Dispatch # 17
Saturday, September 14
Alexandria, Minnesota

Perhaps as much as .6 of a mile on the Crutch-dometer. I've learned to make haste slowly. But I have learned--in my head at least--the techniques of my most recent mode of personal transport. In all my hip-break exercises so far I've only once put terrible weight on the healing hip: this morning; when Thanne had left our motel room to purchase a walker; lying on the bed and listening to the most excellent David McCullough's account of John Adams' career and thought ... suddenly Thanne's cell phone began to sing some dreadful copy of a classical melody, and I without a thought got up to answer it. My good leg took the first step, my bad leg was brought up for the second all thoughtlessly still, but the instant I put weight on it, thought fire-worked against my mental sky and I dropped to my good knee. Do you know how defeating it is just once to do the unthinkable after a good six days' good works? Guilt overwhelmed me. And in contrition I took my crutches outside the motel and walked--with slow deliberation--the circuit of this building, adding, I believe, .3 miles to my overall distance.

+ + +

In all my praises or judgements of those who have served my poor body during this tour, one element of these transactions must absolutely not be forgotten, though I tend to forget, and so it is I above all who must attend to that element: that the viewer as much affects the scene he views as the scene affects the viewer himself. Myself. I mean that my descriptions of good or poor care in the systems of communal service (health, etc.) can never be taken as genuinely objective until I and my own presence are both taken into account as well. This is the principle all reporters ought to remember--not so that they do not include their feelings and perspectives, but rather so that such feelings and perspectives (which can never, never be altogether scrubbed for any report whatsoever!) be acknowledged both by the reporter and by the readers.

So in the last dispatch, when I made health care comparisons, it would be fair for a reader to consider that I felt worse one day and better the next.

On the other hand, when writer/reporters do take into their overall account the personal elements, then readers are themselves put on alert not themselves to read too much of their own attitude into the piece being read. Get it?

In more theological terms, I am speaking of genuine self-examination and truthful confession. This sacred process cannot be done once for a week, but must become second nature for every act that includes communal and authoritative effect. And I call it "confession," because self-examination must be ready to admit something more than mistakes in one's own sight or behavior: must be ready to admit sin and low motives and narrow, self-centered purposes. "Confession" after such examination moves to sin, through sin, beyond sin, if it is not merely self-justification; if it is, indeed, performed before a righteous God who IS and whose judgment I both honor and believe in. Then there is an outside source for cleansing. (This latter the world rejects, considering all discourse and thought about God to be a matter most subjective; but that attitude of our present society is isolated from nearly the whole of our histories and all other societies. I find this worldly attitude itself fraught with a complete subjectivity, admitting nothing, nothing stable, immoveable, permanent. But God is that. And God IS.)

So, in order to show you the fuller picture of the care I have received these last two weeks, the "objectifying" lens by which you can re-view all else I've written, I must confess what a lousy patient I was late yesterday afternoon awaiting discharge.

As long as I lay abed in the hospital with nothing to bind my schedule more than the next pill, the next exercise, the next urinal achievement, I could be endlessly patient. But as soon as TIME entered the scheme of my living, I became another person. When at 5 pm the good Dr. Peterson said I could be released, I waited most impatiently for the nurse to come and begin the process. So impatient was I that when she did arrive, three of four questions got stuck in my throat, all begging expression at the same time, and so the poor nurse began to walk away from me, and I broke the throat-jam by raising my voice and saying, ostensibly to Thanne, "But I have a question to ask before she [the nurse, whose name was Mary] vanishes!"

"I'm not vanishing," the poor woman said, and returned.

In fact, I was wondering whether I should receive the next dose of my pain medication while still in the hospital, or else wait till discharge and our chance to go to a pharmacy. Now, there was some rationality to the question, especially since that next dose was due at 6. Mary went to check and returned to inform me that yes, I should get it in the hospital, and that other discharge procedures would be accomplished while we waited to that 6 o'clock hour.

I could hardly stand it.

I kept peering at the clock in my room--which I knew to be five minutes fast--as if it were Greenwich Mean Time, growing more anxious as the 6 hour approached without the re-appearance of Mary.

Then the big hand landed on 6 and I was up. Pacing. On crutches. (Can you imagine a more absurd scene than a beached whale pacing, turning round and round one fluke, the other forever bearing the bulk on the ground?)

"Thanne, don't you think you should pass by the nurses' station? Check if the nurse is there?"

"No. She said we should wait on her."

"Thanne!" (Unspoken: What about me?)

At true 6:06 pm, I rang the call button.

"Can I help you?"

"Well, I was wondering if my nurse has the medication...."

Oh, I won't go much further with this balancing account. Mary did come. Some of the stuff necessary for discharge had not yet occurred. But at that very moment, a patient was returning from surgery and needed the more immediate attentions, but by that time I had become the bunion on one of her toes--and suddenly I saw what a bad patient I had become. TIME and my sudden return to schedules encouraged in me the evil tendencies which were not gone when I was good (though I could wish they were), but which were merely quiescent then.

Aaargh!

Did I apologize? Well, yes. I hoped that the rest of Mary's night would be much better than that portion she had shared with me. But if it's a beached, beseeching whale apologizing, how convincing can that be?

+ + +

So Thanne and I spent last night in a handicap-accessible motel room, gracious, queen sized bed, while I discovered for myself the various natures of my pains, most of which had been masked till now by a dizzy variety of pain-killers in the hospital. I had the morphine button which I could push at 15 minute intervals; there were at least two other medications of pain-killing consequence (even if their first jobs were to prevent muscle spasms, etc); now there is but one and I am discovering a kind of cleanliness, a clarity about the lingering pains of surgery, muscle-destruction, shifting in the use of muscles, and so forth and so on. I like this new passage in the journey; I like to know what it is I am protecting and serving by use of these crutches. Cause and effect have a closer connection now.

+ + +

And how can I not make mention of the E-mails, cards, letters, kindnesses in all sorts of forms that have so suddenly found us here in Alexandria! No, I never was in a strange place. And that was due partly to the good people here, and partly to the goodness of people abroad who made themselves present here!

The teacher whom I've written about--"Miss Augustine," as I called her, teacher of my 2nd and 3rd and 4th grades in Grand Forks, North Dakota--picked up her telephone and called her local hospital, by which she found my hospital and my room, and then shocked us both by saying, "Hello, this is Miss Augustine," in my ear and receive my yelp in return. We had the conversation of very old friends, though her name has been Dreese ever since I left to take fifth grade in Canada, 48 years ago. She heard my father's voice in my own. We both commented on the ease of our friendship over all these years: for I had written and published several stories about her effect upon my childhood and she had accepted the stories in the honor with which I intended them--as her honor, as the honor due all such watchful teachers.

We had corresponded by picture and by writing before; but I felt such closeness to her that I could not quite believe this was our first spoken conversation in almost 50 years.

And it took my hip-break--and it took her boldness at the telephone--to make the connection yesterday that caused Alexandria to be no strange place at all, but (in effect) a home-coming! A home-coming.

To my teacher. To my presiding Bishop, who called from Wittenberg. To my colleagues at Valparaiso University. To my colleague-pastors throughout our church. To the artists with which I make my habitation and my growth. To my publishers. To my family and more friends than this one man deserves: God bless you with kindness equal to those I have already received. God bless you with every peace.

Walt