Anita Kestin, M.D., M.P.H. has worked in academics, nursing homes, hospices, and locked wards of a psychiatric facility. She’s a daughter (of immigrants fleeing the Holocaust), wife, mother, grandmother, and a progressive activist. She is now attempting to calm nerves and stave off longing for family by writing (memoir, short fiction, nonfiction, poetry). She submitted her first non-scientific piece in her sixties (during the Pandemic) and is thrilled to see her work in print.

Love it or List it

By Anita Kestin, M.D., M.P.H.

Here is what I know from watching hours upon hours of “Love it or List it” on HGTV:

Everyone wants a so-called “open plan” for their first floor.
In order to be a participant on the show, you have to be part of a couple who disagrees on whether you should leave your home or not.
Hilary wears statement necklaces and has a wonderful accent.

Someone somewhere said that wisdom is acquired painfully. Here is how I came to acquire this wisdom.

In the midst of COVID, I developed a tremendous pain that was caused by a blood clot in my gastrointestinal tract. In case you are wondering, blood clots are a known complication of COVID. The pain from the clot catapulted me into the ER, yelping and writhing. The staff there shot me up with morphine and then sent me home.

The throbbing soreness eased off over the next ten days only to return several months later. I was told that If I hoped to avoid such pain in the future, I would need an operation. The surgeon warned me that the surgery would be painful and that I would undoubtably hate him in the aftermath. And so, of course, when he handed me the consent form, I signed it immediately

As I was being wheeled back from the operating room I saw the long row of windows, searing lights from the fixtures on the ceiling, and the corridor with its easy-to-scrub clean tiled floor. We passed by patients on their way to their operations, all of us on ships into the unknown. During the entire trip to the recovery room, I heard my own unrestrained sounds- high-pitched caterwauling and then guttural animalic sounds I had never made before.

As I reached the door of the recovery room I was begging for pain medication. I got a good dose of it. So good, that when they reminded me that Medicare deemed my operation “same day surgery” and they were prepping me to go home, I meekly put on my clothes and let them wheel me to the car where my husband was waiting.

He drove me home and there we unpacked the narcotics I had been given, and I optimistically began to make a chart so I would not take too much by accident.

Three timed doses of my medications had elapsed, and it had been nighttime for a few hours when I could not ignore the fact that the pain was growing ever more insistent, first over the course of an hour, then rising by the minute, and finally by the second. I went downstairs to look at my chart and I had two hours to go before the next dose. The pain by now was far beyond that of childbirth. Images of animals with paws caught in traps flooded my mind and I knew I had to go back to the hospital.

Once there, the pain quickly escaped three doses of IV morphine and then we were on to IV dilaudid and I was being wheeled up to my room in the hospital where I remained hopped up on dilaudid but still in pain much of the time. For example, whenever I tried to move.

My husband sat in the room reading the paper and wincing in my direction and my kids called distraught and eager to help. They all begged for me to suggest some way they could be helpful. I couldn’t really speak to any of them.

We don’t have a TV at home, but this hospital room had one and when I flipped the channels, I came upon “Love it or List it.”

I spent almost a week, lying in my hospital bed in a subhuman state, watching as one couple after another pursued their dream of an open plan home. There was Hilary, elegant as ever, supervising the strategic destruction of walls. Meanwhile, a few minutes later, I watched David as he drove around armed with an impossible wish list, trying to one-up Hilary and her sledgehammer. I lost all perspective of time and the only marker I could relate to was that another episode had finished which meant that soon another episode would be starting.

After about a week of this, I was deemed well enough to go home so my husband and I packed up the treasures I had acquired in the hospital: emesis basin, graham crackers, narcotic tablets, and tubes of emollient cream.

When I went home, I resolved to discontinue the narcotics altogether, but this left me in pain and, of course, mainlining episode after episode of “Love it or List it” once I discovered I could watch the show on my computer.

Two weeks passed like this. I felt my muscles start to disintegrate. My husband had to leave for a few days, and I was judged unsafe to be on my own, so we hired a home health care agency. The intake person from the agency insisted on watching me demonstrate getting in and out of the tub (in my nightgown) and an hour later the Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs) streamed in, taking over the decidedly not open plan first floor of my house. The living room took on the smell of the cartons of takeout food that they ordered online: fried pork rice, beef Lo Mein, french fries, and eggplant parm. Every surface was taken up with the amusements the CNAs had brought along in order to help them pass the time.

My main CNA didn’t have that much to do compared to the 12 hours of her time that we were paying the agency for, so my main CNA set about to rewatch every single episode of every season of Friends- which by the time it came for her to leave- she had accomplished. We made a strange pair- she, laughing uproariously downstairs while I moaned in bed as the endless renovations flickered on the laptop beside me.

My main CNA was laser focused on the upcoming eclipse and she worried that some new setback might occur and I might need something for her to do during the precious minutes of the eclipse.

Luckily for both of us, that didn’t happen, and my CNA insisted I go outside and watch with her. As I crossed the threshold to the porch, I was shocked that I could barely walk outside. We stood together on the porch in the eerie darkness and when I could stand no longer, I went inside, too spent to do anything but go to bed.

My husband had only been back for a day when a large gaping canyon of flesh opened up in the place where some of the stitches had been. A dehiscence. The pain intensified and I feared that I would get an infection that would surely morph inexorably into sepsis. The doctor in the emergency room told me that the tissue was too weak to hold a stitch and, for that reason, the canyon would simply have to fill in on its own. In the meantime, the area had to be kept meticulously clean. I obsessed over this task and also began to try to coax my muscles back to life. It took me a month from that point to manage a halting stroll around the block.

I no longer felt at home in my own body. Love it or list it? Not a fair question, I was ready to list it.

The gaping hole began to fill in. The tissue that was not strong enough to tolerate a stitch was also slow to heal. I was marooned at home for a longer time than I had been during COVID. A month later, I was able to manage a walk to a CVS. A few days after that, I attempted to drive. The day came when I wasn’t thinking about pain all the time, just at night.

Nothing is back to the way it was before these draconian renovations took place, but I am grateful that, in all the brutal excavation of my flesh that transpired, they failed to turn up an underlying cancer. I’ll take the win, however long it may last.

As I am almost seventy, this wasn’t the worst thing that has ever happened to me. But it was the worst thing that had ever happened to my first home, my body.

Nothing about the experience- the caterwauling, the shock of the pain rising again and again in my body, the sensation of the dilaudid hitting my blood stream, the effort it took to bring my muscles back to life, or the sight of the raw tissue inside the dehiscence was ennobling. I crawled through this time like a wounded and hunted creature searching for some place to call home.