a glass vestibule

 
My grandmother almost died last night. She's been in the hospital all week. I've been there with her everyday, sometimes after work, sometimes instead of work. She went in Monday because she was in excruciating pain from her corroded little back.  She could not even move, poor thing had to call an ambulance to take her to her daughter, bump, bump, bumping away from the suburbs into the big city, to Temple, where my aunt, her daughter, works.  Too sick to operate, too sick to rest comfortably, she just lied in her bed, crying, wishing for an end to the writhing misery, making us all feel selfish for not smothering her or drugging her or any other means of snuffing out her painful life. 

Finally, yesterday she had an awful surgery consisting of scraping away 81 years of extra tissue and bone fragments compressing nerves and causing all the pain.  In 29 years, I had never ever heard her complain, until this week. She’s always been the most stoic person when it comes to pain, she'd say something like, "yeah, it hurts a little, but I’ll be okay," or "well, it's just uncomfortable, not too bad." It's a generation thing, I guess. All week, I stayed with her as she cried out in pain and asked to be put to sleep. It broke my heart. She could not move a millimeter. I had to put the bedpan under her and she would just howl, poor thing.

Yesterday she was in the post anesthesia care unit, about to be transferred to a normal room and her heart began to play pinochle, tossing around numbers, variables, logarithms out of sync with a normal dancing heart.  This went up, that went down, and suddenly, a team of doctors started freaking out.  I stood there, on stolen time in a unit where patients may receive one visitor at a time for a maximum of 15 minutes.  I planted my feet and watched her heart pound, jumping visibly out of her chest.  IVs were pushed to coax her tired heart to let its ventricles fill with blood, to beg it to stop spitting the blood out like bitter nectar.  To no avail.  
It was awful. She was so out of it, incoherent. She was hallucinating and in pain, pain that brought moments of lucidity, a dastardly, vindictive pain that pulled her back into consciousness.  To my horror, her docs cut her morphine, her one solace, and shot her full of epinephrine to ease a suspected, but ultimately unfounded adverse reaction to the soothing, slippery drug. Nothing. Words, deep, secret, musky words murmured, words that added up to cutting her chest open to massage her heart. They prepped the trauma surgery room.
I was underwater. It all seemed a haze. Eunice stood next to me slack jawed as I was, rubbing my arm. It was the one thing reminding me I was actually alive.

The doctors finally decided to try her regular blood pressure medicine and instantly, her heartrate dropped, like New Years Eve: 169, 168, 167...150...134...117...105, and finally stabilized.  She fell asleep and I cried. Wondering would I see her again. Thinking about her smile and her smell and her lovely outlook and disposition.

She was stabilized for an hour or so while she dozed. She woke up totally lucid from having been off the morphine for about 2 hours. She perked up and told me about her "dream." She said she had fallen asleep with the doctors racing around her, then all of the sudden she was back in her own bed at home. She said Mother Theresa and Mother Cabrini were standing beside her combing her hair and rubbing her arms. She said that she couldn't speak and that they didn't either but that they smiled at her and she knew they were there to help her. She said that she stood up and she couldn't believe it didn't hurt her and she took a few steps and they were next to her, she said she knew they were going somewhere, but she didn't want to go. She said she wasn't scared or upset about it, she just made up her mind and thought if she didn't want to go, she shouldn't have to (such an activist). So she decided to lie back down and then she woke up.

I told her that if she sees them again, she better run like hell. I told her she can't go with them yet, that she has to wait until she has great-grandbabies. She said, "Ooooh! When will that be?" I knew I had her back. I hope she doesn't remember this as a promise to breed anytime soon.

I stayed with her another hour and just talked with her. She told me stories about all kinds of things, memories, secrets, lies.  It was so wonderful to finally have her back. She was moving around and lifting her legs and had no pain whatsoever. It was a night and day transformation and I was grateful. I was exhausted and had been standing by her bed for hours but I could not move. The only time I had been away from her since I got there, anytime I had been there, was to turn my head to wipe the tears I did not want her to see.

When I finally had her, the real her without morphine or haziness or hallucinations or disorientation, it was so wonderful. I felt the energy between us flowing back and forth, the warmth and comfort of it. The familiar.
Eunice and I left the hospital around 11. It was the first time I didn't have to sit in my car, hands crossed over the steering wheel, head bowed, chest heaving with gigantic sobs of grief. I was on top of the world. She was in good hands, whose I wasn’t sure, but she believed she had her angels watching over her, healing her, so it wasn’t important if I believed it too. 

We left the hospital. I called my aunt at home. She was woozy. She had just stopped crying herself but mercifully had been spared the ordeal. Everything came crashing down the moment she left. So she completely missed the near-death experience. I told her nothing of it, only relayed the events of the last hour. She didn't believe me. She thought I was making it up to make her feel better. She fought off her half a Valium to hear me tell and retell the stories Mommom had told me and asked me about her blood pressure and demeanor and orientation. I think it was probably the only night she slept since the Sunday before. Before.

Eunice and I went to eat dinner, finally. We sat in a diner, way in the back, in the nonsmoking room. Nonsmoking is usually smaller and the tables are closer. I felt pinpricks of energy from everyone in the room. I have never ever been so hyperaware of people's energies as I was last night. I felt all the people in the room. I really really felt them, their souls, their energy. It was so bizarre, and try as I might, I could not turn it off. It was like I knew each of them intimately, about their childhoods, about who they were, whether they were good or bad or hurt or scared or sure or insecure. I knew why couples were together and what it was like between them. I knew details they would never even tell their mothers. It was so much energy pounding me, really punching into me. I couldn't hear, I couldn't see really, only blurs, images moving out of focus. I felt drugged, like a cruel trick or urban legend. I couldn't taste anything I put into my mouth. I even sucked hard on the lemon I fished clumsily out of my water glass. nothing, just a faint memory of what it tastes like. I was utterly numb, could barely hold my fork. I felt like I was underwater.

You ever open your eyes underwater and you can see, but you are so afraid of how it will feel on your eyes? That tentativeness was with me for every movement. I was rubbed raw, like some subcutaneous layer was just exposed and absorbing every minute detail. I'm telling you, it was nothing I've ever experienced. I was all energy, thick, gelatinous, viscous energy, stringing with sticky, gelled movements, stuck.

I have stood at my grandmother's bedside all week, just holding her, placing my hands on her body and meditating on her pain, trying my very best to manipulate physics and draw it out of her, into me. And I leave her room utterly spent. I am drained and sore and feel very much like I've been in a tremendous car crash. During my hour long drive home through the Badlands of North Philly, I try to get my mind off her suffering and away from the fear of driving alone at night through an extremely high crime area, with my windows down to breathe in fresh air and to compensate for the lack of air conditioning in my dad's old Buick. I try to envision what the car looked like, the car my body feels like it was in when it crashed. I picture the twisted metal in symmetry with the way my muscles feel twisted, a sort of poetry of steel.

Fortunately, I am a B-list celebrity in the hospital. I am David Spade or Christian Slater. My aunt, Mommom's daughter, works for a hospital big shot.  This translates into a private room and one-on-one nursing and waived visiting hours. It also means I can order up chicken noodle soup, Mommom's favorite, when she refuses to eat. I can get her to eat. I'm the only one. I bring her contraband: pudding (chocolate, always can get her to eat chocolate) and canned pears. She will take a toddler sized bite and no more, but it's an accomplishment, something private between us. Something the others marvel at. Food has always been sacred between us. She derives such joy from feeding people, but she is no good at being fed herself.

She stabilized through the night and this morning they moved her to intensive care. She is in a glass vestibule, a goldfish. She is back on morphine, so there goes her lucidity. Back are her itching and the cats that walk on the ceiling. The bugs have returned. She is frustrated and confused and can't understand time or space or the machines clicking and buzzing and ringing. She answers the ringing of distant phones with a loud, "Hello!" She can't follow direction or understand words like morning, afternoon or nighttime. But, if I'm lucky, she'll turn to me and tell me a story about when Kelly was a little girl. She has told me such stories all week, speaking to me as if I were not the subject of the story, the third person. But always stories about me, when Kelly started kindergarten, when Kelly used to splash in the kiddie pool, when Kelly...I wonder who I am to her then. I wonder who she sees when she looks into my eyes like wounded deer, innocent and ashamed and trapped?

My body is a walking prayer for her. I am trapped between the hope that if this is all there is for her, she lets the gentle ladies guide her home, and on the other hand, begging God and the Universe to push her forward, to implant into her heart and brain the will to stand again, to support her body on two legs and walk, to get up and move and heal. She is a horse, strong and sturdy and gentle. She is grounded and hearty. I hope she does not grow wings in her hospital bed and fly away from me.