You Do It To Yourself

How We Make Our Own Suffering

I thought she was dead. No, I knew she was dead.

Brittany, my girlfriend and the love of my life, is a cancer patient. Starting at Christmas that cancer took a pretty serious turn, and things have been gnarly ever since. One of the ways it got gnarly is that she began accumulating fluid around her lung, and she had liters and liters removed from her chest cavity. The fluid kept coming back, and so the doctors decided to insert a catheter, a PleurX, into her chest so that the fluid could be more easily drained, and we could drain it at home.

She went in for the procedure. She wouldn’t be put all the way under, but rather be in what they called “twilight.” After the procedure she would be brought to a recovery room, where I could join her. We had done something like this the first time they drained her lung, and so I thought I knew how it would all go.

I was in the waiting room when I got a call - it was her doctor, telling me that the procedure was over and Brittany had done great. A relief. She was being brought up to the recovery area and I would be able to see her soon. It was all looking good.

And then about five minutes later a voice came over the hospital PA: “Rapid response team to Helford 2B.” That was where I was. A rapid response team is who they call when something has gone wrong, when there’s an emergency.

In that moment I knew she was dead. I could see it in my mind - she had crashed as soon as she had been brought upstairs, and doctors were surrounding her, one of her arms limply falling off the side of the hospital bed. They were frantic, there were machines making noises - I had been in hospitals enough the past three months (and watched enough ER) to have a totally clear vision.

Panic set in. It’s a familiar feeling for me now - my face gets numb and there’s pressure on my eardrums. My fingers tingle. My mind somehow simultaneously slows down and speeds up - there is a torrent of thoughts and fears that rush across the screen of my consciousness, but each of them plays out in excruciating slomo.

Then I realized I would have to call her mother. I was going to have to call her mother and tell her that her daughter had just died, had just died after a fairly routine procedure. What would I say? My brain immediately began composing a statement, went right into writer mode and started working out the right words in the right order.

What would I do without her? How could I live? I imagined the silence of the apartment, the way a space is differently quiet when someone is gone, even if they weren’t making any noise when they were there. The way the air and the acoustics change when there isn’t someone in the next room, breathing and living. The silence of absence.

An hour passed like this. I paced in the waiting room, my mind kept showing me visions of Brittany in that hospital bed, not breathing, a sheet being laid over her head. It was 4K UHD, not so much a vision as a memory. I wasn’t speculating, this was knowledge. I knew, and there was no question that what I knew was true.

And then after an hour they called me back into recovery to see her, and she was fine.

For an hour of my life I tortured myself. I put myself through an emotional wringer that would likely break international law if inflicted on another person. In the words of Radiohead: You do it to yourself, you do, and that’s what really hurts.

Now, I did have some prior experiences that contributed to this panic. For one thing, the last time she went into recovery after a procedure I was with her within a half hour. The hour felt like an eternity, and waiting that long convinced me something was terribly wrong.

The other experience was a moment where something did go wrong. This was at the tail end of one of her recent hospitalizations, and we were about to go home. She had some final tests and appointments to get through, and we went to the labs where they draw blood. She had been bed bound for two weeks, and was very weak, but for whatever reason we didn’t tell the nurses this.

A couple of minutes after she went into the lab I heard a voice on the PA: “Code blue in VAD. Code blue in VAD.” (VAD stands for Vascular Access Device, which is the name of the tube that has been semi-permanently inserted in her arm so that they can inject chemo right into her blood stream more easily). As soon as I heard that I had a terrible feeling, a premonition, but I told myself I was being silly.

Then a group of people ran into the lab room, answering the call. They were in there for a few minutes, and then two of them came out. I was sitting in the hallway, among a whole crowd of people waiting their turn to get their blood drawn, and I watched as these two people scanned the crowd, looking for someone. I felt strongly that they were looking for me. Finally, I made eye contact with one of them, very serious eye contact, and she said to me, “Are you Devin?”

That panic feeling. A flush of fuzziness as the blood does what it does when it thinks something real bad is about to happen. I told her I was in fact Devin.

“My name is Joanne, and I’m a chaplain here.”

Just a thundering moment of horror. There are some people you don’t want to be approached by when your loved one is in the hospital, and certainly the chaplain is near the top of the list. This person’s whole job was being there in crushing moments of fear and pain. She was now here for me.

“Brittany is doing okay,” she said, and then explained that she had fainted while having blood drawn, likely because of the fact that she had not been on her feet for days.

“You really need to lead with that,” I said. “Definitely don’t lead with the fact that you’re the chaplain.”

So you can see I had priors here - experiences that informed my reaction in that waiting room. And that moment with the chaplain was like double confirming - I had a bad feeling and then my bad feeling was proven true. Nevermind that I have bad feelings, terrible premonitions, gut churning hunches all the time and they never turn out correct, all my brain could focus on was the one time I did exhibit a little bit of anxiety-influenced precognition. If you’re always expecting the worst you’ll eventually be right, and being right one time is more than enough reinforcement for the next time you expect the worst.

But I didn’t know. Sitting and pacing in that waiting room I knew I didn’t know. I knew that what was happening in my mind was projection, imagination, dark fantasy. My brain was writing itself a movie, one that was claiming to be inspired by true events, like Fargo. But none of it was true, and all I did was make myself miserable. I made myself sick.

And here’s the thing: even if my panicked feeling had been right, agonizing over it for an hour wasn’t going to solve anything. We like to think that we can prepare ourselves for the blow by imagining it, but we’re actually not that good at imagining it properly, and so the blow still feels like a sucker punch when it lands.

What happened to me in that waiting room is what we do to ourselves every time we succumb to anxiety and fear, just that this was a little bit bigger than the day-to-day version of it. In Buddhism there’s a story about a traveler who takes refuge in a shed overnight, but he does not get a good sleep because he spends the entire night terrified of a snake coiled in the corner, ready to strike. But when the sun comes up he sees that the snake that menaced him was just rope, turned into a snake by the darkness and the delusions of his own perception.

I have an extra stumbling block with this stuff - as an Italian I have a genetic disposition towards superstition and believing that just maybe I can see the future, or have a vision, or whatever bullshit my peasant ancestors would have taken for granted. Mix that with a diagnosed anxiety disorder and you get yourself a real self-perpetuating delusional fear that simply keeps feeding on itself.

The only reason I didn’t lose my mind in that waiting room is because I knew this. Even as I knew she was dead, I also knew she wasn’t. I knew that I was torturing myself. And I knew there was nothing I could do about it in this situation, that despite my sobriety and meditation and spiritual whatever I don’t have the kind of control required to break out of that particular trap. But knowing that I was in the trap helped; I wasn’t going to go and touch the snake to prove it was rope, but I also wasn’t going to fully turn myself over to fear of it. I utilized resources I had; I did breathing exercises and I made my poor father deal with my anxiety through text messages (the fact that I could keep it to text and didn’t need to get on the phone is frankly a testament to how much better I dealt with this than I might have a decade ago. Actually, the fact that I reached out to anyone instead of just losing my fucking mind is a sign of immense progress). I also was able to be aware I was having an overreaction without berating myself about that overreaction - this would make my therapist so proud, to finally have a moment where I wasn’t telling myself what a stupid asshole I am.

This is the essence of all the spiritual journeying/self improvement that we try to do over the course of our lives - it’s not that we’re going to handle situations perfectly, but that we will be able to handle them better than we once would have. It’s progress, not perfection as they say, and knowing that you’re never going to get it right - that there’s always room for improvement. But also recognizing when you handled it a little bit better than last time.

The road ahead of us is long and scary. This cancer stuff - it sucks, I’ll be honest. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of opportunities to freak out and panic and imagine the worst (hell, I’ve done it at least once today). When that happens I just have to remember that this is something I’m doing to myself, that the torture and the pain are entirely self-inflicted, and that just because I think that’s a snake over there does not mean I actually know what the hell I’m looking at.