The
calm is not enough to lull you. It's the microseconds after a hard
sprint, before the rush of endorphins washes strain from your
muscles, where every sensation tells you that your body is still
struggling, still suffering, though you no longer make progress. It
is planting your second foot firmly in the snow at 14,000 feet,
gasping for breath in the oxygen-thin air, succumbing to your body's
demand for respite, but knowing that you've lost your acclimation to
the pain when the next step begins. And in that lucid moment you
have in pause, you are cognizant enough to look up in search of the
aspired for mountain apex, but it's whereabouts are obscured, by
cloud or by false summits.
There
is an end. You know that in fact, but you cannot know it in feeling.
In the animal part of your brain, facts are a weak opponent to what
you feel.
Yet
you take your next step, always climbing, each step more trying than
the last. Each step a commitment to ignore the protests of your
muscles, your bones and joints, to pursue your crazed obsession. But
here, there is no choice. While mountain fever might possess one to
never give up until the top is reached, the option always remains.
Turn back. Turn around and instantly feel thicker air with each
step. Let gravity ease your burden.
But
this is different. The next contraction is an event already decided
on 9 months previous. There is no turning back any more.
You
may be engulfed into your own personal world of pain laying down, or
perhaps sitting. But I stand, arms wrapped around the neck of
co-manufacturer of my condition, in the midst of calm. Well before
the next wave comes, I can already feel the involuntary tightening
ball in my midsection. Oh no. I
utter, and the signal is given that soon I will be far from this
place, and anything my body does while I am gone is of no concern to
me any more.
The
sensation grows, sucking me into a black-hole of pain, throwing out
only the gamma radiation of primal cries, manufactured by my body in
the absence of commands from a now vacated mind. The body has no
better instruction and knows no better response.
Information,
once entering this black-hole, can never escape. Even the memory of
the pain cannot be retained. The knowledge that it was experienced
survives from outside the event horizon, but the experience itself
will never surface again. At least, until the next contraction.
Slowly,
it releases me back to my body, and I am in the moment, understanding
only that I am back in the calm I look down. A fat drop of blood,
laid thickly in deep red, forms a perfect circle on the laminate
hospital floor. I stare at it until the next wave overtakes me.
When
I surface, another drop. And I plunge into the world of pain again.
Three
drops. Then gone. Four. Five.
Now
there are too many drops to count. They have overwhelmed the floor
and begun to coalesce and form a crimson pond.
Hours
ago, I could remind myself, soon, this experience would all be just a
memory. Now, there is no opportunity for such self-reassurances.
The mind is unable to collect itself in time to do anything more than
recognize its own existence between bouts of oblivion.
Time
does not exist as it does normally. Ninety seconds are an eternity,
yet the hours that pass collectively are no longer constructed by the
minutes and seconds of the clock. They are a series of waves and
calms, lined up together, one by one, like beads on a string. There
is no end in sight, but neither was there a beginning. This world
simply always was, is and will be. The end of labor, like before its
start, does not dictate it existence. It has merely defined my
visit.
The
end of labor and the start of active pushing brings me back the real
world. Pain now has purpose. It is active and prophetic. The
calms, the few that exist, now host the possibility of hope, desire,
fear and anxiety. It is a place where strength of mind and heart can
make a difference. Where it is possible to have courage.
Oh
no, I utter as each pushing
contraction begins to build, but their quality has changed. Before I
was dragged away, helpless and passive, to an isolated plane of
existence. Now, this pain, andmy words steel me and provide
strength. Screams are not the absence of the mind They are products
of will.
Here
it comes. I gather my strength!
Push!
Mind and body act as one with determination.
Do
not give up! Now is the time to show strength.
“Okay,
look down!” the doctor tells me and I do. Surprising to me,
somewhere in the middle of the battle a child was born.
Welcome
to the outside world, Eiger.
