Don’t Fret What’s Not There

“I know they’re not really there,” my mom said, scratching the edge of the hospital bed. “But I see spiders crawling.” Mom had been in the hospital for weeks after a simple scope went awry and nicked her bile duct, leaking caustic fluids into her body. The strong painkillers created vivid hallucinations, like spiders in the bed, mice on the wall clock and snakes on the floor.

Normally, Mom is terrified of these kinds of critters, of pretty much anything that slithers or creeps. Yet even in
critical condition, she understood the nurse’s explanations and recognized the visions as hallucinations. She was not afraid.

Unlike my siblings and me. We had more questions than answers.

“What if the problem recurs when she goes home?”

“What if we don’t know how to flush the PICC line?”

“What if the pain never goes away?”

It finally dawned on us that we were borrowing trouble; we were anticipating problems that didn’t exist yet and feeding unfounded fears. If my mom could ignore the fear of things she knew weren’t really there, then we could stop worrying about the “what if’s.”