BETWEEN
Between is
Beige waiting rooms
With molded
Plastic chairs
Long corridors
Connecting
Here to there.
CHAPTER FOUR.
March
6, 2000. 2PM.
I feel like Alice in a distorted
version of Wonderland, watching the corridor that connects the parking garage
to the hospital grow each day to immense proportions. It takes one minute and
twenty seconds walking at a normal pace to complete the trek. I time it, but
it seems longer most days. My shoes make only muffled sounds on the carpet, my
tired smile meets the faces of other weary travelers: doctors, nurses,
visitors. We all look shell-shocked, like victims of a national disaster,
thrown into this corridor. It is the last place on earth we want to be, but for
the time being it is the only place we can be. Our real lives have been
suspended; this corridor, stretching from here to there, is all we have.
I am bone-tired. It is an expression
my grandmother would use when I would try to cajole her into playing a game of
jump-rope. “I am bone-tired,” she would say, dropping into an old wooden
rocking chair that creaked no less than her joints. I would laugh and run off
to my games, leaving Nanny to rock in the sunshine, each squeak of the rocker’s
gliders sing-songing her weariness.
I am bone-tired now, so tired that I
can feel the ache from the tips of my toes to the roots of my hair. I wonder
every day if I will be able to traverse the corridor or stop somewhere along
the way, sinking into a liquid puddle of weariness, no bones or cartilage or
organs, just a large wet spot as my flagging energy seeps out onto the gray
carpet.
Yesterday, someone stopped me on my
corridor journey and said, “I don’t think I would have been as well-prepared
for this as you have been.” Prepared? You can be prepared for such a tragic accident?
Who plans or expects that in one blinding instant of crashing metal that a
loved one will be so grievously injured? That lives will be forever altered?
I did not plan. Even now, I do not
plan. It is only dogged determination on my part, German stubbornness coupled
with Native American tenacity that keeps me putting one foot in front of the
other and marching on.
Ron is dozing when I enter his
cubicle in the ICU. I check the chart at the end of his bed. Critically ill adult male. Catheter taken
out, drainage tube may come out tomorrow. Patient was up and walked around bed.
Still on 02 tank. Psych consult reports patient is handling things well.
Scheduled to leave ICU tomorrow.
I plop down onto the visitor’s chair
and check the list I carry in my pocket. I have dropped the insurance cards off
at the admissions desk. Ron signed the power of attorney to me yesterday. Reese
had gotten Ron’s things out of the trunk of the wrecked Taurus. The bookbag in
my car is filled with sixth grade essays to read. Someone from
church—Ann?Joan?—is bringing supper tonight. For the moment, no one needs me
and I close my eyes briefly, trying to ease the headache that settled in three
days ago. I have been the one that demanded the psychiatric consult. Perhaps
someone could come and talk to me to see how I am handling it.
I watch Ron sleep, the monitors and
wires connected to him beeping and whirring. In the last week, I have become
all too familiar with their functions. This one monitors his heart, this one
his respiration and blood pressure. This tube from his chest is draining fluid
off his damaged lung. The IV in his arm feeds Ron nutrients since his damaged
pancreas cannot digest food. The kids call it “banana pudding.” The morphine
infuser doses out his pain medication.
From all accounts and reports, Ron
is doing well, or at least as well as anyone can who has been hit by a truck.
The kids and I tease him about it, our black sense of family humor rising to
the occasion. “Stop being so stubborn,” we teased Ron last night when he balked
at his breathing treatment. “What, do you need a truck to hit you?” He laughed
along with us, although the movement compressed his chest and set off an alarm,
bringing a nurse.
It will be, says Dr. Huffman, two
weeks until Ron can come home. She is optimistic that we are over the hump.
Watching Ron now, seeing all the machines and monitors and tubes, it is hard to
believe that he will ever walk out of here. We will need to arrange for home
care during the day while we are all out of the house and at night I will take
over. My depleted strength makes me wonder if I will have the energy to teach
all day and tend to Ron at night, but I do not express my fears. Pastor Tripler
has assured me that God will not give me more than I can handle.
Ron groans in his sleep. I wonder if
the scenes of the accident flash before his eyes. He says that he remembers
only a little; there was the sound of screeching brakes and an impact. After
that, he says, it was a blur. He does not remember kicking open the passenger
side door, or crawling out of the car. He does not remember talking to the
paramedics, although they report that he was standing on his feet when they
reached the scene. I am grateful for his lack of memory. The image of the
accident haunts my own dreams.
Ron’s body will, Dr. Huffman says,
heal. He is strong. But it is not his body I am worried about as I watch him
sleep. I cannot help but wonder what this will do to his mind. We are not yet a
year away from Friends’ Hospital and the breakdown that sent him there. Despite
the psychologist’s very brief examination, there is something I cannot quite
put my finger on yet, something different about Ron.
“He seems good,” Reese said last
night. “Don’t you think?”
And I responded that, yes, Ron seems
to be healing nicely.
Reese tapped his head. “I mean
here,” he said. “He seems better here.”
I nod reluctantly, because who can
really tell at this juncture? Up until twenty-four hours ago, Ron was unable to
speak because of the ventilator. Yes, he seems to be in a more positive frame
of mind than I would have thought, but is that just relief that he is still
alive? And, yes, his first words, written on the nurse’s pad, spoke of hope,
but we still have a long road ahead of us and hope can wear thin. I know that
my husband likes instant solutions. Despite what the psychologist has said, I
have lived with Ron’s mood swings for eight years. I know that he can sometimes
seem—well, normal—for a few days, then quickly he will hit another skid and
begin the downward slide.
At the moment, watching him sleep,
eyeing the monitors that surround him, I want to be hopeful, I want to share
Reese’s perspective. But still, there is that seed of doubt.
Something is just not right.
MARCH
6, 2000. 6PM.
The list the kids keep by the phone
has grown again by the time I arrive back home. A “church lady”—Allen can’t
remember who—has dropped off supper and Bonnie is ladling out chicken and rice.
I check the phone pad while she puts it on the table. Gus called insurance agent. Spoke to Sergeant at West Goshen. Power of
attorney letter arrived. Ron needs to sign. Don’t let Ron talk to insurance
agent!!!! Cards came from students at Westtown. Heinz sent a basket of fruit.
Calls from Jim, Celeste, Kelvin, James.
Bonnie, Allen, and
I say grace before digging into the casserole dinner, making Ron’s recovery the
focus of our prayers. I chatter on, talking about how well their father looked
today, the fact that he is leaving the ICU tomorrow and that the drain in his
lungs might soon come out. They add little to the conversation, although Bonnie
offers to return to the hospital with me that evening.
“Are you coming?” I ask Allen. He
shrugs. He has seen Ron once in the last two days, a visit that made him grab
my hand tightly and avert his eyes away from his father’s damaged body. He
refuses to talk about the accident. I have made an appointment for him tomorrow
with Steve, the therapist Ron was seeing. During the years we have been dealing
with Ron’s mental illness, Allen has sometimes retreated into himself.
I often think of Allen as my
neglected child. His older siblings assure me that it is not really true, that
Allen has always had any time and attention he needed from me, but it still
feels as if he is often pushed to the bottom of my list. I carry guilt that he
and I did not share picnics in the park as I did with Bonnie and Dennis, that
his early years had been spent in the care of a babysitter since I was a
working mother, that school and classes have disabled me from serving as his
homeroom mother at school. Allen asks very little of me, but my heart is often
burdened for him.
When he was four, Allen was
diagnosed by school officials as being educably mentally retarded. The news was
handed to me over a conference table with little explanation, dropped like the
proverbial ton of bricks. I was crying in the parking lot when the school
psychologist came up behind me and put her arm around me. In the years that I
have managed my own classroom and sometimes needed to impart difficult news to
parents, I have remembered the feeling of having my insides torn out. I would
never want another mother or father to go through it.
Ron’s reaction to Allen’s diagnosis
was typical, given the mental state he was in at the moment. “It’s your fault,”
he said, “because you’ve always worked.” He did not really mean it, of course,
and later on said he did not even recall saying it. Nonetheless, the words tore
at me and some part of me has wondered if it can be true.
I watch Allen as he heads out of the
kitchen. We have come a long way from that initial, devastating diagnosis.
Allen has learned to do things once thought impossible. While he still requires
an adapted curriculum and special services, it is clear that he will one day be
able to maintain an independent life. I have fought hard for him, my youngest
child, calling state representatives and school administrators for services,
advocating that he have the least restrictive environment and be mainstreamed
when possible, and refusing to treat him with medication. The reason for
Allen’s various learning disabilities was a rare condition involving elevated
blood ammonia. We discovered it, almost by accident, when he was four. Since
then, we have carefully controlled his intake of protein, a major cause of the
elevation.
Kids like Allen need practice before
performance, Dr. Purcell told me. We do everything we can to make sure he is
thrown into unfamiliar circumstances as seldom as possible. When he went to a
new school, we took several tours ahead of time and made sure he knew how to
find the gym and the cafeteria. We talked to his teachers and walked him
through a typical school day. One time when he wanted to buy a snack at school
and did not know how to negotiate the snack line, Bonnie set up a practice line
at home. After a week, he felt confident enough to do the real thing. When he
entered middle school last year, it was helpful that I had been a long-term
substitute there three years before and knew the routines and the art rotations
and what the heck a “mini” was.
But how do you practice this? How do
you prepare a child for the grievous injury and possible loss of his father?
Then again, Ron has spent most of Allen’s childhood as a broken man. It is
Bonnie and Dennis who show Allen photos of long-ago family vacations and help
him to remember a father he never really knew. “Is that Dad laughing?” Allen
will ask when he sees a picture of us at the beach, burying Ron in the sand.
His older sibling will nod. Yes, Dad used to laugh.
The phone rings. It is my friend
Debbie, calling for the latest report. It seems the line is always busy. Her
son Seth, who is four, interrupts her. “Say hello to Miss Linda,” Debbie says
to him. “Say something comforting because Mr. Ron was hurt and is in the
hospital.”
Seth’s lisping voice comes over the
phone. “How did Mr. Ron get hurt?” he asks brightly.
I smile to myself, imagining Seth’s
chubby hands holding the phone. “Well,” I say, “a truck hit him as he was
coming home from work.”
There is a sharp intake of breath.
“Oh, my gosh,” Seth exclaims, “you could get killed like that!” Debbie grabs
the phone away from him. “That wasn’t comforting!” she admonishes. Yes it was,
the sort of black sense of humor we have all used to survive. It reminds me
that while Ron’s road may be long and difficult, I can still laugh. It is a
gift.
MARCH
6, 200. 9PM.
Once I return from the hospital, I
spend the evening returning the phone calls that have been added to the pad,
believing that anyone who has called to ask us about Ron deserves a personal
update on the situation. I try to keep the calls brief, but often I am drawn
into conversations. Do we need anything? Yes,
I need my husband back as a whole man. Is there anything they can do? Yes, they can pray and remember to always
wear their seatbelts. Most people concentrate on Ron: his vital signs, his
spirit, his prognosis. Once in a while a dear friend will ask how I am doing
and I will always give the same reply: I’m hanging in there. I’m okay. It has,
for years, been my standard response.
The kids have gone to bed long
before I finish my phone calls and my paperwork for school. The last call has
been from my oldest son. He will be home tomorrow, he says. I protest that he
not cut his vacation short, but he stops me. He needs to see his father, he
says. He will be home around 3 and go to the hospital with me for the afternoon
shift.
I hang up the phone and check all
the locks on the door. I know that Dennis, like Allen, is wondering if Dad will
ever laugh again.
I check on my two sleeping offspring
before falling into my own bed. Bonnie is snuggled next to the ancient stuffed
pig that has inhabited her bed for years. Her room is strewn with discarded
clothing and movie posters. She looks, for all outward appearances, to be a
normal teenager. She has been places few teenagers had to go.
Allen’s lanky form barely fits
beneath his Star Wars quilt. One leg has fallen out of his double bed. I push
it back onto the mattress, cover him over gently, and kiss his forehead. His
skin tastes slightly of salt, an indication that his blood ammonia may be on
the rise. I feel something hard and sharp as I tuck the covers around him.
Pulling back Han and Chewie, I discover that Allen has secreted a hammer from
Ron’s toolbox between his sheets. I cannot fathom a reason for its presence,
but I do not remove it.
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