Staph and Spirit, Part 1

     I've been sick the last nine weeks or so, with a major staph infection serious enough to be hospitalized for five of those weeks. My wife (my best caregiver) didn't tell me right away that the second night in the hospital, my doctor told her that I "might not pull through." Twice in the course of the five weeks I experienced "flash pulmonary edema," where fluid filled the areas around my heart and lungs and I felt "air hunger," literally not being able to take a full breath. During these attacks, my blood pressure skyrocketed to over 240. I believed in those gasping moments that I was going to die. Without the very skilled medical attention I did receive, I might have stroked out or otherwise been compromised enough to stop living.

     I'm home now two and a half weeks. I'm much, much better. I'm walking and moving, although a cane sometimes provides security. My zest for food has returned, although I don't have half the appetite I did before I got sick (some would say that's a good thing). My sleep is beginning to get better. I am slowly returning to work, a few patients at a time.

     It's the spiritual side of all this that I want to talk about. In the hospital, many sleepless late night hours gave my mind free rein.  I couldn't beat down the creeping fear of losing my breath and dying, or at least being terribly sick the rest of my life. A young rabbi who was the chaplain on our floor asked me in one conversation: "How do you experience God here in the hospital?" I answered mainly through the helping, healing hands of the staff, from janitors to aides, nurses and doctors, etc. So many loving, kind and skilled people helped me feel cared about and taken care of. But that's the story I told myself in more hopeful moments.

     As I said, during much of the hospital stay, there was a fear in me that felt crippling. As someone intimately knowledgeable about trauma from counseling hundreds of firefighters, EMT's, and other 9-11 survivors, I saw that I was traumatized acutely, especially by the two scary episodes of pulmonary edema and that doctor's doubts about my survival which I learned about a few weeks after he spoke to my wife. The looping re-experiencing of those awful moments, especially in sleepless late night hours, was terrrible. Trauma takes away that implicit sense of safety and predictability in life we all usually take for granted.

     I was fortunate in that a dear friend and fellow therapist, also intimately aware of trauma and its effects, picked up on my state of mind and soul  and asked if she could help. The tools we worked on together helped me regulate and better manage my fear-based physical and emotional reactions. I have given many workshops on trauma, and one of my experience-based observations is that trauma is a spiritual wound and needs a spiritual healing. Another is that the same God a person might have before the trauma will not likely survive the trauma. Both ideas could not have been more true for me.

     I'll end here, because I want to give my own experience the room to detail and expand upon. I'll continue this discussion in the next blog.