Expansion and Contraction

Usually, by this stage of the winter, my city has been shut down by at least one freak ice or snow storm. If it’s snow, there are generally not enough plows in the Willamette Valley to make the streets passable right away. When it’s ice, local officials generally don’t use salt to melt it because we live near too many sensitive waterways, and whatever deicer they use is limited to critical through streets. I’m much too much of wuss to try to drive anywhere on slippery roads. Once, after a snow storm, I tried driving my Prius C down a major arterial in hilly Southwest Portland; I got maybe a quarter-mile away from my house before the car started slipping in a way I didn’t know how to control. Heart pounding with fear and regret, I clicked on the turn signal and let myself quietly glide onto a side street, where I came to a safe stop and called my husband for rescue.

This is all to say, I don't go anywhere during even relatively mild winter storms, and my world feels very small at those times. Even if there's nowhere I need to be, I hate the feeling of being stuck. This year, instead of a storm (knock on wood), I got trapped at home for two weeks by pneumonia. My world shrank to the size of my bedroom and, for some unpleasant number of hours, a gurney in the emergency department. My earthly concerns dwindled to what was happening inside my lungs. When you’re worried about being able to breathe, it’s hard to focus on the news, pay bills, or catch up on missed chores.

I tried to be a good worker bee and return to the office a week after my first emergency hospital visit. It felt nice to retread the familiar path, including a purchase at the nearby coffee shop, and to immerse myself in something besides personal health concerns. But I found that I was still coughing frequently and breathing with some difficulty, so I went home for the afternoon and worked from the recliner. My physical world had shrunk back down, but my virtual world had expanded, and it was good to feel useful again. I managed to knock down a majority of work tasks that had accumulated in my absence.

The next morning, still working from home, I tried to keep up the cadence but grew fatigued. I begged off for the afternoon and suggested to my boss that I might work half days the rest of the week. Then I went back to the small, dark bedroom where I’d been sleeping alone in a king-size bed for ten days. My breathing grew worse, every meager lung expansion followed quickly by a contraction. I woke up knowing that I should return to the hospital. So my world, instead of expanding, shifted back to a familiar detour: emergency room, triage, exam room, hours of tests and IV drips. This time I had oxygen and albuterol to help me breathe, and a CT scan for a more thorough look at my chest. My pneumonia hadn’t responded to the first round of antibiotics, and in fact was more widespread than was evident before.

They started me on a stronger antibiotic, and made sure my blood was sufficiently oxygenated on room air before discharging me. I’d been offered the choice to be admitted, to get the full course of medicine under supervision at the hospital. It was tempting, since I didn’t want a third repeat of this ordeal, but the doctor convinced me that my own bed and home-cooked food would probably be more healing. So I went home and stayed there, making calls and sending texts to cancel all the plans I’d made to leave the house that week: Pilates, haircut, a massage to ease the strain from a recent cross-country flight, a birthday celebration with friends. (I turned 43 on Saturday.) Everything had to be rescheduled, even the doctor appointment that was supposed to be a routine follow-up to my original hospital visit.

The first IV infusion of the new medication seemed to do its job. I started to breathe more fully the next day, which helped me to relax and start noticing more about the world. It’s a bit like the climax of the movie Pleasantville, when the suburban characters’ black-and-white environment explodes into color for the first time. I have started going for walks to gently exercise the lungs, letting my thoughts wander along the way to subjects beyond my illness. I’m interacting more with my son and husband. I helped prepare dinner and actually ate a full plate of food, after two weeks of wanting to eat very little. I’m pretty confident that I’ll be able to keep my rescheduled, and much needed, hair appointment.

My lungs still aren’t back to full capacity; I get winded after doing laundry or unloading the dishwasher. But at least I can participate in everyday life. I hope for these antibiotics to keep working, and for the boundaries of my world to continue expanding like breath.