Myself and Cooley Dickinson's Loving Arms

 Shawn Galligan, ‘26

        There is something obtrusive about pain.

        In my mind, admitting to feeling real pain is tantamount to laying a rotting animal carcass along a pristine table. Distracting and disturbing in equal measure, and unpleasant to everyone involved. So, when strange pain comes to visit, I prefer to keep it tucked away under my shirt.

        It is this attitude which leads me to those truly solitary hours, curled up and fetal on brown cotton. My phone is clutched between my knees, and my nose is nestled into the crook of my elbow. I make a ritual of looking up to glare at the digital clock above the stove. Minutes pass like the burning of the world’s most steadfast candle. The pain coils. I shiver.

        It is past one-thirty in the morning when the ambulance arrives, garish and glowing in the juniper night. There is a girl in the lobby door, awestruck in her pink pajamas. She watches me push myself up and acquiesce to being taken away. This is my sole pleasure of the night - until the EMTs lay hands on me, she has no idea about the pain.

        In the back of the ambulance I am strapped in so thoroughly that I begin to fear for my sanity. Three belts across the calves, another at the waist, an X-pattern along the shoulders. The vehicle’s interior resounds with ripping velcro and shaky breathing. My EMT is really just an aging man in an Amherst Fire Department t-shirt, a man made of sly implications and complaints about the hour.

        But, still, he has come for me.

        “You know, I’m very blunt, I’m a very blunt person,” he says to me at one point.

        “Okay.”

        “A lot of people don’t like that.”

        “Okay.”

        A thousand anonymous trees recede through the back window. The ambulance lights stain black pavement red, blue, red again. Every time the vehicle hits a bump in the road, my neck is jostled, and I wonder how the people who are actually dying manage to survive this.

        There is a regality to me now. The high-backed gurney is my throne as I point my chin, defiant, shuttled along and tended to. I feel suddenly powerful and entirely delusional, and I’m not sure which scares me more profoundly.

        At some point I am remanded into the custody of the hospital, mostly a boy my age, with three earrings and a clipboard. He wants to know about my mother’s phone number. The pain coils again, and I apologize to him. It isn’t his fault that his records are so outdated they must come from my actual birth.

        The night nurse, Beth, is blonde and kind. She has read the entirety of A Song of Ice and Fire, but she can’t spell, so she thinks she hates English. She would much rather adjust my IV than return to the shrieking next door, even though the lesser nurses seem very much to want her to. I do not kick or scream or harass Beth like my neighbors do, so near the end of her shift she tells me that I am well behaved. I miss her when she leaves with the sunrise.

        When they scan me, they fill me with a liquid which they say glows in the pictures. I feel it spreading out beneath my skin, hot and hungry, reclining into my insides. I twitch my neck, desperate, like I can shake off that languid heat. I am powerless and supine, and somewhere deep and dark beneath my skin, the liquid is glowing.

        People come into the room and act like it’s tomorrow, but it isn’t. For me, it never stopped being tonight, and their good-mornings and start-of-shift small talk grates on me. My new nurse carries with her the efficiency of day, rather than the gentleness of night, and I resent her for it. At seven in the morning, I am told that my appendix is indeed diseased, and that it will need to be surgically removed.

    I have the most tangible memory of those last few moments before the anesthesia took me. Pressure blankets being wrapped around my legs. My shoulders being adjusted, moved from the white bed to the steel table. The mask over my mouth, the instruction to breathe. Five sets of hands on me, perhaps more. Each appendage, each piece of me, delicately cradled. The complete and utter unburdening of being cared for. If I felt like expending the effort, I could have cried.

    There is a vivid disappointment when I wake. A slow, stinging realization that I am now expected to breathe on my own. That those ten hands do not stay there, cradling, forever. That emergencies are transitory, and dire need is fleeting. Someone takes off my oxygen mask. I am emptier without it.