Anyone who has ever had the unfortunate experience of an extended hospital stay may be able to relate to this.
I was admitted to hospital for a number of emergency operations after a serious trip and fall accident which resulted in a crushed bladder and shattered shoulder. I laid in a coma for eight days. Of course I was completely unaware of anything going on around me.
My first recollection upon waking was the sound of multiple songbirds and what sounded just like Luciano Pavarotti belting it out from the room next door. My first thought was, “Have I died?”
I soon learned that the bird calls and excellent operatic performances were the work of a single patient in the room beside mine, who was a very talented, albeit eccentric young man to say the least. He would lie on his bed, buck naked, singing his heart out while making beautiful bird calls, as he held onto his Willie like a microphone as if performing at the Metropolitan Opera House. Show times always started on schedule every night at 7 o’clock sharp and continued until the wee hours of the morning.
All hospital staff, patients and visitors were automatically invited to this command performance whether they liked it or not, simply by being within earshot, or walking by his open door. I ultimately tagged him as the “BirdMan of the Opera.”
During this impromptu concert, I was trying to figure out what had happened to me, while a nurse kept trying to rouse me from my half conscious stupor by poking, jabbing and tickling the soles of my feet. Apparently she became so flummoxed after multiple attempts to revive me, she called my wife and asked if I had ever been known to not want to wake up. I believe my wife told her, “Yes, pretty much every weekend.”
Eventually, when I started to get closer to full consciousness, the nurse asked me a battery of basic questions such as did I know my own name? Apparently I struggled with that one. Did I know where I was? Of course not. What year is it? I had no idea.
Whatever drugs they had given me during and after my operations were playing havoc with what little understanding of my surroundings that I did have.
It was later discovered that I had a severe allergic reaction to the opioid based painkillers they had been pumping into me, which resulted in a lot of very scary and realistic hallucinations. My opioid induced delusions were so powerful that one night I crawled under the bedsheets in my hospital bed and somehow managed to phone my wife at 5:00 AM in the morning in a total panic. I told her she had to call the police to come and get me.
When she asked me where I thought I was, I had to admit I had no idea but I was certain the hospital staff were going to kill me.
On another night, I was sure that I was in a secret army base in the jungles of Vietnam with a patient named Mike who was in another hospital room down the hall. The only thing I knew about Mike was that he used to be a math teacher and he was constantly screaming like a mad man for more pain meds even though the nurses all said there was nothing physically wrong with him.
So yes, between BirdMan, Mad Mike and my own opioid induced paranoia, I was in a very bad state of mind. Clearly, I was not firing on all cylinders.
As someone who always considered myself to be pretty level headed, I was terrified that I was going off a mental cliff. I honestly don’t know how anyone could be attracted to drug use.
It was late one night during this point in my confused state of mind, that The Angel of Death came to call.
I have never had any interest in the occult, voodoo, or otherwise been fascinated with the topic of death, but when the Grim Reaper entered my hospital room that night, I became interested in death - - really fast!
It was around midnight and the night nurse had just left after leaving a glass of water and my pills on my night stand before closing the door. The room was pitch black except for a crack of light leaking through the bottom of the door from the hospital corridor.
All of a sudden the blackness in the room was replaced with bright light from the hallway when my door was pushed wide open. Jolted awake, I turned my head to see a very short and thin figure looking into my room. At first all I could make out of the silhouetted being in the doorway was very scraggly shoulder length hair and wearing some type of gown or cloak.
At this point I couldn’t tell if the figure was male or female. My first inclination of whoever, or whatever was standing there, was they were probably a patient from another ward.
After a moment, I came to the realization that the figure was a woman, and apparently a very old one. I said, “Hello, can I help you?” but there was no reply. She just stood there not moving, staring straight ahead at me.
I continued, “Are you looking for someone?” thinking she had wandered into the wrong room by mistake, and this was while my half drugged brain was trying to make sense of what was going on. She just continued to stare at me for a minute or so, and then raised her right arm and pointed it directly at me.
I’m thinking, oh crap, I’m completely bedridden, I can’t even sit up in bed, I have my shattered right arm in a sling and I have no idea what this woman wants. I was quite aware of some of the other patients around me who were clearly suffering from various degrees of mental illness. It didn’t take long for me to realize there was no way I could protect myself if I had to. I wondered, does she have a weapon? What does she want, and why isn’t she saying anything?
Now the paranoia is really starting to kick in. This feels like a Stephen King movie. Is she here to kill me!” Is this how it's all going to end?
Now she begins moving slowly into my room, getting closer and closer. She continues to move towards me with her right arm still outstretched and pointing directly at me. Isn’t that what the grim reaper does, touch someone when it’s time to take them? My mind is going wild. Now I’m out of options and resigned to the fact that I’m toast, so let’s just get this over with….
Just as her outstretched hand was inches away from me, I knew I had to try one last thing to ward her off so I said, “Back off creepy. You're in the wrong room. It's Mad Mike and Tweety Bird next door you want. Take both of them together and that’ll save you another trip up the elevator again!”
Just then I heard a man’s voice come from behind her, “Mary, there you are! I’ve been looking all over for you. What are you doing here? Come on dear, we have to go back.”
Go back? Go back where? To Purgatory? To the Gates of Hell? To the land of Fire and Brimstone? Go back to where? Maybe she had filled her quota of souls for the night and had to go back to wherever she came from.
As soon as the man who was speaking to Mary entered the room, I recognized him as one of the interns on the ward floor.
He reached over and gently held her left hand and began to turn her towards the doorway. In a soft comforting voice he said, “It's okay Mary, let’s go find your room. Would that be okay?”
As they started to leave my room, I saw him take the glass of water she was holding in her right hand and said, “Let’s get you a nice glass of water of your own. This one belongs to this nice man.”
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Copyright 2024 Kenneth Lane Smith
All Rights Reserved
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