Hospital stories

   

Night one: After the hospital’s 10 p.m. lockdown Thursday, My brother and I took to the halls in search of distraction. I was mostly looking for a wifi signal. We discovered a cafeteria gearing up for its nightly output, and I fed myself forkfuls of chocolate chess pie and gulps of coffee as he watched crap TV in the dining room. We continued the sugar dump in the vending area, with him knocking back two cheese danishes and me nibbling on an Oreo chocolate eclair. We gulped down chunks of synthetic sweetness, both knowing how stupid we were being, but both feeling totally reckless and invincible in the belly of a hospital. Then I got a text from mom, who said we needed to have a powwow in the ICU waiting-room kitchen, but neither of us are the type to wait for bad news so we busted out into the humid June night to look for our mother and found her on the outskirts of the compound’s parking lots, smoking a cigarette and facing the inky skyline. She started to explain what the surgeons had just called her up to explain, and how dire the situation had actually gotten. The doctor in charge had communicated to her that Krissie was at an operate-or-die junction. My brother and I, as if on cue, moved in to hold my mother as her voice broke and we held her there in that lot, her cigarette smoking clandestinely (it’s a no-smoking property), our faces quivering, until it was time to pull back and reassess and make sure we all understood that we would fight for Kris to have as normal a life as possible, no matter what happened.

We walked back into the hospital with heavy hearts but no real recourse.

 

My dad has grown into one of those people who can’t meet a stranger. Mere hours into descending upon the hospital, he’d met a veteran (above left) and had thanked him profusely for his service, and then gotten him to talk about other interesting things I happened to miss out on. Mom tells me dad used to be introverted and would never make friends anywhere he went, and now this. I find that endearing to a point that I can’t really articulate. Suddenly my dad needs to reach out and connect, however he can. He’d never admit it. But he does.

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I don’t know if it was by design or coincidence, but for four days there was a steady stream of people we knew who we kept running into. Jackson General is a full hour from my hometown but we saw half a dozen people there randomly who were there visiting their own family members and just wanted to drop by and check on us. That doesn’t even count our cousins, who, the first morning, brought coffee and donuts and then, the second afternoon, brought fixins from a fajita bar. That also doesn’t count the dozens and dozens of phone calls and text messages and blog comments and Twitter replies and Facebook comments we fielded. It felt like everyone we knew was devoting some brainpower to getting Kris better, and however hokey that might sound, it helped. Just having people on board, on your side raises your morale. Feeling loved and rooted for is so special and I am so grateful to everyone who took the time out of their busy and complicated days to check on us, and let us know we were being rooted for. I get choked up when I think about it because I worry that we don’t deserve such things, that we don’t do for others like we should. My mother kept saying the same thing: “I need to do better for people.” That is one thing I will take away from this. I have the capacity most days to help comfort others; that should always be my first priority.

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This should provide definitive proof that my purse-rummaging thing is not a personality quirk of my own. It’s a full-blown genetic thing:

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My sister’s fairly steady improvements brought about many praises to God for his great works. Which is fine. I am an agnostic on good days, and even I felt uplifted by the amount of prayers and thoughts people were devoting to my family. But I want to, for posterity, be sure and thank the doctors and nurses and residents and aides and whoever else happened to be involved in the process that took my sister from “um we don’t know what’s wrong with her but we might have to remove her colon” to “sweet, she seems to be doing okay and maybe she can have some Jell-o.” Those people did their jobs with the help of science. Science plus compassion. I am amazed at what medicine can do — all the shit it can fix if it’s applied well. It’s not magic. It’s science. God may work in mysterious ways, but medicine is fairly predictable and I am thankful that the people in charge of my sister’s life were all on the same page about how to fix her. It was not a miracle that saved her; it was medical science. Good ol’ expensive medical science. Even though she will be broke for the rest of her life because of this, I am grateful for it. I’m already hatching plans to help her pay her medical bills once that time rolls around. That Etsy shop I’ve been daydreaming about? It just met its purpose, I think.

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Our time in the ICU waiting area brought us in contact with so many other sad stories that it’s hard to really keep track. There was the one woman who’d been living there for three months while waiting for her mother to recover from open-heart surgery, which turned into countless other deadly maladies. She’d been there so long that she’d basically moved in. “I got squatter’s rights,” she told us. Sure enough it seemed like the staff respected those rights; she was the only one each morning at 7 who didn’t get bitched at if she didn’t have her recliner stripped of its linens. She’d full-on moved in. When I talked to her, I could tell that she never really had any intention of ever leaving. Her right hand had four of five fingers intact and she had a way of moving that made her seem put out by the slightest annoyance. She was going to be there until her mother died, however long that took. I thought about living in that room for months and died a little inside. It happens. I was there for four days and started to feel slightly batty; there is no telling what multiple weeks of living in that environment might do to a person. On the other hand, it’s free (sort of, okay not really) room and board and it’s not like the accommodations are terrible. There’s a nice big bathroom with two showers, and a kitchen with a washer and dryer. Of course, every morning, you’ve got little old ladies bitching at you to get moving at 7 a.m., but after my second day, that just sort of seemed quaint, like I was at camp.

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I was thumbing through an old Better Homes and Gardens when I spotted, out of the corner of my eye, some kid wandering around with a Bible in his hands. He spotted me spotting him and told me that he comes around to critical care units and asks to pray for people. I was tired, which always dilutes my Southern hospitality, so I told him he should hit up my mother because “she would be into that.” Instantly I felt bad about putting it that way. All I meant was she would get a boost from prayer with a stranger where I would just feel weird about it and, frankly, rather have a nap. So I directed him to the kitchen, where I thought she was, so I could continue to read my silly magazine in peace. The kid came back out a few minutes later and said he couldn’t find her, but would I mind if he waited? Not at all, I said, and asked him how long he’d been ministering to ICU families. I honestly thought he was 18. Mom came back out a few seconds later and I introduced them and so began the sermon. He told us about how he had been a sinner and had gotten into a car accident, which resulted in doctors realizing he had a brain tumor, and from there he wanted to share the Lord’s word with whomever he could. He and mom exchanged oddly worded testimonials as I sat silent, hoping it wouldn’t turn into a spiritual intervention for me, the longtime heathen. We prayed together, and the kid told us he was 27 — TWENTY SEVEN — and I cursed my sinful life for making me look older than I actually am. Once the fellowship was over and he left, mom looked at me and said, “I noticed he was looking over here at your legs a lot. That’s when I knew the sermon was over!” Which is hilarious because while she thinks he’s trying to put the moves on her daughter, I know he was probably looking at my legs and wondering what horrible devil creature had eaten them up. In fact, I am now regretful that I didn’t hold hands with young Billy Graham and ask for his mosquito-repellent prayers.

I know that sounds sacrilegious but you just have to take my word for it when I say I am sincere.

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Kris has texted me several times tonight from her REGULAR hospital room. Given how terrible the prognosis was Thursday night, I am more tickled about this than I should be. My goal is to get up and get my ass to Jackson to see her in the late afternoon. I hope she’ll be even better by then. It’s sort of been two steps forward, one step back, but I’ve got more hope in me than should be allowed. So we’ll see.