Richard Rodriquez Talks About His Surgery

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ:

Like you I have visited many hospitals. Until a few weeks ago though I had never presented myself at an admitting desk at dawn, never had an I. IV attached or worn a hospital gown.

I was oblivious of my own health and oblivious at how vast the society of the sick. My heedlessness strikes me now as amazing given the millions upon millions of the sick and the dying in the world.

This summer that toll rang loudly enough in the media. AIDS is spreading through India, through China. Children are dying in the Sudan. What is more, I belong to a generation that has witnessed the termination of the disabled not to be segregated from the rest of society. Everywhere in America, wheelchair ramps and blue painted curbs joined the two Americas.

Yet it was possible, perhaps it was inevitable, as someone who is well for me to be unaware of my health, the well functioning body that encourages obliviousness. But wait a minute. What's that? The lump, the bruise, the pain, the trickle of blood, might sweats. The surgeons' diagnosis suggests this is business as usual — all in a day's work. Sign here, drink this, remove your clothing.

Summer deepens the mystery of illness. Sun pours through hospital windows onto wounded parties that have been dark stars. Outside the hospital, children are on vacation, trees are in full leaf, the Olympics are televised from bright Athens where the beauty and confidence that healthy bodies are filled.

Television, nothing, nothing is as ubiquitous in the hospital room. In some sick rooms the television stays on all night like a child's night light. Stay tuned, come up next, the announcer assures the patient of progression in a world without day or night.

SPOKESPERSON:

All I really want is to be able to climb the stairs and give Michael a bath.

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ:

On a commercial on nightly news, rather Jennings Brokaw, between stories of hurricanes and political campaigns, there are advertisements proposing remedies for every sort of physical even mental malady.

Ad agencies talk about an older demographic than attaches to news shows. And one is accustomed to equate malady with age, but one of the things that surprised me about my hospital ward was the variety of ages there.

Though in this time of war, one becomes inured to TV footage of veterans hospitals crowded with men and women who only yesterday were strong and young.

The patients I met in the hospital, a woman who recount her last two years has a catalog of dire surgeries, confided to me that nothing teaches isolation like illness, no matter how loving one's family, no matter how attentive one's friends, the cards, the candy, the flowers.

One must nevertheless face surgery and pain alone. The opposite truth about sickness is how social it is. I do not mean simply the matter of personal modesty: catheters and bedpans and sponge baths. I mean, that the sick form their own society — form support groups, prayer groups, Web pages. Everyone knows someone who has had the same disease.

Strangers talk to strangers about their bodies with complete spiritual and physical candor. What I learned this summer: there are millions of Americans who speak only of America, a demi nation of all ages, people who know or who have known serious illness, who have felt betrayed by their bodies, been utterly grateful to their bodies, one leg, one kidney, one eye — grateful to see, to walk, to breathe.

I used to belong to the other America, the healthy America. I used to watch Lance Armstrong oblivious of the race he was truly engaged in, as each year he pedaled furiously in front of cancer.

Though my operation was successful, and my prognosis good, this summer I changed sides. I joined the company of the sick, and I will never forget this other America: The people who ride gurneys at dawn, their eyes fixed on the ceiling. I'm Richard Rodriguez.