I found myself yesterday unexpectedly, unwillingly reliving the end, really the climax of my memoir, as I was lying on a gurney at Mount Sinai (having a routine test, nothing serious), talking to an anesthesiologist who had come into my curtained cubby to take my history with anesthesia. And when he asked me about allergies, I told him that I was allergic to barbiturates, as I always do. He looked at me, surprised, asked how I knew that. I said that in my early 20s I was given sodium pentothal during an operation at Bellevue Hospital and was told as I was coming out of anesthesia that I had stopped breathing, that I had almost died, that they thought they had lost me. Why sodium pentothal, he asked, did you have a – and I can’t remember what he suggested I was being treated for – but I said No, it was back in 1966, a long time ago when sodium pentothal was routine, was the drug of choice to put you out during an operation. And he said, Oh, yes, that’s what they used to use it for. Then I added, I was in Bellevue because of a botched illegal abortion, and then I said, all of this gratuitous at this point, but I couldn’t stop myself, I said, And you can imagine how much what’s going on now with abortions upsets me, and I burst into tears, the emotion of that day in Bellevue in July1966 suddenly back in my mind, in that place it hides, the place where I’ve kept it for so many years, just a story to tell, the feelings carefully sealed, packed away.
This really was moving. I found myself shocked by the suddenness of the rush of emotion, springing out in an unlikely setting. The lightest of connection (with the anaesthesiologist) opening a door that is usually so tightly closed it's almost invisible.
ReplyDeleteDeeply moving piece...so resonate with these deeply hidden events that at the time had to be buried so far down the emotions could not even connect. Sometimes all it takes is that small trigger and a safe place to explode the storage box...
ReplyDelete