A year ago today, 9 days had passed since I suffered a stroke my doctor later confessed should have killed me.
A year ago today, I sat in a wheelchair staring out a fourth floor window at the Peace Arch Hospital, which was next to the bed I’d occupied for a few days in a room with 4 other patients. I could see the suburban houses across Russell Avenue reaching out across the distance until they dropped out of sight thanks to the hills that flow down towards Semiahmoo Bay. Beyond the bay sat the lands of the largely rural & undeveloped areas of Northwestern Washington, an area that feels like I’m stepping back in time whenever I go there to see how the Canadian side must have once felt like. Some days the white sun made the clouds pop against the blue backdrop of the sky; on others the wind blew the rain so hard a small part of me was scared it might blow out the 55 year old windows that stood between my room & the outside world.
While my roller coaster temperature had fallen back to normal, my skin was still pocketed with countless maroon hives & acne like pitted bumps. I sat in the chair for what felt like several hours, waiting for a hospital volunteer to wheel me to my new home somewhere on the sixth floor. All of my stuff was in two bags, a plastic one the hospital gave me, where my t-shirt, jeans, belt, socks, and my bumblebee boxers lay crumpled up on top of my black runners. Of all these items of clothing, my boxers were worn the most after my arrival, helping to cover my ass and my junk. But the high fevers I suffered from resulted in them becoming absolutely soaked in sweat so many times that it no longer made sense to keep them on.
The other bag was one I brought with me to the hospital. It had a USB plug with a couple of long lightning cables to keep my iPhone charged; headphones; a book called “The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, & Connection through Embodied Living“ by Hillary McBride; a small pile of papers from different departments in the hospital from mental health resources to physiotherapy.
I pass by the isolation ward daily now as I get treatment for my feet. What’s weird is I miss it.
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