A Different Emergency Room Visit

Monday night my mother and I accompanied my father to the emergency room of the "UKE", Hamburgs biggest hospital.

What immensely intricate weaving, what curious circumstances that brought about me sitting there next to him. In an Emergency Room, yet again, and this time so totally different.

It was his kidney that brought us there. The problem had been revealed by a routine test his doctor had performed in April, which required another test that showed no life in the kidney at all. Which prompted another test, a CT scan, finally taken Monday morning. This still didn't provide any explanation as to why the failure had happened, and why it had happened with such incredible speed in a matter of months, when apparently such a process normally takes years.

His doctor, dissatisfied with the findings of the CT scan sent him straight to the hospital, to put Papi into the hands of more experts. The hospital in turn, booked out as they are weeks in advance, suggested over the phone to use the route via the emergency room, to get in more quickly, and thus we arrived there the three of us on the same evening, not in a very emergency kind of way, properly fed by a German dinner of whole grain breads and various cheeses, smoked ham and liverwurst, a small overnight bag in tow neatly packed just in case, and a book, and chocolate covered rice cakes for more nourishment in my purse.

>From the waiting room I watched the ambulances through the glass partition and the large glass doors pull up in front of the hospital, delivering their patients, all older looking citizens in various states of coma or sedation, eyes mostly closed, white hairs ruffled, and I thought back to the moments when I had been wheeled through the entrances to the three emergency rooms I had been delivered to... not so very long ago.

The TV suspended from the ceiling in the corner of the room was silently showing a large patch of fertile soil, hands putting seeds into the ground, a program on gardening maybe. The check in desk flaunted a startling deep blue glass front, the wall behind the staff was of the same dark blue, surrounded everywhere by white and metal and glass... this building was brand new. The sun fell in at a low angle through the pale yellow vertical blinds behind us, bathing the space in the quiet golden light of northern summer evenings.

So quiet here. So little drama. The waiting room harbored five more people, none of them visibly injured or troubled. My father patiently next to me. Worried. Quiet.

Odd to be there on the opposite side of experience, as the support team. So much more clarity about the whole process, so much more overview, more detachment.

That day had started with an vigorous upbeat: after weeks of pushing away the worries over what might be wrong with his kidney, weeks of fending off fears of reentering the hospital system that 4 years ago had held him in an embrace so long and tight, he almost hadn't returned home, he came back from the CT scan beaming with the surprise announcement that his kidney was not completely dead. This sigh of relief turned into a silent dread after his regular urologist sounded the alarm bell and insisted he go to the hospital... instantly. Even my mother, who can be counted on to remind everyone that whatever it was, THIS was just what was meant to be happening, and who had kept a calm and cheerful attitude on this subject throughout these past weeks, all of a sudden grew unusually somber and small voiced, and I could hear the fear creeping into her imagination.

This anxiety was still with them in the waiting room, was still with them in the private treatment room we were led to were I ate more of the rice cakes and read to them from the book, a chapter on hunting with birds of pray. It was hard for my father to let himself relax, he wanted to see the doctor NOW and after we had waited in there for another 30 min, he went outside into the hall to inquire in his polite way how much longer it would be.

Another hour further into the evening the mood had shifted yet again, and we were merrily driving back home, playing out our little family jokes, and laughing our little family laughs.

The doctor had simply shown us the likelihood of new possibilities and a fairly easy way through this mystery. A tiny camera into the bladder, a tiny stick into the tube to the kidney, a little patience to let it drain out and the reasonable probability that the organ would recover. None of it sounded so bad any longer.

It's so interesting how easily we get pulled lockstep into the automatic alignment with anxiety, I had to consciously word out for myself a different perspective, because when I investigated closely enough I actually could find no harm in these events, and since Papi came back with the "bad" news I had looked for ways to pass through the barrier of gloom. To shake up my parents' instant evaluation of what this experience must mean... could mean. Of what was to follow. Interesting. All this up and down, all this fear and hope riding upon nothing but different interpretations. Spinning different stories into the future. His actual state of wellbeing had not changed, not a bit. The present moment had remained completely neutral.

When I woke up the next morning, it occurred to me what an enormous burden is hoisted into a crisis when we allow an evaluation to take place before something has happened. When we get sucked into wanting a certain development and rejecting another one. Because we THINK the first thing will be better for us than the second. What arrogance really! But more so: what ignorance! HOW in the world can we know??? We don't!!

When my journey began, I thought the worst thing that could happen was for the cysts not to respond. If they responded only a little - that would not be so great, if they shrank clearly enough - that would be good, and if they disappeared - well, that would be fantastic. I thought I knew what this whole thing was going to be about, as if it was a task that was testing my performance. Consequently I could excel or I could fail. What a huge misunderstanding! This may really be the biggest revelation for me, and it was yet again pointed out to me even more clearly over the past days watching my father stumble through his experience like I had stumbled through mine. Life never makes a mistake. I dare to think it may really be true that life offers us nothing but opportunities of expansion and greater wholeness, that we are held in this dance by a love so vast it is difficult to comprehend. That our power lies not so much in our ability to create what we want, from our limited, oh so limited perspective, but in understanding that what we encounter IS what we have created as the limitless oneness that we really are and that we only need to say YES.

I believe that's what I learned from my life when the worst thing I had feared happened to me. And I learned that it was good. No, actually more than that: Exquisite.

So, Papi's worst fear was to go back into the hospital where the nightmare of four years ago had begun. On top of that right now a hospital that, according to various reports, had not yet ironed out it's renovation chaos, after moving into the new facility... oh, fertile ground for a multitude of things to go wrong, for mistakes, poor coordination, miscommunication, malfunctioning this and thats...

As life had prepared this miraculously unfolding series of events for him, he had nothing but smooth alignment. Fast response in the Emergency room, swift transfer into the urology clinic the next day, instant admission into the beautiful outpatient facility the following day, and a successful procedure with the friendliest staff he had ever encountered. A surgeon who personally called back to see how he was doing two days later!

His journey isn't over, but now it is clear it WILL be different from last time.