The Hospital

Surgery and beyond

I spent last week in the hospital having a repair and revision of my ostomy. I had surgery on Monday, and I got home yesterday afternoon. Many people have asked for updates on how it went, so I’ve decided to write about it and share a few photos as well. We’ll start with the hair washing I had in bed several days into my stay when my hair was getting pretty gringy, using a special shower cap that washes hair:

Hospital shampoo: put on the cap, massage it around, wait 20 minutes, take it off, and presto, clean hair:

Result of in-bed shower cap shampoo

View of the mountains from my hospital bed

I got into photographing abstract shapes in the room

The Surgery

The surgery yielded the best possible result. Thankfully, my surgeon was able to do it all laparoscopically—he hadn’t been sure beforehand that he could. The hernia tear was repaired with mesh, and the ostomy was “revised” but not relocated. My surgeon took out roughly 4 inches of my colon and changed my loop colostomy into an end colostomy.

When I saw the pathology lab report, I learned that the roughly 4 inches of colon they removed began with the stoma. The stoma is the end of the intestine that they bring through the belly muscle and out through the skin. Stool comes out of the stoma and empties into a bag that is attached to the belly with adhesive.

As many of you know, my previous stoma, whom I had named Otto, and I had a very close relationship for these last 8 years, and I was initially sad to learn that he was part of the 4 inches of colon that were removed and sent to the pathology lab. However, my new stoma is round and smaller than the old one. This means I can now order pre-cut ostomy bags and will no longer have to cut the irregularly-shaped hole on every bag myself as I’ve done for the last 8 years. Hallelujah! And, my new stoma insists it is still Otto, just a different part of Otto. All in all, the surgery has left me in a much better place than before.

The only bad news is that hernia tears can recur, especially in older people, and especially in older women, because the tissue is weak. There’s also a risk of infection after a surgery, especially abdominal surgery, and especially in older people. So there’s no guarantee that this is a permanent fix or that I’m out of the woods just yet. And of course, as Hank Williams famously sang, “No matter how I struggle and strive, I’ll never get outta this world alive.” But I think there’s a decent chance that I’ll be around for a while longer.

Recovery

Being a patient turns out to be a full time job. You don’t just lie there peacefully in silence as one might imagine. Your days are very busy, and so are the nights. One thing after another happens. An endless stream of people come to your room. I worked with the ostomy nurses on learning to use a new ostomy appliance that will perhaps give me greater freedom of movement. I met with a dietitian on what to eat as I recover and beyond. I worked with a physical therapist on how, with severe abdominal pain, to get in and out of a regular bed that doesn’t have all the nifty features of a hospital bed. With an occupational therapist, I practiced getting dressed and undressed, putting on and tying my shoes and then untying them and taking them off. Everything is way more challenging with abdominal pain! My surgeon or one of his physician assistants visited me daily. Nurses arrived every few hours with medications. Medical assistants came to check and re-check my vital signs. The phlebotomist showed up to draw my blood around 2 or 3 in the morning. Meals were delivered. A cleaning person came and went.

The pain was pretty bad and still is. But my spirits have been great, and I very much enjoyed the myriad human interactions. These medical workers were all younger folks of diverse racial, cultural and economic backgrounds, all doing this great work together. They were all beautiful, radiant beings. We had a lot of fun together, a lot of laughter and love. I live in a retirement community, and although some of the folks I meet with on Zoom are young, I’m mostly surrounded by, and in the company of elders like myself, so being around younger folks all day was a very refreshing and wonderful treat.

Beyond Spirituality and nonduality

I brought 2 books with me to the hospital, Love’s Drum by Elias Amidon, a Sufi teacher, and The Emperor of Gladness, a novel by Ocean Vuong. I never once opened the novel. I did read a tiny bit in Elias’s book, but not much. It’s a gorgeous book, but I found I had little or no appetite for spirituality or nonduality, and focusing my eyes on a printed page seemed to be difficult with all the pain meds. So occasionally I’d try and then give up.

One night, I got an email from a dear friend who is dying of cancer. She probably has about two months to live. She wrote, “I suppose I should practice ‘like my hair was on fire,’ but I don’t. Cured of that by Ramesh, Darryl, Robert and you (ha ha).”

I wrote back, “I’m with you. Rather than practicing like our hair is on fire, I wonder if simply being as we are, and as Mary Oliver says, ‘letting the soft animal of our body love what it loves,’ might not be a better way to go.” I was referencing a favorite stanza from Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

—Mary Oliver

My dying friend responded with a poem by the poet and satsang teacher Dorothy Hunt:

What if there is no place to arrive?
No nirvana apart from samsara,
no heavenly chorus welcoming us home,
no cheering bodhisattvas at graduation
into the second or tenth or thousandth
level of reality?

What if this breath is enough?
this moment is enough,
these tears of sorrow or joy are enough?

What if tomorrow never comes
because life is always now?

What if we simply stopped?

— Dorothy Hunt

YES YES YES!!!!

Coming Home

I got home late yesterday afternoon. I’d made a reservation in the dining room for dinner with a friend here in the retirement community, and I needed to eat, so off I went. Once I got there, it hit me how utterly exhausted I was. In fact, I was in that state where you suddenly fall completely asleep without having any sense that you’re about to do so. You’re just suddenly gone. I almost face-planted into my dinner plate. My friend saw me going down and called out, “Joan… JOAN!!!!” just in the nick of time to save me. That near miss made me laugh, which is painful to do with abdominal pain, but still enjoyable.

This morning I took a shower and washed my hair the real way—what bliss!

The pain is pretty bad and there’s some nausea, but it’s been a beautiful day. I sat in my armchair, the sun was out, the Forsythia bushes I see from my window are wildly yellow. White pear blossoms are raining down like snow, turning the ground white and providing a magic show in the air.

The appetite for writing about spirituality or nonduality seems currently absent, although I can still speak of the wholeness and nonduality of everything, the sacredness of everything, the beauty and love everywhere, and the ease of being at peace with life as it is, no longer practicing like my hair is on fire. Even drinking coffee again, with half-and-half no less.

Once again, I want to thank all of you for your support and love.

Home again!

Love to all…