As the Indian Doctor murmurs over my collapsed and invisible arm vein in an attempt to get in a line, I find myself hanging onto Doug’s hand.
I’m not really a clinger. Throughout the deliveries of three beautiful children I felt like I stayed pretty much in the driver’s seat – excruciating in parts, yes, but out of my mind, no. Right now I’m clinging. And practically begging him for ice – the third time in only a few minutes – while my whole body seizes up. I’m trying to get my cramping legs to stop convulsing and my abdomen feels like its being gored by a bull.
Three bags of IV fluids and pain drugs later, I’m browsing Facebook (because it’s what you do at midnight in the ER.) Severe gastro, possibly appendix compounded by dehydration – none of that feels important right now. I want to kiss the feet of the doctor who found the vein on the second try (my arm is notorious for taking much longer). I want to buy a round of drinks for the harassed nurses who are attempting to locate a spare ambulance for the 15 year old brought in unconscious by his parents after being found in the back of a Ute at a party. He’s been unresponsive so long they’re considering intubation and need lights and sirens to get him to a bigger hospital.
But most of all I want to buy rehydration kits for refugees – hell, for anybody who needs them, really – in places where this kind of treatment isn’t available a mere drip-line away.
Because as I lay there rigid, cramping and quite a lot pain-crazy, it struck me: people die like this. Constantly. Old people and children. Their parents watch them. They are completely helpless.
No IV fluids, magnesium and potassium for cramps and convulsing. Nothing.
It happens as a result of vomiting or diarrhoea, incredibly common in parts of the world where drinking and bathing in dirty water is the norm. But it also happens increasingly because of heat waves: 3500 people died last month in India and Pakistan in temperatures over 45 degrees across several weeks. I can’t even begin to imagine what that must have been like. Three thousand five hundred.
What would I give to prevent that? Right now, having experienced just a tiny slice of it, just about anything.
We all suffer – big things, small things, things we imagine no one else understands. And of course, suffering sucks. It can turn us inward, make us crippled, helpless and bitter. But it can also open us up to others. A stint in an emergency department… caring for an elderly parent… experiencing depression… being bullied – these things give us “experience bridges” that imagination and goodwill alone can’t build. And these can be powerful.
The word compassion means ‘to suffer with.’ Our experiences of suffering, when we refuse to hide them, curse them or belittle them, can give us fleeting glimpses into ourselves and others that can propel us to work for change… for comfort… for support… for any kind of good, really. That’s how compassion works.
I’m always wary of the impulse in myself and others to try and create, at almost any cost, an existence for our children where suffering isn’t part of their experience. You hear people say: “I just want my children to be happy. I’d do anything not to see them suffer.”
Nope. I will protect them and love them and nurture them with everything in me, but I will never wish for them a future entirely free of suffering. To do so would cut them off from much that makes us human and the ability to connect with the millions for whom suffering is a daily reality. I want them to be brave enough to face their own stuff; brave enough to suffer with others; brave to think and act to reduce the essence of suffering for people just like them.
BTW: I bought the rehydration kits for the refugees – delivered by Medecins Sans Frontieres to places around the world that need them most. Check them out here.
It doesn’t matter what or how small your experience of ‘suffering’ is – someone out there needs you to use it for good.
Image: AFP Press
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