids romping in our swimming pool. Pain comes and goes from bad to extreme. One to ten what number? Eleven. That kind of pain. I’m not convinced I’m dying until a physician, who’d been watching the kids, pushes on my abdomen and I grimace and groan. New pain atop pain i'd been holding back, convinces me.

I wake with a few punctures in my belly and waist—robo surgery, I’m told—and a plastic bag attached to my left side. A young man carbuncular, the surgeon, swaggers into the recovery room informing me he’s cured my diverticulitis. He pauses then delivers his punchline, the surgeon brags he's removed two feet of intestine. ba da boom.

I didn’t know I had diverticulitis until he tells me I don’t have it now. Peritonitis made the surgery a challenge he continues, he couldn't see too well through all the muck. Quite a challenge as it develops. 

Three days later, I turn grey and get a code blue ride to the surgical suite. Doctor comedian nicked the spleen and it is consuming itself. I’m bleeding to death. Now the surgeon slices me from sternum to abdomen to fix his fix. Who would have known the young man to have had so much blood in him?

I died during that surgery, splenectomy, but I get sent back from the other side by the ancestors telling me to get out of line. I wrote about it when the Dilaudid had worn off, in this La Bloga-Tuesday column (link).

July 2014 was as consequential a month as I’ve lived (other than August, when I was born, and married, and returned from overseas). I’d died and come back in July 2014. 

Science calls it an NDE, near death experience, but science doesn’t respect cucui, the spirits, and thinks brain chemistry, DMT, cooks up those visions and messages, “delusional ideation,” researchers call what happened to me.

Twenty-one days in the hospital teaches me to understand physical pain. I while away the hours locating the source of pain deep inside. This allows me to brace for the next wave of explosive pain so it won’t kill me again. Waves of pain blind me and I writhe into deeper agony, groaning into the empty hospital room with the world happening beyond the curtain.

This week marks my twelfth year back on this side of the curtain. I was ready to remain over there with the welcoming spirits who’d assembled. I know now why the ancestors sent me back: Barbara needed me.

Physical pain from one to ten has no counterpart for existential pain—in 2018 Barbara’s dementia of the Alzheimer’s type diagnosis delivers me into a new career as a caregiver. The disease arrives hard and quickly accelerates how she changes. What the books foretold happened one after another with relentless inevitability.

Alzheimer’s produces unrelenting all-enveloping pain in my heart and thoughts. I turn off emotion. This is now my life and I live it every moment of every day. COVID drives us to shelter in place for the rest of our lives. Barbara transitions in February 2023.

Living with Alzheimer's dementia changes both people. Only now do I possess the wholeness to write Barbara’s and my story of living with Alzheimer’s, and my new story, after Alzheimer’s.

We had only time.

Alzheimer’s happened to Barbara. She experiences it alone, by herself, I cannot share that, nor bear it in her place. Behaviors so essential to her personhood change. How painful when I recognize the absence of something as fundamental as a smile. When did I see her final smile? Why didn’t I notice? The pain of regret doesn’t diminish, only memory puts regrets in their place, deep inside where pain comes from.

In 2014 I cross to the Other Side and return. In 2018 Barbara and I begin living with Alzheimer’s dementia. I get sent back because Barbara would need me. When we’d wed on my birthday in 1968, we vowed to one another, “all the days of our lives.” 

There is no pain in joyful memories.