The Day I Had My Oatmeal Privileges Revoked

By all accounts, my living situation was more than comfortable. I was reclining on one of those fancy beds that can prop up at any angle you want. My room had its own bathroom and a huge window overlooking the city. All my meals were delivered to me by a friendly and pleasant staff, and I spent all day rewatching such classic films as “Finding Nemo” and “Shrek 2.” When you put a certain spin on it, the inpatient ward of the children’s hospital doesn’t sound like a bad place to be.

It was six days after I’d had a troublesome coil of intestine removed. The surgery was a practical application of the garden hose philosophy: as my gastroenterologist eloquently put it, “When you got a knot in your garden hose and you can’t untie it, you cut out the knot and glue the two ends back together.” As a special bonus, the surgeon threw in a free appendectomy, a 2-for-1 Blue Light Special on problematic organ removal. My colon was being held together with titanium staples, and all I had to show for it were two laparoscopic incisions under a healthy coat of gauze.

And, on this Day Six, I was bitter. I had been promised to be out of the hospital between three and five days after the operation, and six falls significantly further outside of that range than one might expect when looking at the raw numbers. On paper, six is not much more than five. In a hospital room, six and five can’t even be measured using the same instruments.

If I wasn’t measuring the time in days, I might have measured it in roommates. Since the time I first woke up after the operation, no less than four teenage girls had cycled through the bed next to mine, either with appendicitis or an appendicitis false alarm. I never talked to any of them, but between us I felt this mutual respect. We were not there to make friends. We were there to get treatment for debilitating abdominal pain and move on with our lives.

The longer I stagnated in bed, the more miserable I became. My inner Colin Craven was rising to the surface, prepared to complain belligerently about anything that dared interact with my physical senses. For instance, the godless screech of the IV drip when you moved your arm more than four inches at once, or the scratchy-yet-undeniably-fashionable I.D. bracelet, or the way every single item in the hospital was one of three colors:

  1. Approaching mint. The standard-issue gowns were a color that wanted to embody green, but got stuck along the way. The socks, too; the socks had rubber non-skid tread on both the top and the bottom, providing so much friction it would have defies the laws of physics to even think about slipping.
  2. Greyish-pink. All the trays, dishes, and bins were clearly from the same botched-up batch at the plastic factory. I found it uncomfortable that the containers used to store arts and crafts supplies were the exact same shade as the pails offered to you when you need to vomit. The window panes and wall trim were also this color, as if a woman said to her husband “Honey, let’s paint the baby’s room Amazon River Dolphin.”
  3. Off-off-off-white. The plastic frame of the bed and the floor tiles emanated a distinctly unbleached vibe that could be mistaken for dinginess if it didn’t smell so strongly of sanitizer.

The only thing that did not fit under any of those color categories was the button that administered morphine directly into my veins. Everything around me was an ugly muted pastel like an Easter greeting card as viewed by someone with cataracts, but that button was a vibrant royal blue ripped from Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” It was exhilarating to look at; the color was a drug in itself. By that sixth day, I barely even used the morphine anymore. If anything hurt, it wasn’t the sutures in my stomach; it was my eyes, fatigued by switching between Facebook and WorldOfSolitaire.com for almost a week.

My throat was painful, too. Just the previous day (Day Five), I’d had a nasogastric tube removed by a nervous student nurse, dragging stomach acid up into my nasal cavity and grating my esophagus all along the way. The process was not an enjoyable one, but it did free up the space for such popular activities as food. After the tube was gone and the nursing student was done apologizing, I was put on a “clear diet,” described to me as “You can eat anything you can see through.” By this definition, I could have lollipops, Jell-O, broth, or shards of broken glass.

I never drank the broth on principle, that principle being that lukewarm, meat-flavored liquid salt is not good. The lollipops were inoffensive, but the staff would always bring me flavors that I didn’t want, like lemon or grape or whatever the hell green was supposed to be. I wanted red. Red was the best flavor. I never got red. So, all I had been eating was Jell-O, or more accurately, Off-Brand Flavored Gelatin Snack. There was a time, when I was five or six, when an exclusively Jell-O-based diet sounded like a great idea. At the age of seventeen, I could confirm with all certainty that it was not. As hungry as I was, I didn’t want to ask for a meal tray because I knew all I would find was an amalgam of sugar and food coloring whose consistency transcended the boundaries between liquid and solid.

I was passive-aggressively posting a disparaging Facebook message about the hospital’s color scheme when I heard the mechanic whirr of the automatic hand sanitizer dispenser outside my room, a sound that had become my Reveille. One of the multitude of nameless nurses opened the door. They all looked vaguely similar in my post-op haze, and my efforts to distinguish them ended shortly after I was introduced to the third one. Former president Gerald Ford could have walked through my door with a saccharine smile and cartoon-character scrubs and I would have been none the wiser. I instinctively put aside my laptop, under the assumption that she was going to check my pulse or heartbeat again. Instead, she stood at the door with a clipboard grasped with both hands.

“Good news! So, actually, you are going to be allowed to transition to a solid foods diet now. Can I get you something?”

My mother and I shared a look that clearly communicated both “This is great! We’re making progress!” and “About damn time.”

“What do you have?” asked Mom.

The nurse shoved her clipboard under her arm and started counting off on her fingers. “Let’s see… we have oatmeal—”

“Oatmeal.”

I’m sure she continued listing a few more options, but that first item arrested my attention span. The power of suggestion had overtaken my faculty of choice. At that moment, absolutely nothing sounded better than oatmeal.

After a few minutes of suspenseful anticipation, a different nurse brought in a Styrofoam bowl and a plate of sugar packets. With the first bite I felt my third eye open, my chakras align, my humours balance. My throat, still raw from intubation, graciously received its grainy baptism. I thanked my new god, the guy on the Quaker Oats box, for deliverance from another cold, slippery cup of yellow dye #5. The oatmeal wasn’t particularly good on an objective level, but since it shared no empirical qualities with Jell-O, I felt like a seventeenth-century peasant invited to dine in the hall of his lord.

After my life-changing religious experience and a few hours filled with unwon rounds of Solitaire, my surgeon opened the door. Since I had been unconscious for a majority of our interactions, I barely recognized his half-covered face. He was in a surgical mask and gloves, as if my room happened to be on the way as he was rushing off to remove a kidney. He quickly inspected my healing scars, and asked how I was feeling.

A surgeon’s interest in your health pretty much ends as soon as all the open holes in your body are stitched up. I should have known that his question was more out of courtesy than genuine interest, but I was tone-deaf in my bliss. The absolute euphoric high of a proper breakfast was affecting me far more intensely than the morphine ever did.

“I ate oatmeal!” I proclaimed in the prideful tone of a second grader who just learned to tie her shoes and wanted the whole damn world to know.

I saw his eyebrows scrunch up, concerned, under the scrub cap. Out of all the reactions I could have anticipated, this was not among them. “What? No, that’s not right. You’re still supposed to be on a clear diet. I’ll let your nurse know. See you!”

After he shut the door, something in my morphine-warped mind snapped. I immediately started crying. The unfortunate cocktail of long-term confinement, sleep deprivation, and general misanthropy channeled all of my lethargic energy into a sobbing pseudo-political rant. The right to eat oatmeal is a common courtesy that our society takes for granted. It’s the eleventh commandment carved into Moses’ stone tablet; the fourth unalienable right penned in the Declaration of Independence. I never realized what an important liberty I possessed until it was denied. Was it really in the hands of this lone surgeon to revoke my right to eat oatmeal, and was it legal to retroactively repeal that right after I had already reaped its benefits? Was the brevity of this exchange an indicator of its integrity or lack thereof? Could he be impeached, or was I not allowed to eat fruit yet?

“Ha.” My mom laughed, exactly once. “You’re a lot more talkative since they removed that tube.”

I couldn’t argue with that. She clearly wasn’t taking this matter seriously, but a smile broke through my outrage.

If I was more alert, I might have seen that the oatmeal was a metaphor. It was hope, it was healing, it was a near future where I didn’t feel so guilty all the time. Soon, Mom wouldn’t have to sleep in an armchair next to my bed. Soon, I wouldn’t be the reason our health insurance nearly hit the annual limit. Soon, I wouldn’t be failing out of AP Calc for missing so many classes. Soon, the shame would stop spiking like blood pressure. There were so many “soon”s in that Styrofoam bowl; I swallowed them greedily with a packet of sugar. And within the span of thirty seconds, the surgeon destroyed that promise of the future. It was like he grabbed me by the IV line, looked me in the eyes, and told me “Your stupid fistula-ridden colon is going to keep draining time and money and energy from your family, punk, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

But I was not more alert, and if anyone asked me why I was crying so hard, I would have said it was the oatmeal.

Whatever the cause of this generalized hurt, I was not interested in experiencing any of it. Perhaps in an effort to stave off this new brand of pain I didn’t have the energy to understand, I pushed the big blue morphine button. I quickly fell asleep, eyelids heavy with perceived betrayal, dreaming of online solitaire. Morphine doesn’t heal wounded pride, but it does numb it for a little while.

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