 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| The Reading Room |
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."
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."
 | |  | |  | |  | |  |
 | |  |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
Excerpts: "Why is she losing blood. . ."
| My Other Body: a memoir of love, fat, life, and death by Ann Pai |