The first feeling you have when you wake up in the hospital is regret— regret that you are awake.
That was one of the few things I recalled from my last hospital experience, when I had outpatient eye surgery in late 2000, as I went in for my thyroidectomy on Tuesday. I had forgotten the actual pain that followed the operation — only the memory of not wanting to wake up to it remained.
The sounds come in first, followed by tentatively opening your eyes, closing them again, and wishing you could get back to sleep. I think the first voices I heard after Tuesday's procedure were those of family members visiting me, especially my father, who was very happy to relate that I had not had to have my entire thyroid removed.
The pathology results from the section of the gland that was taken out were inconclusive, so — asked by the surgeon to decide whether I should have a full thyroidectomy — Dad made the call for me to keep the remainder of it, on the chance that it might not be cancerous. The odds given him were sixty-forty in favor of cancer, which is certainly daunting but not overwhelming.
Even if it turns out that I do have cancer — and I should know for certain today — I think my father made the right decision. He asked what the surgeon would do if he were making the decision over his own thyroid, and the surgeon replied that he would opt for retaining what was left of it. The doctor noted that I was in good health and so could stand for a second operation if need be. Moreover, if it turned out the second operation wasn't needed, I would be better off for not having to get the radiation treatment that would have been necessary had my full thyroid been removed.
Somewhere mixed in with the memory of my family's voices, I remember the surgeon coming in and telling me how the operation went. The main thing I gathered from him and my family was that everything had gone very well.
I did not feel pain so much as a generalized sense of discomfort — the whole helpless feeling of being hooked up to an IV, unable to get to a restroom without aid, feeling the need to cough and being unable to get into a position where I could cough, and so on. My neck felt odd for being stitched-up and I wondered if underneath the thick wrap it was being held together with chewing gum and piano wire. It stung where it was stitched, but mostly just felt too tight. It still does as I write this, so I should not stay up too much longer.
It was a great relief to discover I still had a voice, even though my throat was raw. My big fear with regard to the operation was over the small but significant risk that my laryngeal nerve might be damaged.
The one thing that I remember during my first hour of semiconsciousness following the operation, other than the foggy impressiions of my family's and surgeon's visits, is that I had two songs weaving through my head, alternating with one another at odd intervals. The songs ran through my mind very clearly and incessantly. Thankfully, they were so beautiful that I did not want to stop hearing them.
The first, and this is I think the one that was going through my head right when I first came into consciousness, was "Lift up your heads," from Handel's "Messiah," only I didn't hear the title lyric of the aria. Instead, what kept weaving in and out was the call-and-response of the choir, singing, "Who is the king of glory? The Lord of Hosts!"
"Messiah" is one of my favorite pieces of music. At the same time, it was a little odd for that particular aria to go through my head, as it is not one that would normally come to mind. When thinking of Handel's masterwork, I usually think of one of the arias I learned from my high-school choir director, Mr. Fenstermacher, like the "Hallelujah" chorus and "For unto us a child is born." "Lift up your heads" was not among them.
The other song that went through my head was a popular Reform Jewish, English-language arrangement of the Aleynu, a prayer that is sung at the end of every Jewish service. I had heard it in Hebrew a few mornings earlier while attending a Shabbat service with my sister, who is a rabbi and who came out from her home in the Midwest to be with me in advance of my surgery. The version that came to me in the hospital was,
Let us adore the ever living God And render praise unto Him Who spread out the heavens And established the earth And Whose glory is revealed In the heavens above And Whose greatness is manifest Throughout all the earth He is our God, there is none else
I think that one of the reasons the prayer came to mind was because I associated its theme of adoration with another I had heard at the Shabbat service, one that has special meaning to me — the Sabbath Kedushah, which quotes Isaiah's vision of the angels (Isaiah 6:3):
And one would call to the other and said, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory."
That passage is, for Catholics, the essence of the Sanctus, said during the Communion service at every Mass. It is also part of Parashat Yitro, the Torah portion that was read at the service I attended with my sister as well as the rest of Jewish services around the world this past Shabbat.
Funny that, just two weeks earlier, while I was in the audience at Theology on Tap, the speaker, Father David Toups, not knowing I was Jewish, had asked me if I knew the Hebrew word for "holy." (You can hear his shock at my knowing the answer at the 35:10 mark into the podcast of the talk.)
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A few hours later, after Brother Hugh Vincent Dyer O.P., who serves at my parish, prayed over me and gave me Communion in my hospital bed, I summoned the strength to open my Magnificat — the only reading material I had brought besides Fulton J. Sheen's Peace of Soul — to see what was the Church's reading for that day's Mass.
When I saw it, I cried.
The responsorial psalm was Psalm 24, verses 7-10:
R. Who is this king of glory? It is the Lord! Lift up, O gates, your lintels; reach up, you ancient portals, that the king of glory may come in! R. Who is this king of glory? It is the Lord! Who is this king of glory? The LORD, strong and mighty, the LORD, mighty in battle. R. Who is this king of glory? It is the Lord! Lift up, O gates, your lintels; reach up, you ancient portals, that the king of glory may come in! R. Who is this king of glory? It is the Lord! Who is this king of glory? The LORD of hosts; he is the king of glory. R. Who is this king of glory? It is the Lord!
I realized that, while I had been in surgery, priests who knew that I was having the operation were offering Mass for me. Friends and readers of my blog were offering up their prayers while attending the Mass.
And so, the angels, who "call one to another," had put the song in my heart — "Who is the king of glory?"
The Jewish prayer that had come to mind, too, I realized, was a grace that flowed from the prayers sent up by my sister and at least one Jewish reader who, I knew, had been praying for me.
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I later learned that someone else had been praying for me in a special way — my mother, who converted to Catholicism twenty years before I did and who has not practiced the faith for over a decade, having remarried outside the Church (though remaining Christian).
Mom and my stepfather had let me know that I was in their thoughts and prayers and that they were available if I needed them. I had declined their offer to visit — it has been my choice not to see them for some time, for reasons that I won't go into here — but I appreciated that they were concerned about me.
Today, my mother sent me the following story, which touched me deeply in the midst of the unresolved issues between us:
A woman came into our office at the time you were in surgery. I had met her only once, several months ago. She asked me to hold out my hand. She had her hand tightly closed, opening it into my hand. There was an olive-wood rosary in it. She had had this rosary on her night table and had been praying with it every night. She said, "I didn't want to go out today, but I thought that I had to bring this to you, that you needed it." She then went on to tell me that she had received this rosary on a pilgrimage to Medjugorge, and she shared many miracles that had happened to her there. She also shared her devotion to the Lord. I told her that you were undergoing surgery just at that moment, and that I was just at that moment looking for someone with whom I could share my anxious and helpless feeling about it. I told her that you pray the rosary, and she said, "Now you have to pray it for her, because she can't." Although I felt strange doing so, I remembered how to do it, and I prayed for you.
