Thirty Lost Summer Days

Oct. 4, 2022

I still harbor those childhood memories of endless summer days and nights, free from homework and school, playing in the woods behind our home in the country while trying to avoid my dad’s demands to mow three acres of pristine bluegrass lawn and in the evening’s glooming chasing fireflies until Mom called me in for bedtime. The idea that summer should still be a time to enjoy yourself remains a mantra. So, on a July night, the 12th to be exact, I woke up about an hour after going to sleep with an all-over body discomfort, not really pain but a deeply unsettling feeling that something wasn’t right. My anxieties kicked into hyperdrive. Sleep never really arrived that night, nor would I have a decent night’s sleep for another 30 days. I sensed that the rest of my summer plans were out the window.

This tale is not just an unveiling, or an unwelcome revelation of something intimate and personal. It also is about getting older, about the difference between having a weird abdominal pain at 30 and at 69, within days of my 70th birthday.  And it’s about how we should never stop being aware of life’s brutal reality, never forgetting or denying that from one minute to the next, everything can change.

Thirty six hours after the initial pain, I was lying in a hospital bed, a CT scan and ultrasound pinpointing a completely blocked kidney. A day later, successful surgery had removed the blockage, but because of extreme swelling, three or four other stones were left behind. Two weeks later, those were removed in New York. The entire four weeks is a blur, a whirlwind of three anesthesias and procedures. Nothing was remotely normal until a stent was removed on Aug. 12th, 30 days after my pain began. In the end, I got a clean bill of health. Recovery was more about dealing with the dull fog induced by the anesthesias and a total lack of exercise in that long month than about any long-term worries.

Yet nothing was the same, either around me or in my head. My wife’s worries were written all over her face. Hugging my daughter felt somehow more urgent, and more necessary. Dinners with friends presented a challenge to not dwell on my illness, but also to stay focused and not let my mind wander. When I saw a picture of myself taken in the middle of the episode, I looked old and drawn, not a description I would have used before. Instead of proudly trumpeting the idea I was in the best shape of life on July 11th, every step I took felt tentative, every day’s end marked by a deep, unsettling fatigue. Every middle of the night wakeup led to long stretches of dark fantasies about, well, about everything and nothing, some important, some totally trivial. I felt trapped by my anxieties, unable to brush them off or somehow resolve them.

I am keenly aware that every day people wake up with discomfort like mine and the pain turns out to be pancreatic or liver cancer, or some other much more serious disease. My wild thoughts that first night had run through all those dire outcomes, the inevitable anxiety caused by unknown origins of pain. In the wake of the experience, however, the mirror of mortality shook my usually intact sense of invulnerability, that precious terrain that let me live without paralyzing fear of death. After two years of pandemic life and the deaths of close friends, I had to admit that I had constructed rationalizations that I was doing everything to stay safe. Inevitably, the psychological toll of denial of trauma caught up with me, and caused a different kind of paralysis; it was fueled by a loss of optimism, usually a bedrock constant in my life. I was stymied at nearly every turn; writer’s block, procrastination, a lack of focus. Yet still, I externalized the ever-present trauma, boxing it into a place where I could ignore the worst outcomes being suffered by others. My simple kidney stone blockage stripped away those illusions and, despite all my proclamations of being fine and happy, I came face to face with the reality that I had been anxious and struggling to regain my pre-pandemic drive and motivation.

Although only a few short weeks have passed since those 30 lost days, I sense the walls are coming down. On a long hike on a mountainous trail in the Canadian Rockies, a trip that I had worried I wouldn’t even be able to make, I stopped feeling like a patient in recovery. I wouldn’t describe it as a new spring in my step on that 9-mile hike, but I was suddenly less worried about being weak. Upon getting home, I have started writing, diving into tasks that had been ignored for too long, devoting time again to my guitar playing and song-writing, and as an adjunct to my writing, beginning to re-imagine the plot lines of my next novel, 20/20.

Is there a lesson here? There are all the cliches: live life to the fullest every day; don’t waste time on inconsequential things; be aware of your surroundings. So yes, there are lessons, maybe ones that don’t make life’s unpredictability any less scary but that might help us prepare for life’s inevitable curveballs. And it may be too soon to declare victory over the malaise of the past two and a half years. But it’s a start. And I now believe the wake-up call of those 30 summer days will prepare me better for what’s to come.

There will be other summers. Not as many as I had ahead of me at 30. But more than some close friends of mine who aren’t with me anymore; they woke up with a pain one day and didn’t make it through the next year or simply laid their head down and didn’t wake up. I won’t ever forget, as I had forgotten on July 12th, that things can and do change in an instant. I’ve been reminded that one of the best ways to cope is to simply move forward, with that core belief in life’s possibilities. Every day.