Don't Leave Me This Way: Or When I Get Back on My Feet You'll Be Sorry (4 page)

YOU ARE CRYING AS QUIETLY
as you can and Nurse Doom is administering the IV.

“You know,” she says in a low voice, staring at the needle, “there’s a department here that can get special hats for chemotherapy patients.”

Her job description must include speaking words of cheer to patients receiving injections of poison.

You glare at her angular face and cold blue eyes as you feel the stuff coursing through you. You find your eyes drawn to Nurse Doom’s own stiff white trifold hat, which looks like something out of the 1940s.

“Is there a department,” you ask, “for nurses’ hats? Because I think you’ve
got
to update yours to this century.”

She stiffens, but doesn’t look at you.

“A lot of chemotherapy patients,” she growls out slowly, “have problems adjusting afterward. A lot of chemotherapy patients are
glad
that there’s a department that can get hats for them.”

Silence. Neither of you wants to talk next.

You are a chemotherapy patient.

You conjure up a dunce cap in your mind.

To be honest, hair is the least of your worries at the moment. Half of your head is shaved flat and bald and embroidered with an intricate S-shape pattern of staples. The other half has shoulder-length hair and you can tell, even now, even without looking at it, that it is getting matted and gnarly. It hangs unevenly, and there’s a strange weight to it.

Finally, she breaks the silence.

“There is a department that administers support groups for chemotherapy patients here. You’re the sort of patient who should take advantage of that program.”

The sort of patient who should take advantage.

You.

Not only a chemotherapy patient. But the sort who should take advantage. Great. Now you have another support group to attend. “I’m still working on trying to sit up,” you tell her. “Is there a support group for how to deal with medical staff?”

She keeps staring at the needle. For some reason she doesn’t want to look at you.

“I’m sorry I made fun of your hat.”

No response.

“But I have to tell you it is still kind of weirding me out.”

She coughs. On purpose. That little cough people cough that says, “That’s enough.”

She turns on her heel and her angular face vanishes. You hear the door close and the footsteps clicking away, quieter and quieter, down the hall until they’re gone.

Nurse Doom has apparently had her fill of you.

You cry as loud as you want for a few minutes.

Then the room goes wobbly and things are bluer and colder. It’s like ice being pushed through your veins, and you notice that the inside of your mouth tastes like pennies. And you make a mental note to yourself that it’s time to get a haircut.

“ALL I’M SAYING
is think about it.”

For some reason your dad is really worked up about the decision to cut off the hair on the side of your head that isn’t bald and glittering with staples and red puncture wounds.

He’s there by your bed, just at the edge of your field of vision. By him is a table filled with flowers and a tiny man with a frizzy black halo of hair who keeps telling you his name, Curtis, and who is unpacking a beauty case. Your dad is making his trying-to-smile expression, which he’s been doing a lot lately, and you’re trying to talk yourself into eating a hot fudge sundae.

“All I’m saying is, it’s a big step and why cut off your hair if you don’t have to?”

You need help to eat everything, including this hot fudge sundae. Everything you eat tastes like pennies, not that you’ve ever eaten pennies, but it’s what you imagine they taste like. You ask your dad to put it on the table next to your bed.

Useless.

“Don’t you want to keep your hair?”

“Dad,” you say, “I would if I had the other half. The half-bald look isn’t in this year.”

You look at Curtis.

“Let’s get it over with.”

He turns on a buzz cutter and runs it along the side of your head. It tickles. Five or six strokes. You feel it fall. Then Curtis gathers it up and shows it to you and gives you a little smile.

“Sinead O’Connor’s got nothing on you, kid,” Curtis says.

You stare at the small mop of hair he’s removed from your head and is now extending toward you like a trophy. The weekend before your stroke, which now seems like a couple of centuries ago, you paid $140 to have that clump of hair styled, permed, and cut. Now it looks a little like a rodent in hibernation.

“Throw it away,” says your dad.

“No,” you tell Curtis. “Put it here on the bed.”

Curtis does.

“Anything else?” Curtis asks.

“Yeah,” you say. “Do you do nails?”

Curtis smiles.

“Of
course
I do nails.”

“Good,” you say. “Could you please do mine? Something bright. Unlike this room.”

THAT NIGHT, WHEN YOU’RE
all alone again, you toss the clump of hair on the floor in front of your bed and press the call button.

Quicker than you expect, a nurse materializes. She leans in the door halfway and says “Yeeeeess?” Plump, big eyes, blond hair, smile. It’s Brenda. There are so many nurses to keep track of. You make a mental exercise of remembering as many of their names as possible. You even try to remember their kids’ names. Brenda is usually willing to listen to you when you want to talk about the treatment or ask questions or pick up the TV remote. Brenda is your happy-go-lucky nurse.

You’re glad it’s Brenda who has materialized.

“There’s a mouse in my room.”

You try to show no emotion. You point at the floor.

She steps in the door and looks at the floor.

“Oh dear.” Mock horror. “Better make a call.”

It does look like a mouse down there, at least with only the hallway lights on.

“I think it’s dead,” you intone solemnly. “It wouldn’t move when I yelled at it. Turn on the lights and see if it runs away.”

She steps to the doorway and clicks the light. She stares at the clump of hair on the floor. Then she steps toward it cautiously. Then she leans down and looks at it closely.

“You,” she says quietly, “are a troublemaker.”

Still kneeling by what used to be your hair, she looks up at you. The minute you make eye contact, you both start laughing hard, right out loud.

It feels good. You both keep doing it for as long as the laugh can last.

Finally the laughter eases away into the distance, and she picks up the hair and throws it in the wastebasket.

She stands next to you and puts her hand on your shoulder.

“Did you have anything, you know,
real
to ask?”

You think for a moment.

“Yes,” you say. “Yes, I do.”

“What?”

You show her the fingernails on your right hand…
masterpieces.

“Don’t my nails look
fabulous
?” you ask.

Brenda is impressed, and she should be. Curtis spent over an hour and a half on them. The left hand wouldn’t stay anywhere you put it. It was a major project.

“What do you think? Not your usual diva red, huh?” you ask.

THE CRITICAL CARE HOSPITAL
nursing staff is a group of extremely caring individuals. The kindness is completely genuine. On Saturdays, Nurse Happy-Go-Lucky brings you fresh bagels and cream cheese. These are supposed to be for the nurses only, but she shares with you. It feels so good that she would do that.

You take a long look at the bagel with cream cheese. It occurs to you that you are very lucky to have it, very lucky to have a nurse like Brenda who will bring you something good to eat on a sunny morning like this—you’re grateful for that, too. And for a heart beating inside your chest. Even with some things not working like they used to, even with half of your body gone, you’re alive and there is a window, and luminous sun bouncing orange light off the wet street, and the city waking up and getting ready to go to work. But here you are watching it instead of driving southbound on Route 128 and someone you like just gave you a bagel. It’s the best bagel in the world.

You are weeping, staring at the window, staring at the bagel, so grateful for it you don’t want to spoil it by picking it up and eating it.

You need help. Chewing is difficult—you keep biting your tongue and cheek. Cream cheese must be all over your face. You don’t care. You’re supposed to be here. God wanted you to be here and receive food from someone who wanted to feed you something she was supposed to be eating but she gave it to you instead. God put you here. God kept the heart in your chest beating. God gave you this food through Nurse Happy-Go-Lucky.

So you could do something.

You don’t really know what it is though.

Bring it on.

WHEN YOU WERE A KID,
you thought riding in an ambulance would be exciting—going fast, passing all the other cars, sirens screaming. You never thought about the reasons that might make you a passenger in one. The child in you liked the idea of the frenzied activity, the urgency.

Mom driving all of you to swimming lessons, the wood-panel Country Squire station wagon, and an ambulance would shriek past you. Mom silenced everyone and told you all to pray a Hail Mary for the faceless, genderless occupant of the ambulance. You liked to think that your prayers gave the (presumably) dying person a fighting chance.

Now it’s your turn for someone to recite the Hail Mary for you. You are the injured stranger to your fellow commuters. The transport from critical care to the next leg of your journey, the rehabilitation hospital, is jolting. You can’t hear any siren. Jim is following along behind—or so they keep assuring you.

The ambulance is sweltering. Your head and neck are damp with sweat. You are strapped on your back to a stiff, unforgiving gurney. Your body feels every single bump in the road. It’s excruciating. When the ambulance hits one of the many potholes, your central nervous system rattles and explodes, your body gets increasingly stiff, and you feel it trying to coil like a spring. But you’re tied down, so you can only feel stiffness and spasms. You hit another pothole and the explosions and spasms start again. You wonder if this is what rigor mortis is like.

When the ambulance finally arrives at its destination, you are jostled out of your tiny moving torture chamber into a much larger stationary torture chamber—the rehab hospital.

The critical care hospital was always extremely clean. The floors gleamed, and the rooms were pristine and modern looking. Even as they wheel you into this place, you can tell from the smell of it and the look of the ceiling tiles that you are entering a place that is old and worn out. You don’t like it.

There are no rooms available on the neurology floor. Brain trauma must be more popular than heart problems: They find you an open room on the cardiac floor until a room in the neurology unit opens up.

The emergency medical technicians bring you into a room with two beds and a harsh fluorescent light that is oddly off center. You are relieved that no one else is here to share the space.

“Which bed would you like?”

“Neither. I want my own room.”

The EMT, staring at you blankly, looks clueless.

“I’ll take the upgrade—the one with the view by the window.”

No answer.

The EMTs are getting ready to leave. Jim is nowhere in sight.

“Please,” you say to them, before they vanish. “Don’t.”

One of the guys leaves, like you didn’t say anything at all. But the squat, pleasant-looking fellow who drove the ambulance through every available pothole stops and turns to look at you. “Don’t what?” he asks.

“Don’t leave me here. It’s a mistake, I’m not supposed to be here,” you answer.

He looks at you like you’re joking. But you’re pretty sure you’re not.

He’s gone.

You’re alone.

IN ADDITION TO THE MISPLACED
lighting fixture, the room has putrid mint green walls and an exhausted pink linoleum floor.

The bed on which you have been placed boasts a thin, sagging mattress covered by two threadbare sheets that now envelop you carelessly. It is late July, and even at dusk, the room is broiling.

You press the call button. A black box above your head crackles loudly.

A voice buzzes: “What do you need?”

“It’s really hot.”

The voice buzzes again: “Sorry. Can’t change it.”

One stroke isn’t enough, now you’re going to have another—a heat stroke. You press the call button again.

The black box squawks: “Yes.”

You shout, “Is this purgatory or hell? Or are you the Wizard of Oz in there, in that speaking box? And if you’re the Great Oz, I want to go
home
.”

Silence.

You weep. Time passes. You have no idea how much of it, but it passes.

When an aide arrives at your bedside, you say, “I was beginning to think humans didn’t really work here. What do you think of cranking the air conditioner up a notch, please?”

In a robot move she turns her back to you. You think she must be adjusting some settings somewhere, but instead she opens up the window. Yeah, that’s just what you needed. Now you can smell the auto exhaust, hear the road rage of the southeast expressway, and still be just as hot.

“You should have someone bring you a fan, because that’s how patients deal with the heat here.”

“What? Have somebody bring in a fan for me—you’re kidding, right? What is this, a hospital or a homeless shelter? This place charges more per day than the Ritz-Carlton and you’re telling me you have no way to control the temperature?”

The aide leaves.

Jim still isn’t here. Maybe they were lying about him following the ambulance after all.

It’s you and the black box. Period.

You press the call button.

Nothing happens.

You glare at the black box. You press the call button again.

Silence.

Empty hall.

So much for the orientation process at this hospital. Patient care resides in a little black box over your head.

TWO WEEKS EARLIER,
you had been power walking, managing multiple projects, and performing a dizzying variety of physical and mental tasks. Now it’s two in the morning and you’re sprawled in a heap, kissing the foul, deadly pink linoleum floor in a rehab hospital.

Why did this happen? If you think hard, you are pretty sure you can reassemble this sequence of events. Got it—it happened because during a potty transfer, you leaned forward to take a sip of water from a cup that was directly in front of you. The floor is furious; your face aches from it. And now, as you lie in a pile on the floor, the aide is reprimanding you, too.

“That was
impulsive
,” says the aide.

“No,” you say, “that wasn’t impulsive.”

“Whatever,” says the aide.

“Fuck you
sideways
,” you say, biting off the words, with your mouth pressed against the floor. “Pick me
up
.”

“I
beg
your pardon,” says the aide.

“Now
that
,” you say, pronouncing from the floor as clearly and carefully as you can, “
that
was impulsive. Trying to lean forward to get a drink of water, that’s not impulsive. But saying ‘Fuck you sideways’ because you won’t pick me up,
that’s
impulsive. See? There’s a difference.”

YOUR BODY’S CENTER OF GRAVITY
is something you never gave much thought to before. The brain does many things unconsciously, things like breathing—and stabilizing itself when you lean forward to get a drink of water. The brain’s the boss, supposedly. Currently though, some of your body parts are guilty of insubordination.

In fact, the entire left side of your body now refuses to take orders from the boss. No one on the left side is listening—they’ve quit their jobs. So the boss has pretty much chosen to ignore the left side of your body. It no longer exists, according to your brain.

THE FALL HAPPENED
at a little before two in the morning; there was only one aide to hoist you from the bed to the potty chair next to your pathetic, sagging bed. You required two—it was a matter of policy. Down you went. There followed a full-body X-ray in your bed. Your shoulder shows a two-inch separation between your limb and your shoulder joint.

The aide says it’s because of your fall—and the fact that you’re “impulsive.”

Actually, it’s from her yanking your arm to get you back up off the floor.

You’re starting to see a pattern here: The bigger the staff ’s error, the more “impulsive” you are.

“It’s typical for right-hemisphere strokes to act impulsive,” says the doctor who takes the x-rays.

You may be brain damaged, but you know full well they’re just covering their asses. It’s an unspoken rule: Always find a reason to blame the patient for any problem. This reduces the risk of lawsuits.

Two weeks ago you were in charge of your life. Now that misplaced fluorescent light above you seems to be running things.

You can still hear the surly aide’s verdict in your head: “That was impulsive.”

You press down on the call box button for at least a minute and hear yourself weeping when someone finally answers.