A memory from January 2001.
I flailed to consciousness, the way a submerged and drowning person reaches for the surface. Or at least it felt that way—the involuntary and instinctive struggle toward light and air and voices. Then a second or two of surprise as I realized that I wasn’t immersed in a cold tide but lying in a hospital bed, tied down by sheet, blanket and tubes going into almost every orifice. The rhythmic distant roar of the surf I had heard in my disoriented state was the hiss and sigh of the little motor inflating and deflating the anti-embolism cuffs on my calves. A nurse bent over me, and offered me ice chips. I sucked at them eagerly—I was parched, for all my dreams of water—and tried to focus my eyes as I took stock.
So, I had come through the surgery okay, and I was back in my hospital room. Good. I had been through this kind of thing two years before, so I knew the drill. I felt lousy right now, like a cement truck had run over my abdomen, but as long as I could use the little “painkiller watch” on my wrist to self-administer medication in the first two or three days, and sleep whenever the pain spiked, I would feel better every time I woke up. Then one by one the tubes would go, and when the anesthetic wore off completely and I could stand unassisted, I would take walks around the ward. And then at some point, a nurse would remove the ladder of stainless steel staples on my belly and I could go home to await the clinical pathologist’s report on whether the tumor had spread. It would be uphill from here, and I was determined to take charge of the process in any way I could.
I looked around the room and to my disappointment saw that there was someone in the next bed, a squat, elderly woman whose permed curls were tangled in a shapeless mass on her pillow. A large, homely man in work clothes and a baseball jacket—her husband? He was about the right age—sat beside her bed. Every so often, he would fumble helplessly with her coverlet, tucking it tenderly around her chin. At least the two of them were quiet, I thought. Poor guy. I drifted off to sleep again.
More odd dreams, of high school afternoons working in Bradlees, and a parade of customers wandering past me, aimlessly up and down the aisles. The dream dissolved into the sound of shuffling, heavy footsteps. I opened my eyes to see three women in polyester slack suits lumbering by, like the character balloons in a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. They passed by the foot of my bed, each turning to stare openly, curiously at me, and then arranged themselves in a circle around the elderly woman. Bending over her, they called to her in loud, over-the-fence voices. “Ma—we’re here. Ma, everything is going to be okay. Ma, can you hear me? Ma, wake up.”
I don’t know if she responded, but I was now wide awake. I glanced at the clock on the opposite wall. It was just past four. When the duty nurse came in an hour later with my standard-issue post-surgical meal, all six visitors turned to watch her arrange the cream of wheat, applesauce and milk on my bedside tray. With a sixth sense borne of long practice, this angel of mercy pulled the curtain between the two beds without having to be told.
“Thank you,” I mouthed to her silently. She smiled, and whispered with a wink, “Visiting hours end at eight. They’ll be gone soon.”
But after four hours the women were not only still there but joined in their vigil by two very large middle-aged men, whom I presumed were either brothers or husbands, and who expressed their discomfort over the circumstances by pacing in and out of the room like captive rhinos. It wasn’t until nine o’clock that night that they all finally left the ward, and I could get the undisturbed sleep I had been denied and now desperately needed.
But no chance of that, either. Now that she was alone, my roommate was now awake, and began to call out deliriously in a relentless, repetitive, querulous, nasal tone, like the baaa-aaa of a sheep. “Help me. Help me. I’m tied up. I can’t move. I’m paralyzed,” she said, over and over. “I’m paralyzed. I can’t move. They’ve tied me up. Someone help me. I’m paralyzed. Please. Please help me. I can’t move.”
She wasn’t very loud, but she was loud enough. I spent the first four hours of this trying to tune her out. But in the nighttime silence of the cancer ward, her cries were impossible to ignore. I would drift off only to wake to the same maddening sound. Soon, whenever she paused for air, I found myself even more on edge, anticipating the moment she would resume her miserable litany. By three a.m. I was an exhausted wreck, quivering with suppressed rage as I tried not to think about how very much I wanted to leap out of bed, tubes and sutures be damned, and smother her with my pillow. Crazy with pain and fatigue, sick to my stomach, I began to yell back at her. “Stop it! Shut up, shut up, shut UP! Go to sleep!”
The next day, daughters, husbands and dad were back again, this time with two preteens in tow. The kids clearly didn’t want to be there, especially when mom pushed them to the bedside of the unresponsive woman, ordering them to “say hello to Gramma.” At that cue, the girl-child began a continuous whining that didn’t let up for over an hour, while the boy-child pestered Grampa for change for snacks and soda from the hospital vending machines. By now the traffic back and forth past the foot of my bed was continuous. I tried to sleep, but I may as well have been lying in the main terminal of Logan Airport. Once I opened my eyes to see Junior’s face poking through the curtain, his open jaws working on a huge hunk of chocolate as he stared dully at me. I scowled back and his head disappeared behind curtain again. The daughters by this time were camped around their mother’s bed. Someone had brought lunch, and they used the old woman’s mattress as a dining table, passing sandwiches and potato chips over her supine form, chatting as if on a picnic.
Soon the elderly woman’s physician came in and in hushed tones gave the family an assessment of their mother’s condition. Judging from the wailing and cries of dismay and denial that greeted his report, the news wasn’t good. The doctor had apparently asked if the family would like a priest to administer last rites, because once he left one of the women began shouting at her unresponsive mother, “The doctor is sending Father in to see you. He’s going to say some prayers and he’ll make you ALL BETTER.” I was never happier for the curtain separating my space from theirs at that moment, because I was too tired to hide the expression on my face.
My duty nurse came in to change the dressing on my sutures. “How was your night?” she asked, and in response I grabbed her arm with the inhuman strength that comes to the truly desperate.
“You’ve got to get me a different room,” I told her. “I can’t stand it anymore. She babbled all night and I didn’t get more than fifteen minutes of sleep at a time.” Whispering through clenched teeth, I added, “And her family is driving me nuts. I feel like a freaking sideshow.”
The nurse looked past me at the gathering on the other side of the room. “You don’t look good,” she agreed. “I’ll have them move you to the first vacant room we get. Try to hold out until then.”
When the orderlies finally came three hours later to wheel my bed to my new room, I felt rather than saw the family watch me go. “What was her problem?” one of them asked, without even bothering to lower her voice. I didn’t hear the response. I didn’t care. I just wanted to be out of there.
As it was, the continuous disturbance hampered my recovery to the point where my oncologist delayed my discharge for two additional days. When that afternoon finally arrived, I waited in a wheelchair in the holding area, dressed in the loose clothing I had been told to bring prior to my hospitalization, while my husband brought the car around to take me home. Suddenly, two of my former roommate’s family members rounded the corner to take seats against the opposite site of the lounge. The father recognized me first, and somehow managed a smile that was weary but genuine. “Going home?” he said.
I smiled back and nodded.
The daughter, a sullen woman in a pair of badly fitting stretch pants and a pullover tent top, gave me the once-over and then said in a flat, hostile voice, “You look good.”
I suppressed the urge to say, “No thanks to you or your sisters, you rude cow,” and instead smiled sweetly, viciously at her. “My oncologist told me that I’m probably cancer-free,” I said. If she resented my recovery that much, I would more than oblige her. Payback time.
Two days later, I saw the obituary. The old woman had died the night after I had been discharged. I remember being relieved I wasn’t there.
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