The Little Things

This is a picture of my thermometer.


I acquired this little yellow doom-stick in a total isolation room on the seventh floor of my hospital. It tried to "stick" it to me (terrible pun totally intended) by registering a fever on the day of my planned discharge and royally freaking out my doctors. After I had weaseled my way out of the situation with the help of my good friend Tylenol and all the argumentative force of a very expensive legal education, I figured the little troublemaker owed me a favor or two, so I pocketed it. (Note to readers: this is 100% legal in the hospital with disposable thermometers -- you've already paid for them anyway.) Unfortunately, in my glee at "free" new medical equipment, I forgot and left my beautiful blanket behind on my hospital bed. Hey, you win some, you lose some, right?

And what I "won" in this case was a judgmental piece of plastic that lately has been spoiling my plans way too often, despite a hefty dose of immuno-suppressants and a polymyxin/aztreonam IV cocktail. To say that me and "Thermy" here are not close friends would be an understatement on par with calling the cast of Bravo's Real Housewives, "just a little bit annoying." Still, most of the time the two of us are able to bury the hatchet and get along for the 10 seconds or so that it takes Mr. Killjoy to do his job and register a fever.

Most of the time, that is, until last Friday.

The events in question started out pretty much like always in that I was super cold and shivering under about 15 blankets when it suddenly dawned on me that maybe I should actually take my temperature rather than blaming the 60 degree weather outside. So I fished the little monster out of my medicine cabinet and popped it in my mouth. As I did so, I also made my patented cross-eyed contortionist face, which allows me to see when the little "F" on the thermometer stops blinking, and then I know the reading is done. It's a fun little party trick, only this time my friend, who was standing about 10 feet away from me, happened to pull a confused face of her own.

"Hey Pipe, why are you still holding that thermometer in your mouth? It's been beeping for a while now."

Um . . . pardon my language here, but shit. Turns out the thermometer that I've had for 4 months -- the one I thought was annoyingly silent -- is, in point of fact, anything but. The darn thing beeps, apparently with some repetition, and it has been making this beep at me every day at least twice a day, week after week, month after month, from a distance of about 6 inches from my ear. And I have never heard it. Not even once.

Okay, so let me just pause for a second here to acknowledge that this is not the end of the world. I have known for over a year now that I have permanent hearing loss at the high frequency level from a lifetime's worth of high-dose tobramycin use. And, weirdly enough, I'm okay with that, especially because my particular case is very mild by hearing loss standards. Even on the day I failed my hearing test I didn't really think much of it. I was, more than anything, disappointed by the loss of yet another helpful drug to the side-effect gods and my life more or less continued on as normal -- I just sort of accepted that I wouldn't be able to understand people very well if there was a lot of background noise and then I moved on. There wasn't anything I could do about it, anyway.

On the other hand, though, the incident this past week really threw me for a bit of a loop, and I have to admit that I'm still a little confused as to why. I mean, not to sound dramatic or anything, but I wake up every morning and pop a handful of pills designed to make my body as vulnerable as possible to any and all infectious agents, with the hope that such vulnerability will also help protect the foreign organs that currently reside in my chest. I follow this up with shots to ensure my blood doesn't clot and (more often than not for the past few years) several hours spent plugged into high-dose antibiotics that make me walk like a drunken sailor and lose much of the sensation in my face and hands. I'm completely used to checking my blood sugar and giving myself insulin shots at the dinner table by now, and I'm surprisingly cavalier about waltzing around New York City with a needle sticking visibly out of my chest. And given all of this (not to mention the slew of other stuff people with chronic illness face on a daily basis), you'd really think it should take more than a silly beeping thermometer to ruin my day. Right?

Wrong.

That insignificant piece of plastic and its inaudible beep really, really, really pisses me off.

People like to tell us that we should focus on the beautiful little things in life, and also that we shouldn't sweat the small stuff. But I'm the first to admit that, more often than not, I seem to get it the other way around. Lung failure and subsequent open-chest surgery, constant IVs, and a medication schedule that would confuse most pharmacists seems, well, kind of run-of-the-mill to me now. Not to sound blase or anything, but I've been through it, I've seen friends go through it, and I've even learned to laugh at some of the morbid stuff. I had to. But yet I still get angry and defensive when my family (lovingly) teases me about my less-than-perfect performance as a patient in the ICU. I still get mad when my housekeeper rearranges my medicine cabinet (do.not.touch.the.drugs.), and I'm kind of ashamed to even admit how pissed off I get when I can't find a cab in the rain. And yes, even I am aware that the last one on that list is possibly the single whiniest complaint ever. I'm still 100% guilty as charged.

So, yes, it's true that I can ignore a rainbow or a kind smile from a stranger, and still get my day "ruined" by something that I know is, in the grander scheme of things, probably not even that big of a deal. And for the record I'm not saying that hearing loss of any kind at 29 is acceptable, but I am admitting that I'm not quite sure why I choose to focus so much energy on that, rather than on the multitude of other things that are going right (or wrong) at any given moment in my life. I'm not sure why I can handle talking about an infection that nearly killed me, but not about the ICU that saved my life. And I'm not sure why some things seem so much more intense in the moment than they do, say, a couple days down the road -- or even to the person standing 2 feet to the right -- while other things can seem like no big deal at the time, until I work myself into an angry frenzy two days later. I think that for me personally it all comes down to the way I see myself (whether that be as someone who can laugh at a little thermometer or as the world's best ICU patient), but it could just as easily be about trying to put forward an image of the person I wish I could be.

I do know for certain that it's not for me to judge what's big or small in another person's life, especially when I can't even get it completely sorted out in my own. I've also accepted the simple fact that it isn't up to me, at least on the very gut level, what sort of things will leave me chuckling at my own ridiculousness and what will make me cringe every time I hear the story. What is up to me, however, is the way I choose to react to something once it's already happened: how and when I choose to let out my frustration, the conversations I might need to have to solve the problem, and what I might do to minimize my discomfort in the future. I can't necessarily promise that I'll never be caught sweating out the small(er) stuff, but I can choose to ask the question of why something is really bothering me and what the best way is to deal with the problem. And if I'm really strong I might even choose to listen to the answer.

Provided, of course, that I can even hear it.