I am out of the hospital. Still waiting on full results. But am recovering in relative comfort at home, cared for by the Fair and Industrious Trudy, two dogs and a faithful son, with well wishes coming in from down the street, across town, and across the country.
So let’s get down to business…
Prelude
Appleton, Wisconsin. Some time in the 1960s. I’m pretty sure that’s where we were, visiting friends who had moved there.
I remember nothing from the trip other than I was very, very sick. They had me in a bed upstairs, in an attic it seems, for I recall some steep stairs at the end of a long room. But my recollections are unreliable. The only thing I remember clearly is that I was delirious.
The delirium was so complete, that I remember having some kind of Fantastic Voyage in which a large white blood cell was oozing around me.
It would be years before I would figure out what that was all about: the white blood cell was my tongue and the oozing were my efforts to swallow. I know this, because years later as an adult I got very sick and when trying to swallow I found myself instantly and completely thrown back to Appleton, Wisconsin in the 1960s.
When you’re sick, a delirious brain can play games with you.
…which is why I asked you here today. As you know, I’ve just emerged from a week in the hospital. And I have stories of delirium to share.
1. Constructor delirium
After the surgery where they took a hunk out of the back of my tongue, they slipped a feeding tube up my nose, down my throat and into my stomach.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that it wasn’t particularly comfortable, leaving aside the fact that their first attempt (as I lay unconsciously oblivious) was a failure, and they had to first jiggle and finally remove the first (kinked) tube and thread a new one down as I sat upright and fully conscious on the bed.
Now, a tube going down your throat is not a normal thing. And in the darkness of those hospital nights, as I drifted between semi-sleep and semi-not-sleep, my brain just didn’t know what to make of it. The best it could do was translate things into something it knows. And for two horribly confusing nights, my brain was trying to figure out why my throat software had a malfunctioning class constructor.
In this case, there were three constructors involved: two on one side of my throat and one on the other side. And it’s this last one that was causing my brain the most anxiety, because for whatever reason is was in the wrong place, or it was doing the wrong thing, and all my brain wanted to do was rewrite the code to fix the dang thing so that it didn’t hurt so much.
For two nights, that’s all my brain would think about.
2. Anchor tag delirium
As the days merged with nights in the hospital, pretty much the only thing I was concentrating on was managing the pain. The nurses were generally good at this, but sometimes just before a shift change, after too much time had passed, while I was semi-sleeping, my brain would start interpreting the pain as a malformed HTML tag.
The tag should have looked something like this: <a href=”http://mdanderson.com/pain.html“>pain</a>.
But it was missing the href attribute. Instead, the tag looked something like this: <a>pain</a>. It was missing the reference to the true location of the pain, and as a consequence things were all messed up.
Problem is, knowing this didn’t seem to help. Because no one (including the nurses) came in to add the missing href attribute.
And so for several days, in the delerium of recovery my brain was silently screaming for someone just to fix the dang tag.
3. Startup script delirium
“Something’s not working right,” I said to Trudy, sitting up in bed.
It was pitch black. She had been deeply asleep, and she didn’t have the faintest idea what I was talking about.
After all, of course something’s not working right: I have throat cancer!
But that wasn’t it. My brain was struggling to interpret some new signals from my body.
Since we had come home, I was drinking Tylenol-3 every 4-6 hours, and that stuff just doesn’t go down easily. On top of that, I had been on the feeding tube so long, that I had a lot of food in me, and … well let’s just say that it was running out of places to go. Or for the medicine to go.
And every once in a while, I would wake up with a gurgling bubble of nasty, stinging, codeine-y something coming up my throat, making it impossible to lie flat on the bed.
Clearly this isn’t how it’s supposed to work. You’re supposed to lie flat when you sleep, and my brain was trying to figure out what was going wrong.
Actually, my brain had figured it out. It had, while I was sleeping, Googled the problem and figured out that there was just missing a line from my startup script. There was an if-check that my script didn’t have, a check that would detect the presence of these bubbles before they popped and append them to another variable before… well… that was the solution: add the missing line to the script.
But it wasn’t helping. The bubbles kept percolating up. I couldn’t sleep because of it, and I was exhausted.
Postscript
“Ben, you have a strange father,” Trudy said after he finished reading.
Maybe so. But I think I’ve worked thru most of the deliria now.
