Morning Pages in a Hospital Bed
Three pages before rounds: the one part of me the ward couldn't schedule.
The nurse who woke me at 5:40 every morning had cold hands and a warm voice, and she never once asked why I needed the overhead light on before the sun. Her name was Agnes, she pronounced my diagnosis more gently than any doctor did, and by the second week she had started bringing my blood pressure cuff and my pen at the same time.
I was thirty four when they admitted me. Acute leukemia announces itself with boring symptoms, bruises and tiredness and a nosebleed that would not quit, and then one Tuesday a hematologist is telling you that you will be living on the seventh floor for the next five to six weeks while they take your blood down to nothing and build it back. Ward 7 West. Induction, they call it, like you are being welcomed into a club.
I packed badly. Everyone packs badly for a stay like that, because your brain refuses to believe the number of days. But at the bottom of my bag, under the wrong socks and a phone charger for a phone I no longer owned, was a spiral notebook and the habit that came with it.
Morning pages. Three pages, longhand, first thing, before your ego wakes up and starts editing. I had learned the practice years earlier from that famous book everyone's aunt owns, and I had kept it up off and on the way people keep up flossing. On the outside, it was self improvement.
On 7 West, it became something closer to load bearing.
Because here is what nobody tells you about a long admission: the illness is frightening, but the scheduling is what erases you. Vitals at 5:40. Bloods at 6:00. Breakfast, beige, at 7:30. Rounds sometime after 8, a weather system of white coats that formed at the end of the corridor and moved bed to bed. Chemo when pharmacy sent it up. Sleep when the corridor let you.
There was a whiteboard on my wall where the nurses wrote TODAY'S GOAL, and in week one somebody wrote WALK THE HALL x2, and I remember staring at it and thinking: I used to have a job. I used to have opinions about restaurants. I have become a person whose entire day is walk the hall... twice.
So I made an amendment.
Under WALK THE HALL x2 I wrote, in green marker: 3 PAGES. And every morning after Agnes took my vitals, in that gray hour when the corridor lights were still dimmed to their nighttime setting and the IV pole I had named Gerald hummed beside me, I wrote.
The ward could schedule my blood, my meals, even my sleep, but it could not schedule the pages. The pages were the last country where I was still the government.
I will be honest about what the pages contained, because the practice only works if you are. Page one was almost always complaint. The food, the noise, the tape residue on my arms, the man in the next room whose television played a game show at a volume I can still hear. Page two drifted, half diary, half weather report, whatever moved past the window.
But page three, and I noticed this within days, page three told the truth every single time.
By page three my hand was tired enough that the guard fell asleep. Page three said things like: I am terrified my mother will outlive me and I don't know how to say that to a woman who still cuts my hair. Page three said: I keep making the jokes so the nurses will like me, because I have some idea that the liked patients live.
A medical student caught me at it one morning. Priya, third year, always half a step behind the weather system of white coats, kind eyes over her mask. She came in early to pre round on me and found me scribbling and asked what I was writing. Grocery lists, I said. She looked at the three dense pages of a man who could not walk to a grocery store and said, those must be some lists... and let it go, and I liked her permanently after that.
If you go looking, you will find research on writing through illness, actual studies, expressive writing and immune markers and wound healing rates. Priya told me about them later, delighted, as if the notebook were a therapy she could finally chart. Maybe it did help my blood counts... But that was never why. I did it because everything else on that ward was done to me, and the pages were the one thing I did.
The night before my day 28 biopsy results, the practice broke.
I sat with the notebook at 4 a.m., hours before Agnes, and I could not write page one, could not do the complaints... could not manage the weather. The results would say whether induction had worked. There is no page two on a night like that. So I wrote one sentence, and then I wrote it again, and I filled the entire first page with the same eleven words, forty times, like lines given as punishment or maybe as prayer: Whatever the report says, I am still the author of this.
The report said remission.
Not cured, they are careful about that word, but the marrow was clean enough to keep going, consolidation rounds ahead, a future with appointments in it instead of a future that was itself an appointment. My mother cried on the phone and then pretended she hadn't, and I let her pretend, and that night I read everything I could hold.
Somewhere in it I found an essay on why safe poems lose, written for poets, about how writing that protects the writer never reaches the reader. I read it flat on my back with Gerald humming beside me and felt caught. My pages had been honest, but everything I had ever shown anyone was safe. Two different notebooks, really. The true one and the shown one.
So in week five, bald as a thumb and bored of my own cowardice, I did something with page three. I took the scared sentences, the mother who still cuts my hair, the jokes for the nurses, the forty lines of whatever the report says, and I shaped them into the first unsafe thing I have ever written. It took six mornings. When it was done I entered it into a monthly poetry contest from my hospital bed, on my phone, with a nurse's wifi password and my heart going like a fire drill.
Placing did not matter... Sending it did. It was the second country I took back.
Discharge day came on a Thursday. I gave Agnes the good chocolates my uncle had sent, and when the transport chair arrived I looked at the whiteboard one last time. TODAY'S GOAL: HOME, someone had written. Underneath it, in green, my amendment still stood, and I decided to leave it there. Maybe the cleaner erased it an hour later. Maybe the next person on 7 West looked up from that bed and saw 3 PAGES in a stranger's handwriting and wondered. I like to think of it as a message in a bottle for whoever needed a country. That, I have learned, is most of what hope is: a note from someone who was here before you, saying the mornings can still belong to you.
I am home now. Consolidation is behind me; the checkups are spacing out like telephone poles at the edge of a town. But my body still wakes at 5:40, every morning, cold hands or no cold hands. I have stopped fighting it.
I get up. I turn on the light before the sun. I write my three pages, and I govern.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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