The Two Kinds of Decay

Fear and Fright

I woke from the long surgery and saw my double-lumen permanent line and felt frightened. It looked like something I should pull out — a white dart, a poison arrow — but I couldn’t pull it out. It was sealed under a clear plastic patch.

For the first day, doctors monitored the site through the patch, which covered part of my chest and my right side. The wound was fresh, and despite the pressure from the patch, the wound oozed.

The patch kept the ooze contained.

I had read Freud in school. He distinguishes fear, a state of worrying anticipation in relation to a definite object, from fright, the momentary response of our mind to a danger that has caught us by surprise but is already over.

And so when I looked at the plastic patch, I knew that what I was feeling, clinically speaking, was fright.

But the feeling didn’t subside. Its sharpness lasted. So I looked down a second time, thinking the sight would no longer be frightening.

It was. And for hours I lay there, weeping in fright. Not fear. Fright.

The night nurse came in every couple of hours. After the second or third visit, when I was still crying from fright, she scolded me. But I wasn’t sad. I was scared out of my mind.

So she gave me a tranquilizer.

I became addicted to them immediately and took one every night for weeks, and it wasn’t long before I started needing more of them than the nurses wanted to give me.