Yes, I really did tell my nurse that having Conan the CNP on the recovery floor to put people out of their misery would be a good idea. She disagreed.
For those who don’t know by the way, CNP stands for certified nurse practitioner. If you’ve been reading along, you’ll know that this occurred a few days after I’d had surgery for my Crohn’s Disease. The recovery had not been going well. My body was simply not waking back up, so I’d needed to have a catheter reinserted to prevent bladder infection and an ng tube to keep me from constantly vomiting bile. I’d already been sick from the Crohn’s for over a year at this point, so these recent developments were unfortunately just the icing on the cake. I’d been physically broken, but now I was finally starting to waver mentally and emotionally.
So yeah, that state combined with a lack of sleep and the lack of filter from painkillers had me wishing that someone would just put me out of my misery. Or at least just knock me out for a while. It’s difficult to convey what it’s like to be in a mental state like that, so I’m going to kick it up a notch and risk alienating some of my readers by bringing up philosophy.
If you’ve never read Emmanuel Levinas, you should give him a try. He has a wonderful mind, a big heart, and a knack for explaining ideas that are difficult to articulate. Like all existentialists, he spends a lot of time exploring the self and what that concept even means. One of my favorite observations of his is that there is a similarity suffering and insomnia. In both, you become aware that it is impossible for you to ever escape from yourself.
We spend most of our day engaged in activities, so we’re most often both thinking and doing. However, when you can’t sleep, you are only thinking and not doing. You can’t will yourself to sleep and the more you try, the further into your mind you get. You become aware that you can’t just turn your mind off. You can’t get away from thinking. In short, when you experience insomnia, you experience yourself entirely as a mind and you realize that you can’t divorce yourself from your perspective. Levinas described it as feeling enchained to yourself.
That enchainment is the same with suffering. In suffering, you realize that can’t escape being you. Even if you fall asleep, you will still be you with all of your pain when you wake back up. It’s a frustrating experience. You’re unable to do anything to help yourself. There is no pause button, off switch, or fast forward. You’ll never be able to escape yourself. You can’t create your own relief. Instead, you just have to endure.
So yeah, I didn’t really want to die, but the thought of being knocked out at least until I was further healed was very appealing.