EP&M Online
Webmaster Page for October, 2006
A Change in Time
essay by
Arthur Mortensen
Time is more than relative. As the philosopher/physicist
J.T.Fraser has described time, it is a layer of umwelts, from the timeless
existence of a photon to the uncertain time and direction of quantum
events to the
blindly forward time of simple animals to the complicated, variable
time of human beings, or noos-temporarility
as he puts it. The
more complicated the umwelt,
the broader the sense of present becomes. For human beings, the
present can be decades. But, for all of our relative (and
mortal) omniscience in time, there can be sudden changes, when time is
no longer compressed, but where a year can stretch for what seems like
a decade, and an hour can last a day. Such has been so for
the Webmaster and his spouse
in 2006.
We had had warnings in late 2005 and began to pay attention by planning
for what we'd known as likely for eleven years, but which, thankfully,
had not happened, that my spouse's MS would begin to steal more
than her ability to walk any distance, but would begin to affect her
ability to do basic transfers, as from bed to a standing position, or
from a scooter to a chair. It started in earnest in February with
a call to 911 for assistance in helping Liz get off the floor.
Two days later, she was stuck in her scooter. EMS came this
time, two strong firemen, one a very convincing young man said solemnly
"she can't stay here like this." A lengthy hospitalization
followed. Time began to change.
The present closed its gates from the decades of our marriage to the
weeks of her hospitalization. Visiting someone dear in the
hospital, despite one's best intentions and feelings, can become
drudgery. Her slow progress in physical therapy made this
worse. What had been a struggle weeks before had become almost
impossible, as if her body had turned into molten lead instead of an
intricate dynamic of muscle and bone. The concentration she
required to walk five or ten steps was what either of us
might have applied to a work of art, her to a painting, me to a
poem. Time became impossibly busy, a net of barely
connected threads, some involving frantic efforts to make our home
friendlier to someone in her condition (we had done some in the
previous decade), others involving visits, work, sudden flurries of
filling in friends and relatives on her condition, letters, e-mails,
the endless trips to and from the hospitals. Then, just five days
before spring 2006, she was released and, despite quaverings and
waverings, began to live as she had before, enjoying social life here,
work there, and even doing some drawing. Time
simplified in some ways. It also expanded, the present opening
out into
months, then years, the previous fall and summer, with their trips and
visits and work, drawing back into view.
This writer was able to keep working in several capacities, for pay at
the same college where my spouse works at a very demanding job (she
looks after several hundred students who have a variety of
disabilities, from learning problems to physical handicaps, all
daunting and all needing her responsible care). For pleasure I
worked as poetry editor for the Web site for the Newington Cropsey
Cultural Studies Center, putting out monthly issues. I began to
write poetry again and became a serious student of Lewis MacNeice, who
may, after all the debate, be for me a more rewarding poet than his
contemporary W.H. Auden. As anyone who writes knows, especially
those who work in story, the present can become enormous when
working on a novel, a long poem, or even something shorter. We
refer deeper and deeper back and often, for those who explore science
fiction, further and further forward. It's good that we can do
this because time seems to accelerate as we age; the combination of the
slowed, expansive time of storytelling and the rapid time we experience
past 40 and 50, is exhilarating, as if one is living more than one
life. Then, ten weeks after her
release from the hospital, my spouse had a serious relapse at the end
of Memorial Day weekend. It wasn't subtle. Her right leg
stopped responding to commands, then her left.
Paralyzed from the waist down for the second time, and despite the best
efforts of friends, some helpful police, and her husband, EMS had to be
called again. Within very long hours she was re-admitted for more
extravagant treatment of her illness,
and in another hospital, not within walking distance, but a half hour
commute from work, and an hour from home in Brooklyn. Time
changed upon the arrival of the stretcher. Each incident,
the EMS crew's difficulties in getting my wife onto the stretcher, the
difficult maneuver down a badly designed hallway in our apartment, the
ride the wrong way on one-way 9th Street with the siren, not behind but
from the vehicle we rode in, the left turn onto Smith, the ride through
the tunnel into Manhattan, and an endless, too fast, rocking ride up a
road I at first mistook for West Street until it occurred to me that
the river was on the wrong side, all while holding Liz's hand and
talking to her and answering questions from one of the EMS guys, and
signing forms, and hanging on around bends and quick stops, cursing
traffic until we arrived at an MS clinic affiliated with Mt. Sinai
where my wife would be evaluated for admission. Time's present
became a gateway barely minutes wide,
from the arrival to the examination by several doctors and nurses to
the admission announcement. Both of us were relieved by the
latter, which may seem
odd, but without an admission we would have been faced with returning
home
without Liz being able to get out of a chair or out of bed. The
treatments, steroid injections currently the only symptomatic relief
for MS, meant a week of relative predictability in a comfortable
room. Time
opened a bit. I ran into a classmate I hadn't seen in fifteen
years, time for he and his wife to have a son eight years old and a
daughter fourteen. He was visiting a cousin with MS who had
briefly been my wife's roommate. The requirement for more changes
at home
gave me goals of a longer-term than the work day before the hospital
visit. Physical therapy started thereafter and, slowly,
progressed to where my wife's physical abilities were about what they
had been during the
early spring. We were pleased; we could see the horizon of the
present opening again, a return to a more normal day, hers with her
students, at home and at her easel, mine to more ordinary habits,
including
cooking for two instead of just myself. On the 27th of June, she
was released and we rode home to Brooklyn, a leisurely trip by
ambulette. She struggled coming into the apartment while I tried
not
to think of how her walking had noticeably deteriorated the day before
her release, but we settled in and had a nice dinner
together at home.
At midnight of the same day, she had a recurrence so serious it
required EMS
to rescue her from the bathroom. We called
various night services for doctors, in a panicky rage that this
had
happened, and by the middle of the next day the ambulance for Mt.
Sinai was here, and its crew loading my wife for her third
hospitalization. The route, at least, was familiar, though the
rocking music from the front of the ambulance was new and
refreshing. It was June 28th, the day after liberation turning
into the day of re-admission. Despite the change, time
stayed open, the present extending to the previous two visits, and to
years of reading about MS, consultatioins with doctors; that
present was filled with anger. She hadn't responded
normally to treatment. She hadn't responded the way all MS
patients respond to that treatment where the good effects of steroids
last six months to two years. But the head of the MS clinic
didn't seem
very surprised and prescribed phosphoresis, an old standard in MS where
plasma is replaced in the patient's blood, all of it by an enormous
machine that is a laboratory unto itself, with half a dozen
centrifuges, great hanging bags, and a highly trained technical
nurse. Steroids
would follow if they seemed necessary. Five days
later, and several scares with the plasma replacement, when Liz's blood
pressure went very low, the steroids were started, but both of us
persisted,
certain that the doctors were missing something else
wrong, something that the head of the MS clinic was not quite willing
to admit. Finally, after both our insistence, he brought in
neurosurgeons to look again at my wife's spine. Now almost three
weeks into my wife's third hospitalization, her weakness becoming more
and more pronounced as muscles began to atrophy, the new crew found a
major
surprise. Heavy calcification had caused compression of the spinal cord
in the place where the MS group had looked for lesions from my wife's
long-time disease. The symptoms of such a compression are
identical to those from MS lesions in the same spot. Surgery was
debated for some time, until Liz and I decided we should try; the
calcification from degenerative arthritis could only get worse. I
arrived at 6:45AM to wish her well and we had a surprise. A
colleague of many years standing was in the next room, being prepped
for brain surgery. After an endless escort of two nurses and my
wife to a surgery that looked like a set in Babylon V, it was suggested
that I might go to the cafeteria for that breakfast I had
skipped. I ate slowly and barely twenty minutes had passed since
I'd ordered a generally forbidden waffle to go with eggs and
bacon. The syrup was still fresh on my tongue when I raced to the
second floor surgical waiting area, announced myself, and tried to fill
the time by reading newspapers. I found the text and pictures
alien, as irritating as strobe lights on the front of a hardware
store. I walked about; I ventured into a chapel, paced across the
bright, high, glass-enclosed atrium, then went back to the waiting room
and managed to read a magazine I rarely choose to look at. As so
much of the press today, its concerns were wrapped up in what stories
it could sell to readers who were constituents of the politics of
hysteria. While the copy wasn't much of a challenge, it struck me
impossible that only thirty minutes had passed as I read it. I
began to make journal entries. Time changed. Divorced from
the moment to reflect on not only our hours, days and weeks past, but
on what was going on in the world, the next two and a half hours were
gone in swift order until, enroute to the bathroom, I was flagged down
by a greenclad
surgeon who reported, smilingly, that things had been more complicated
than they had expected, but that he was confident in good
results.
I asked if I could see her and he said she was in recovery.
The surgical tower for Mt. Sinai, for a detached tower is where those
science fiction sets are placed, has several recovery areas. I
found them all, after going through strange rooms filled with
glittering equipment, cannisters of oxygen, lines of gurneys, anxiously
moving, serious people with masks flapping beneath their hooded heads,
their shoes covered with fabric to seal sources of potential
infection. Liz was in none of them. I looked for less than
ten minutes in all likelihood. By the time I ran into the
anesthesiologist, who told me that she was already on her way to her
room, it felt as though half the afternoon was over, but it was barely
noon. I arrived in the room to find another surprise, my
sister-in-law and her marvelous daughter, fresh from a visit to a doll
store in Manhatan after driving in from Harrisburg. In minutes
Liz was rolled, recognizing me, but groggy as one would expect, not so
groggy, though, that she didn't beam with delight to see her young
niece and her sister. In a few more minutes, she looked down and
said "look." She could wiggle her toes and move her feet which
she hadn't been able to do in a very long time, years in fact.
The doctor had been right. A week later, having been helped to a
standing position
only once in the previous three and a half weeks, she went to physical
therapy, this time for over a month.
To help restore some sense of normalcy, Liz and I agreed that I should
come to the rehab clinic only every other day. The following
month for me
was a busy one; and she was able to do some paperwork messengered up,
assisting her students from her hospital bed. She even drew a
little. Time's present grew.
I
wrote a couple of poems. But the time between December 2005 and
August 2006 still felt like half a lifetime, an endless series of
events,
twists and turns, discoveries, false and real hopes,
illuminations of character, surprises from friends, and a startling
lack of interest from our parish and from neighbors. A trip
to visit my father in August of 2005 might have been from another
era. This
new time changed again when, August 23, Liz was released and came home,
where she has been ever since, progressing steadily. It has been in
fits
and starts, however. A few weeks ago, she collided with a health
care
assistant in a local park and overturned her electric scooter,
injuring her shoulder. Lacking
the use of one arm while her shoulder healed, she required assistance
for virtually every
activity\, another breach in time when
nights seemed like weeks.
Because she has been home, for me there has been an odd combination of
normal
time, when I'm at work, or reading, or writing, and this new twist in
time,
of minute by minute struggles. But she's healing, and the
present is widening, however imperceptively,
and we hope for the best.
During all of this, it kept occuring to me that I was a little overdue
on EP&M Online. From time to time I would take stock of what
the next issue would be. But, by the time I decided to resume
publication in mid-September, I realized, with a start, that it had
been 10 months since
the last issue was written. Time and its changes will do
that. The umwelts
of human time are many. Some days the morning of the present day
seems to have been in June of 1968 and on others it seems to have been
impossibly long moments ago at a quarter till noon. We hope that
time will collaborate us again in presenting EP&M Online as we had
for the previous nine years.
Arthur Mortensen
"The future is not far behind."
The author, hard at work on EP&M
Online's advanced Control Data Corporation word processor