December 06, 2002

where i been

I meant to write yesterday, but things got all topsy turvy. My brother-in-law was in a car accident, and with no car, he had no way to the hospital (the cops dropped him off at home--nice, 63-year-old guy with a head and chest injury). So I spent from 10 a.m. til 5 p.m. in emergency with him. They kept him overnight. He's having a battery of heart tests. Awaiting news.

In the mean time, let me remind myself that you can't spend a day in the ER without feeling... well... without feeling.

The woman I can't get out of my head is probably 90 years old. She looked so unalive I wondered what possible tests they could be performing on her in the CT-scan room that would tell them anything.

Did she even have a pulse?

There's just no way. No way this woman was alive. But the family who stood around her acted as if she were alive. So maybe she was. She was skin stretched over bones. I never saw her open her eyes. Her head was tilted back on the gurny, arched in private pain, her mouth formed a perfect silent scream, releasing fury up to the florescent lights. Her mouth never twitched. Just strained against itself.

She was death in still life.



She reminded me immediately of the ruins of Pomepei. The living captured in time in media res--in the middle of sleep, of thought, of horrible ends. Everytime I think of the living dead woman I want to scream for her, "LET ME OUT!"



There was an older man, too, and his younger wife was with him. She wore lots of jewelry and patted his side. He couldn't find comfort, not from her, not from the nurses. He was the "difficult patient," the one who kept trying to get out of his bed, to go, he didn't know where, but to go somewhere, trying to go anywhere that might be away from his pain. He didn't seem to know where he was headed, but something on his face said he'd know it when he got there. Over and over he tried to get up. And over and over they stopped him.

Several herniated discs, I overheard them tell his wife. These were at least part of the old man's problems. "I need to go," he kept saying, "Honey, somethings wrong, somethings real wrong." And he would sit up, and they would come lay him down, and three times I grabbed the IV bag off its hanger and handed it to the woman just before he ripped the IV out of his arm. She told me thank you three times, but I just nodded, said, "I'd hate to see him have to have that put in again."

By the time I left, they had sedated him. After the security guard came to hold him in the bed, I guess they figured there was no harm in slipping him a little quiet time into his IV.

Wish I could have had a doggie bag for home.