From My Other Body:
In the Hospital
"Why is she losing blood. . ."
Time moves differently inside a hospital, where you no longer feel yourself move through time. You move toward or away
from the patient's white sheets, the dormitory cinder blocks, the cafeteria clatter; we moved toward Joyce's tests, her naps,
her feedings, the jagged puzzle-pieces of her conversations. We lost our appetites for time, and others took care of time for
us. So rather than beat our hearts against time, we relaxed and slipped from medication to water cup, electrode to readout,
empty to slightly less empty urine bag. Events repeated themselves day after day like the line on an electrocardiogram
readout. Hypnotized by routine, we stopped watching time. Yet time crawled toward us like some prehistoric, predatory
tortoise.
Around us, objects of metal, rubber, or sterile plastic became predictable yet remained utterly foreign. We couldn't pretend
to translate the flashes and beeps of equipment, yet their rhythms pressed into our lungs, into our sleep. Fascination sat
like a heavy child in our laps. We shifted it aside to accommodate the hospital as normal, nothing to be frightened of -
naturally, one might always lie down to eat one's food from a plastic tray, sip milk through a straw dipped in a paper carton.
One might always in the course of a day hike up one's gown for an unnamed nurse to smear lotion over the white
moonscape of one's belly. One might hear the hue of one's urine discussed in front of one's father. One might gasp for
breath and quickly be fitted with the clear cup of a flexible oxygen mask.
To blink at life is to invite life's trammeling. We pretended that hospital time was the only sort of time, and that none of the
hospital's accoutrements or incidents bewildered us.
Amidst our pretence, Joyce lay ponderous and sullen. New nurses gulped, first seeing her. Two nurses struggled to lift
Joyce when the sheets were soiled; two nurses braced and hoisted her when she slid down in the bed and couldn't wiggle
upward to straighten her spine. Beside her bed, a blue curtain on an oval track fell in its quiet drape against the wall. Like a
trophied spear against the sky, a bag of blood hung atop a pole beside the curtain.
"Why is she losing blood?" I asked Dr. Abu. In our accustomed poses near the nurse's station, we greeted one another
with mirthless smiles of comfort and with the usual audit: I held still so he could gauge my balance of worry and
detachment; he let me watch him mask his exhaustion, pull a scarf of strength across his face. His dark eyes were like
closed boxes, his voice, deep and floating as if toward shore, from a boat on the ocean at night.
"We're not sure," he said. "She doesn't show the signs of someone who is bleeding internally. We cannot run the tests that
we need to do. We cannot give her one type of medicine, for it will interfere with the other problems." A shadow of
frustration and pain like the black blade of a circular saw passed across his face. "Her white count is still elevated. She
still has not produced urine. We simply cannot perform a diagnosis," he said.
He gripped the lip of the station desk with both reluctant hands, braced his arms as if for a hamstring stretch. He watched
his hands as though for signals, answers coded in their thousand-times bloodied, soaped, and rinsed planes and lines.
He turned his head. His eyes were cold but comforting, like a friend's hand reaching for mine in a power failure, in a
stopped and blackened elevator. "The amount of fat on her body," he said, choosing his words slowly, "prevents us from
learning what damage has already occurred within her body."
In a hospital room fifteen steps away, Joyce squinted, petulant and bored, over the high dune of her gowned stomach, at a
relentless television. Fifteen steps away, my father, who had sat bedside with his father and years later his mother as they
died, swung a sports section page in its flimsy arc past the features to the box scores, and my mother, who had been far
away when the news came that her father and years later her mother had died, gently snored, her hands folded on her
stomach and her head tipped forward onto her breast. And next to me, Dr. Abu straightened his spine, looked me in the
eye, and allowed himself the dream of a deep sigh. He said: "This is a nightmare."
