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I hoped to meditate in Bhutan but found peace in a hospital instead

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Five days before I was scheduled to fly to Bhutan for a writing and well-being retreat, a sudden pain shot through my abdomen and back. I was having lunch with a friend, I had just finished a Caesar salad, and then — wham. The pain was so intense that I struggled to breathe.

“Something’s wrong,” I wheezed to my buddy before slipping out and leaving him with the bill. My doctor’s office was on the same block, and I staggered inside, flopping into a waiting-room chair and slumping against a wall. Soon, I was in an ambulance with bad shocks, my pain flaring with every pothole.

Hours later, when an emergency room doctor revealed that my appendix had ruptured and that I would need an appendectomy in the morning, I knew I would not be traveling to Bhutan. What I didn’t know was that the seemingly straightforward procedure would result in a complication, known as ileus (where the intestines can’t move waste from the body).

Doctors shoved a tube through my nostrils into my no-longer-functioning gut, and I was hospitalized for nine deeply uncomfortable days. Whatever could go wrong seemingly did go wrong, from a blood clot in my left arm (which occurred after doctors inserted a PICC line — a catheter used to distribute meds and liquid nutrition — and led to twice-a-day blood-thinning shots) to an impacted bowel (after nine days of inactivity, the train couldn’t reach the station, if you know what I mean).

Yet something unexpected happened. I discovered more about mindfulness, kindness and joy while trapped in a hospital bed than I probably would have in a Himalayan monastery.

My lessons:

Be in the moment (It can reduce pain). After the surgery, I was a medical mess. My stomach had shut down, so I couldn’t eat or drink. My abdomen was sore from the appendectomy. The nasogastric tube from my nostrils to my gut put constant pressure on my sinuses and throat. When an IV started leaking, nurses struggled to start a new one, poking my swollen arms and hands in nine places, until I finally said enough. (They ended up putting in the PICC line, rather than starting a new IV, the next day.)

Then, one night, around 3:30 a.m., I made a discovery. I was sucking on ice chips, and by focusing solely on the cold, I minimized my discomfort. It was my frigid attempt at mindfulness meditation, which research suggests can relieve pain: In one study, patients who meditated reported a 32 percent reduction in pain intensity.

Meditation engages neural processes not previously linked to pain relief, the researchers have found. This includes reduced activity in the default mode network, a brain region associated with mind-wandering and self-directed thinking. The more the network deactivates during meditation — and decouples from the thalamus, which relays pain signals — the greater the relief.

“It’s not necessarily removing the pain, but it’s reducing the relationship of self to the experience of pain, which is generally contaminated by ruminations, worrying and fear,” says Fadel Zeidan, a study co-author and professor at the Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion at the University of California at San Diego.

Study participants received a 60-minute meditation training session, but even for novices, slow, deep breaths can be effective, Zeidan says. He’s a believer: After his appendectomy, he found meditation to be more effective than morphine.

Give kindness, receive kindness. As a patient, I appreciated the kindness of the medical staff. But when the staff made occasional mistakes — four times, night nurses incorrectly disconnected the suction machine attached to my tube, spilling stomach fluids onto my bed (and me) — I was kind to them, too. And that kindness can beget kindness. A nurse, for example, helped me shower since I hadn’t bathed for a week. That wasn’t in the medical orders. She simply thought, I bet he would like a bath.

Kindness also feels good. It can boost levels of serotonin and dopamine — neurotransmitters linked to the brain’s pleasure and reward centers — and release endorphins and oxytocin, your body’s natural painkillers. And when you’re sick, acts of kindness may reduce depression and anxiety by redirecting your thoughts from your symptoms, an Ohio State University study found.

Embrace impermanence. If my appendix had ruptured in Bhutan, I would probably be dead. Sepsis can occur quickly, and I would have been traveling in remote areas, away from medical care, facing language barriers and potential misdiagnoses. But there’s an upside to my near miss (aside from not dying). It’s a reminder of impermanence — and acknowledging that can increase appreciation for life and “reframe stressors as opportunities for spiritual growth,” noted a recent study in the journal BMC Psychology by researchers in China.

Consider an exercise that Cassie Mogilner Holmes, a UCLA Anderson School of Management professor and author of “Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most,” calls “counting your times left.” Think of an activity you take for granted, such as carrying your daughter to bed. Then calculate how many times you can do it before she’s too old and too independent.

“Recognizing the limited nature of experiences,” Holmes says, “increases our paying attention to them.”

Find joy in broth. The day before I was discharged, I received a bowl of vegetable broth. It was my first food in over a week and the most exhilarating meal of my life. The following afternoon, when a nurse wheeled me outside, the air was so fresh, my lungs seemed to tingle. Driving home, everything seemed glorious and new: Look! A dog! Oh, wow! A tree!

Short-term deprivation had shaken me from what psychologists call hedonic adaptation. We become so used to things that we stop noticing them. Mindfulness can help prevent that.

Holmes gives an example from a happiness course she teaches: A meditation expert gave each student a Hershey’s Kiss candy and told them to think about everything involved with the chocolate, from harvesting to packaging. The expert told students to listen to the crinkling of the foil as they unwrapped the Kiss, to smell the chocolate, to put it in their mouths without biting it but instead just tasting it.

“It was this incredible experience where everyone was like, ‘Usually I eat 10 without even thinking about it,’ versus this very mindful eating,” Holmes says. “We tend to move through experiences so quickly because we’re concerned about what’s next and getting things done, as opposed to noticing what’s right in front of you.”

I’m guilty of this as well. I work too much. I doomscroll too much. But then I remember my illness, and the tube that shackled me to my bed (I could only get up when nurses disconnected me from the machine), and I become present. And I pay attention. To birds chirping. To the wind. To faces.

The late spiritual guru Ram Dass, who suffered a stroke in his 60s, said that suffering is grace — a gift that can awaken you. “I don’t wish you the stroke, but I wish you the grace of the stroke,” he told an interviewer in the 2017 film “Ram Dass: Going Home.” I share that sentiment. I don’t wish you ileus, but I urge you to look, listen and be. To take time and savor the broth.