Thursday, February 9, 2017
I awoke with my normal pain in my head, my itchy forehead, an uncomfortable eye, but no fear of belly needles.
It was already shaping up to be a good day.
I had nurses scheduled to come to my home each day. Their job was to make sure the tubes going into my body were clean and clear, to hook up fresh bags of antivirals and to tell me I could not shower because it would get the PICC line wet (we found a way around that one).
The regular nurses who came to the house were nice, friendly, and helpful. We still really didn’t know what was going on with me (no one really did) aside from the mystical word “encephalitis”, but they helped as much as they could. It was relatively easy for them to say, “You have encephalitis, and this is what we need to do to get rid of it,” but no one really knows how the future will look once your treatment is underway.
Things had, however, changed. My brain wasn’t quite the same as it was before.
My first real look into how things had changed happened Thursday morning. I had not realized how much the isolation room in the hospital, with its lack of noise, interaction, and mental stimulation, was a blessing to me in my recovery.
My wife and I had just finished having breakfast together. We were chatting, and she asked me to send a text to someone. I started into the text, and while I was texting, she said something or other to me… nothing major, she just casually mentioned something small. The combination of trying to send a text and listening to someone talk sent me to the other room for an hour-long nap.
Wrap your mind around that one…
The experience of someone talking to me while I tapped out a text on my phone exhausted me so much I had to sleep for an hour!
I also remember trying to pour myself a cup of coffee after returning home. That sounds unimportant, but it stands out in my mind because it taught me I was in a far worse condition than I had understood.
It’s a simple thing to do, of course, to pour a cup of coffee. Unfortunately, someone tried speaking to me at the same time, and suddenly coffee poured all over the place.
Multitasking had become my enemy.
I didn’t notice the change in the hospital because, while there, I never had two things happen at once. They never tried feeding me breakfast while giving me a belly needle. They never tried asking about family medical history while giving me a belly needle. They never tried giving me an MRI while brutally shoving a stainless-steel tube in the trusting, sensitive skin of my precioius belly.
I’m sorry, I guess I’m still a little bitter. I will have to examine my heart and move towards forgiveness.
But the issue remained, when I first came home from the hospital, I could no longer do two things at once. There was a point there where I struggled to carry on a conversation if I was standing at the same time.
I know what some of you are thinking when I speak about multitasking, because I’ve heard it before (even from a doctor). You’re dying to chuckle and say, “Ahh… maybe not being able to multitask is a good thing!” or “None of us really multitask well!”
While that sounds wise… while it may sound helpful to encourage people to do one thing at a time, that’s not really the issue.
Imagine, for a moment, that you want to tell someone something important. Now imagine that you have to find a chair before you tell them the important matter, because you can’t think on a deep level at the same time as keeping yourself upright.
It’s either stand or speak. Not both.
Multitasking is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s something we often take for granted.
The path forward was going to be a far more difficult journey than I’d have understood.
To be continued…
