A Long Recovery: A Lenten Journey
It’s Ash Wednesday. I cannot go to the rail for the imposition of Ashes. I’m grieving that this morning in the slightest way. I cannot go because I am at home, tethered by a nasal cannula and several feet of green plastic tubing to an oxygen machine. “Rover” has been my constant companion since I came home from the hospital on Feb. 1st. “A long recovery,” the doctor had said, “Eight weeks on oxygen at home” was his educated best guess.
I spent thirteen days in the hospital with Covid pneumonia. Before that I was sick at home for six days. I went nowhere but a doctor’s office and the hospital and back home from Jan. 13th for six weeks. I’ve now been home a month and twice my husband has put me in his truck with a portable tank of oxygen to “take me to ride.” My life got very slow and simple in profound ways very fast. I’ve not known how to begin writing about it.
The days in the hospital brought struggle, suffering, humility and isolation and they also gave me gratitude, beauty, monastic solitude, and soul nourishment. How can that be? For thirteen days I could not see or touch my husband. The phone was the only connection to him and my children and I was too weak and winded for much conversation. Every hospital staff person who entered my room had to be gowned, masked and gloved and then had to take it all off and throw it away every time they left my room. They tried to consolidate trips. Most of the time they wanted me to lie prone which is better for the lungs to maximize the amount of air coming in. Tubes and wires connected to my body sent information to a nurses’ station and remote respiratory therapist who monitored my progress and spoke to me through an intercom if my numbers dropped. Numbers on a blinking screen told me if I was maintaining an “A” in oxygen saturation - that means above 90%. That first week was a constant struggle to stay out of the “B” zone. Any movement other than lying face down was too costly to my stats. Day after day, in my husband’s morning phone call, he would report to me, “You held your own last night.” I could read between the lines. Every day felt like a battle for a hill. I could not keep fighting like that indefinitely. Eventually one side or the other would take the hill. I would be eight days before those numbers began an upward trajectory.
Some of those eight days are a blur. Between the steroids and the beeping machines and the in and out rhythm of nurses and assistants taking vital signs, I don’t necessarily recall the individual days and nights until Day 8 when I woke up before 4 am after a night sweat. My sheets and hospital gown were soaked but I did not care. I woke up lucid, knowing where I was, what day it was, and feeling more like myself than I had in two weeks. I knew, before any bloodwork or monitors had said so, that I had taken that hill.
It would a few more days before my doctor would talk about the recovery process or even getting out of the hospital. I would receive flowers, books, cookies, notes, blankets, crosses, all kinds of beautiful, tangible things reminding me a community of saints who surrounded me, standing in for the human presence I could not yet have. Prayers from Maine to Mobile had carried me and would continue to carry me through challenges I did not yet know were coming.
Those last five days I was at the center of the most exquisite display of Spirit-woven cohesive unity I have ever witnessed. The shimmering web was being crafted the entire time I lay sick, though I was mostly unaware until the final days when I had eyes to see. These are all stories for future posts. Yes, there will be many more. Such a halting, life-changing experience demands meaning-making, which is what I try to do here in this space, and pray you somehow receive something from it too.
Having written these words, I am done grieving this morning that I cannot go to Ash Wednesday services. I’ve been living the meaning of this day for several weeks now. I know my frailty. I felt my weakness in body and soul in ways I have run from my entire life. I know I am dust and that to the dust I shall return. I also know that at least as far as I traveled the journey was shared by the Suffering Savior. When I couldn’t remember the Bible verses of my childhood or the theological truths I’ve learned in seminary, it was the image of Christ on the cross, struggling to breathe, that carried me. I lay prone “looking at the cross” in my mind’s eye. I did not have any assurance of my outcome only that He knew my suffering and I was being invited to know his. I was not alone, ever.
This is what the Lenten journey is about - remembering that God took on weak, frail flesh, humbled himself, wrestled pain and isolation and fear, took on Death itself. There is nothing on my journey that He has not conquered. Every single thing humanity can come up against - body and soul - he has been there, felt it, battled it and won. Yes, we are Easter Christians - but how can Easter hold significant meaning and joy without Lent?
A Sunday drive in my husband’s truck was not profound or important to me the first week of January. A breeze on my face I hardly noticed before I got out of the hospital. Skin to skin contact I took for granted until the morning I hugged my husband when he picked me up from the hospital. Those are my Easter gifts. I remember, even without being able to physically join the community today at the imposition, that to dust I shall return, but I do not make the journey alone and on the other side of that dust is new life again.
