The Needle

What happened in the hospital

Van Gogh, Corridor in the Asylum, 1889

CW: extended descriptions of physical pain and medical procedures. Mom, don’t read this one.

“The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.” - George Macdonald

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I was hungry, but I couldn’t eat. I must’ve bitten my tongue when it happened, because it felt swollen and tender against my teeth. They’d rescued my lunchbox from the car, the purple one I pack when I know I’ll spend the day going from job to job, but I couldn’t eat anything in it. I could barely force words around my thickened tongue: speaking felt cottony, and I slurred my speech like Frankenstein’s monster every time my roommate, E, asked a question. I couldn’t eat, but I was so hungry I felt sick, and my head hurt.

My head hurt. My mouth hurt. My chest hurt. My eye hurt, and I hadn’t opened it yet. I didn’t know if I could. My arm hurt where they’d threaded the IV into my skin, and I held it half on the back of my chair and half in E’s hand, bent at the only angle that softened the lingering pinch. A heavy blanket pinned my legs to the folding chair, and I’d curled against the wall. A nurse had wrapped gauze around my head. I could feel the blood drying on my cheek.

Once, a nurse came and called my name. I shuffled off the blanket and hobbled after her. The laces of my boots were still untied from when I’d changed out of my cold and bloody clothes into my roommate’s sweatshirt and the thin blue pants a nurse had brought me—“It feels like wearing a Swiffer cloth,” I’d joked to E—so as I followed the nurse, I tried to watch my shoes and the floor and the woman who moved too quickly past doors and stretchers, all through the blurry headache-splintered vision of a single eye.

She led me into a room to X-ray my ribs, then had me clamber onto the thin white bed of the MRI machine and lie there as flashing lights and whirring sounds floated around me. I’m like a prisoner on a Martian spaceship, I thought. This is how they begin their experiments on my fragile human life-form.

But the torture was not yet to come. Instead, the nurse led me back to the waiting room, where I again huddled against the wall beneath the blanket. E asked if she could do anything to take my mind off the pain. It was the right question: the ever-present pain in my body had driven my mind into a corner, trying to ignore the ache, but unable to distract itself. Everywhere was sore and slashed and strained, and yet I wanted to jump up and run laps around the room, anything to distract myself, or, better still, to drive both mind and body into an animal submission where both were silent and I could fall asleep at last.

“Read me poetry,” I told E.

She did, pulling out her phone to read. I stared at the tiles and let the syllables of her soothing voice roll over me. I thought about knights and Vikings and the bards who’ve stirred men into battle, and as my roommate read, the steel of stronger thoughts than mine entered me with every word. I propped my head against the wall and almost rested.

“That’s an…interesting choice for a movie,” E said, glancing up at the screen above my head. “It’s like a Jim Carrey slasher thing.”

Then the nurse called me again and once again I hobbled down the hall to a little room. I don’t remember if she left me there and the doctors came later, or if they were there when I entered. But there were two of them: a young Asian man with thick-rimmed glasses and a dark-haired woman. They sat me in a chair, unwrapped the gauze from my head, and began to examine the wound. They washed the blood from my face, which hurt. They made me force my eye open, cracking the half-dried blood that matted my eyelashes; that hurt too. They dug cotton swabs under the skin of my lower lashline to sweep dirt and bits of glass from the eye socket; this burned and made tears run into my eyes. It hurt, everything hurt, but I knew they were only doing what needed to be done and that the more I cooperated, the sooner it would be over. So I locked my jaw and begin to recite silently: “Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name…” When I got to the end of the prayer, I began over again.

And again.

And again.

After vision tests with bright lights and tiny letters, they laid me on a reclining chair. I was tipped backwards, with my neck angled downwards, as if I was in a dentist’s chair where something had gone horribly wrong.

The doctor explained that he was going to numb my eye. Then he began to describe in detail to the other doctor—a student, maybe—the size of the needles and the thickness of the sutures he would soon be threading through my eyelid. I lay there with my eyes closed and watched the colored specks, green and blue, spark against the fiery wall of my inner lid.

Something punched into the thin skin beside my eye. A heavy metal rod forced itself beneath the shredded petals of flesh, and an itching, burning venom clawed its way along the tip of the cold spear and spread. I must’ve made a startled noise, because the young doctor said, “I’m numbing the lid and the area around the eye. I’ve got a few areas to go.”

I nodded. Another punch, again the heavy bite of metal in the fragile skin, again the burn of the injection. Punch. Bite. Burn. Again.

I scraped my teeth against each other, biting on nothing, jaw clenched. I curled my hands into fists until my nails pricked my palms. I hissed and sucked breath through my teeth, heaving like a sick dog. Punch. Bite. Burn. Again.

I thought of all the stories I’ve ever read of men and women under torture, of Nien Cheng in Shanghai, of Palden Gyatso in the Tibetan prisons, of the victims of Beria and his secret police. The doctor seemed to me a torturer, who drove his iron stake into my eye again and again to drag some forced confession from my lips. I began the Lord’s Prayer again, but found I couldn’t make it further than the first two sentences. So, like a broken track, I stuck there and ran them around in my head over and over: “Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done…”

The headache that had lingered in the waiting room now roared into the empty space behind my closed eyes. Every new punch of the needle threw a cement wall into the hollow of my head. Again I felt the restless panic: my mind wanted to pull itself out of my body to escape the pain that now flooded the quiet, dark room behind my eyes, but there was nowhere for it to go, nothing on which to fix itself, nothing to think or feel to escape the piercing needle and the headache’s battery.

The numbing injection finished, the young doctor began to stitch. Although I felt the needle working in and out of the gashes, it didn’t sting like the syringe had. But in the dark room, nothing changed: my head felt like it was splitting open to let all the green stars spurt out and spill over the chair to pool in slick puddles on the sanitized floor. And all the while demons drummed inside my skull, and my earlier nausea twisted into my stomach again, and the young doctor kept stitching.

I had lost the Lord’s Prayer. Now, I could only repeat silently, over and over, “God it hurts. God make it stop. God it hurts, my head hurts, God stop it please. Please God it hurts. Please stop it. Please God make it stop. End it God.”

The needle twitched into a bloody flap of skin, and I felt it pierce. My hand jerked and I hissed.

The needle stopped. “Did you feel that?”

“Yes.” My voice was full of rust.

“I’ll have to numb it some more.”

God no it hurts, please no, make it stop, God help. This time when the syringe tore into the eyelid, I screamed. Had he been a torturer tasked with exacting a confession, I would’ve broken. I jerked my head away, I cried, I told him that it hurt and begged him to stop.

“Only a few more,” he said, reaching for the side of my face.

The air tugged itself from my chest. “I’m going to throw up.”

“Okay. Okay.” I felt his hand on my back, helping me upright. I opened my eyes.

I was still in the small hospital room, not a torturer’s cell. Without my contacts, my vision was a wash of blurred shape and light. A lamp with a cold white bulb hung over the chair where my head had been.

“Can you grab a water?” the young doctor asked the dark-haired woman. I heard the door open and close.

The headache had receded when I sat up, but my stomach felt sick, and worse, my chest was tightening and pins-and-needles had begun to spread from my hands up to my arms: tell-tale signs of a panic attack.

“Here.” The doctor passed me a green plastic bag shaped like a gas mask. “If you need to throw up.”

I hunched over in the chair. The panic twined itself, serpent-like, around my rib cage and began to squeeze. Frantic, shallow gasps shattered my chest as I fought to choke fresh air down my throat.

“Deep breaths,” the doctor said. “Take a few breaths.”

Wow, this is his bedside manner? I thought. What does he think I’m trying to do?

I knew I needed to lie back down, that until he finished I wouldn’t be free. But I could neither slow my breathing nor force my body back onto the chair. A hand passed me a small plastic water bottle. I managed to twist off the tiny cap and swallow a mouthful. The water was cold. I took a few more sips, and the sickness in my stomach retreated.

The only way out is through. The thought seemed to come from nowhere, a whisper in the dark room. The only way out is through.

I passed the water bottle and the green plastic back to the second doctor and laid back down. Immediately, the headache snarled awake. “Okay, I’m ready.”

We began the hellish routine again, the syringe and the stinging injection. Again I slipped into the dark room where everything seemed to echo with pain, but when I felt the punch of the needle along my eye, I bit the air and hissed, but didn’t let myself scream.

“Good,” the young doctor said.

He bent his arm across my chest and put a gloved hand on the side of my face to steady it as he began again to stitch. I wanted to lean into the new warmth; I wanted to clutch his arm; I felt a rush of clinging affection. We were alone in this, the doctor and I. He alone could reach a hand into the dark room and comfort me by ending the pain.

As he worked, I lay still, curling and uncurling my toes inside my boots to try and anchor both body and mind to something other than the shells which exploded in my skull and the needle weaving lace into my tattered eyelid. A line from Eliot flashed across my mind: “The wounded surgeon plies the steel.”

I had stopped my earlier litany. The pain had not stopped; I had been put in the dark room and left to slip deeper and deeper into the hurt. And yet, I seemed to feel a Presence, off to the side of the chair, who would neither leave nor vanish the needle and the headache. I was not safe; neither was I alone.

A new ache lanced my head and I groaned.

“Did you feel that?” the doctor asked.

“No,” I whispered. “My head hurts.”

“Here, we can adjust a bit.” I heard him touch the headrest, so I raised my head a little, and the neck of the chair clicked into a new position. When I dropped my head, the headache slunk from the dark room in a merciful retreat, leaving a peaceful hollowness. I lay still, gentled, almost asleep. The doctor worked.

After a minute—or six, or sixty, for time meant nothing in the dark room—pressure began to shoulder against my temples and the base of my neck and to kick behind my eyes. Then the pain swept back into my head. I held myself still as long as I could, but now I knew that I could feel relief, if only for a moment, and so my will had weakened.

At last, I grunted and lifted my hand to my head. “It hurts again. Can you—?”

“Sure. We’ll keep readjusting.” He moved the headrest again, until it cradled my head at a new angle. Again, a brief respite, and then the headache returned. So we began a new pattern: he would adjust the chair, I’d endure as long as I could, then give some sign, and he’d move the headrest again.

Every time the wave of pain returned, I would hold on as long as I could, because I knew that every pause for my comfort only prolonged the agony. So I would curl and uncurl my toes or drive the nails into my palm or clench my jaw hard and try to bear the ache.

It came to a point where I lost all sense of my body at all; I had left it behind on the chair and floated out of the dark room into an unbounded sea of pain. I wasn’t a body; I wasn’t a person; I was just a point suspended and hurting. I drifted deeper and deeper into the swallowing darkness, and then, buried under its weight, something changed.

I seemed to be looking at the chair from above—the corner, or maybe opposite it, where I had felt the Presence. And yet I was also in the chair, head raised, looking at myself, like in a dream where the seer and seen become confused. My chest was naked, and when I looked, it was not my arm I saw, but a man’s arm, outstretched and pinned to the air. I knew without looking the other way that his—my—our—arms were spread out like wings and held in place. There was a hole in his hand, and from it dripped blood.

I seemed to glimpse half his face, and yet no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t move and see the whole. I only caught sight of a lean cheekbone, a closed eye, the shadow of a beard. His eyelashes were wet with sweat or tears. On the left side of his face, in the same place where the needle had so many times pierced the skin above my eye, he wore a knotted band of thorns, and from his torn and lacerated head, the blood ran down over his eye.

The doctor adjusted the headrest again, and I fell into the ordinary dark room and the familiar pain.

“How much longer?” I whispered.

“About ten minutes.”

I didn’t need to ask; ten minutes meant nothing to me. It felt like another eternity before he finally sat back and said, “It’s done.”

When I staggered back to the waiting room, another friend had taken E’s place. I sat next to her, sweaty and exhausted, hearing what was said to me, but barely able to respond.

“E and I were a little worried,” she said. “They had you back there for three hours.”

Three hours? It had felt like like three days. But it was over, and I had been carried through.