Semi-Private

Hospitals, as I've had occasion to mention, seem miraculously awful to me.

They are marvels, truly, temples to the cult of not-dying.  For this I'm grateful.  They've saved my daughter's life, my father's, my mother's.  I need scientific notation to count the bags of potassium chloride, salt, and dextrose that slip drip by drip into my mother and her roommate, who snores rhythmically and regularly in that way that makes you nearly mad with anticipation of the next pass of the saw-blade.  When it comes you want to scream, "Wake up!  Wake up!"

The clear bags of fluid keep them hydrated and alive, keep the cells functioning.

Nurses bang in and out of the room and talk to one another in loud voices while the patients somehow teach themselves to sleep through it.   I certainly am grateful to the good nurses who watch over mom all night and all day; but I've found that I come to dislike everything about the nurses who treat nursing like a job at McDonalds but with better pay.  They call to each other with loud, dull, ironic voices, and treat the patients like a batch of fries that need to be scooped out of the hot oil of suffering.

Mom's roommate had, mom tells me, a bad night, and that means mom had a bad night.  The roommate's respiration is painful, the product of years of smoking by the sound of it.  She's only been awake once in the two days that we've been in and out of this tiny, cramped semi-private room.   Everybody has the right to smoke, of course.  They should be made however to spend two nights in a semi-private room with somebody dying of emphysema.   There's a strange mixture of compassion and irritation that comes with the way in which this oblivious person interrupts my mother's sleep: you can feel pain in each breath, and wish that she could breathe better.  She seems to me barely alive.  The more you listen, the more you just want to do something, to hydrate the rasping lungs and throat.

Right now the nurse is loudly and absently calling the woman's name as she straps her up for the frequent checks of blood pressure and temperature.   The nurse moves on to my mother, wakes her, squeezes into the tiny space between my chair and my mother.  She calls my mother's name, mispronouncing it.

A doctor and an intern somehow shoehorn themselves into the room.  An IV machine beeps loudly, as though trying to make itself heard down the hall.   Mom wakes up, looks at me with a painful smile, and says, "It's been like this all night long."

She goes to the bathroom, which might be the last citadel of peace and quiet, pushing her IV machine like an oddly insectoid silver tree of life.

I wander out into the hall and look out from the ninth floor window.   Below, the Mississippi winds away, dark and quiet, as tranquil, beautiful, and unconcerned as this hospital is concentrated, busy, clattering, and surreal.

Comments

[Kim]

I'm glad that you're writing. Sometimes I have nothing to say except what other people have said, although even to say that somehow seems like an intrusion. Reading what you wrote reminded me of a poem and I'll put part of it here, surely not to comfort, as if I could, but really just because I thought of it. The author wrote an entire book of poems in which he confronts his own illness, his mothers illness as well. For some reason I go to this book a lot.

"...faithful body, you are not in the best of shape,
far from the glitter of the river in which you once swam.

But I want good tears when I stand on the street

and, from the sky, drifts down the finest mist on my face.
Not everything is given and it should not permit sadness.

Let me
Let me keep on describing things to be sure they happened."

[Otter]

Thank you, Kim... really heart-stirring stuff to me. (For those reading who don't know, the poet is Jason Shinder.)

I think a lot also of the prior lines:

If there is no cure, I still want to correct a few things

and think mostly of people, and have them all alive.
I want a door opening in me that I can enter

and feel the clarity of evening and the stars beginning.

One after another, I want my mistakes returning
and to approach them on a beach like a man

for whom there is no division between one way or another.

[Kim]

Just one last thing on Jason-- I read an article about how frustrated his friends were with him because he seemed to be in denial about his cancer. He'd take trips instead of going in for treatment, he'd often show up late, he didn't take his medications as prescribed, he'd joke with his doctor as if his doctor was the one who had cancer. After he died his friends found this:

"I've been avoiding my illness
because I'm afraid

I will die and when I do
I'll end up alone again."

******************************************
But the article ends with this, from his diary:

". . . bless my presence in this time and space, which will soon be only memory in those few who knew me and then in those few who knew of those who knew me and then in just one line one day in the year 2089 about the past and someone by my name who tried but failed who was single all his life and who also wrote some things, I think poems. The hours are left for vanishing and also for joy and for blessing and gratitude."

I guess I'm weird to need death poetry. The name of his book is Stupid Hope. I like that.

[Victoria]

That picture is the same view from the room a friend of mine had when she had to spend the night in the hospital. She was having weird twitching spasms, so they hooked her up to a machine that read her brainwaves and put her in a room with cameras to see if they could figure out what the problem was. The next morning, the nurses came in to unhook her, and as she was bent over the bathtub to wash the glue out of her hair, a nurse told her that they didn't see any abnormalities and to go home because "we have real patients to treat."