And so I was in the hospital – with 3 IVs running through my veins, a catheter, hooked up to oxygen, strapped to a heart monitor, lungs filled with fluid, heart not properly pumping, white blood cell count 2.5X normal, narrowly avoiding surgery, on heavy pain meds.

Other than parents, only my college roommate and my daughter’s godparents visited.

Didn’t matter how many degrees, contacts, experiences I had.

I just lay there.

Trying to survive.

And that was a lesson in how powerless we really are as human beings.

But I was also cracking jokes, laughing when I could, and encouraging the staff. One of them said I had incredibly high pain tolerance as most people would be screaming in pain rather than joking around.

Because we Malaysians are really, really hard to beat or kill.

Initially the staff wanted to give me Tylenol for the excruciating pain. That would have been akin to using a pellet gun on a charging rhinoceros.

Thank God for Oxycodone. And yes, I now understand why it is deadly addictive – it feels like blessed relief when it kicks in, like pure comfort.

Early on though, they would also miss my doses of painkillers, which was not fun. One night, a nurse vainly attempted to draw blood multiple times from what she thought was a vein but was really a tendon. We all laughed in a shared sense of dark humor and misery.

Sometimes, things are so f____ up that’s all you can an should do.

The hospital’s equivalent of Internal Affairs paid me a visit to ask me to narc on the nurses but I knew better than to do that.

Snitches get stitches.

Or in my case – no meds.

They also gave me a walker to use at home after my stay even though I told them I wouldn’t need it.  I used it for exactly one day before learning to stumble around.  I also didn’t take a single pain med since then, not even over the counter ones.

And since then, which has been over a year.

I guess I could point to that as strength, grit, resilience, or whatever but that’s not the full reality.

The truth is that it took a long time for healing, months after discharge.  Slowly but surely, and with setbacks.

A very wise friend made the observation that the healing process can take longer than the actual illness.  And that the experience leaves us changed, not better or worse, just changed.

And so it is with all types of injuries and wounds – physical, emotional, spiritual.