The Blog of mamapolo

While I pray for each of you that an experience like ours never becomes a part of your personal history, I warn you that getting older is not for sissies and that some day your parent or sibling or friend will become gravely ill.

The paucity of time that afflicts all of us always becomes even more exaggerated in these circumstances. I have never been a fan of cloning, but it would be ever so nifty if I could leave one of me mopping floors and keeping vet appointments, send another of me to the post office, while I spent my time at the hospital. There are those who would argue that one of me is quite sufficient, I’m sure.

Yesterday, riding flushed and triumphant on the golden chariot of no ventilator and no pneumonia, I made a couple of phone calls and pulled together a thank you gift for the ICU staff.

When I arrived at the hospital, I commandeered a wheel chair (only after the previous occupant had been loaded into the back seat of her mother’s SUV, wincing and whimpering as her casted broken leg was arranged) and loaded up the trays of shrimp, cookies and pastry, and meats and cheeses, along with bags of rolls and fancy mustards and other condiments. I wheeled it through the familiar obstacle course of corridors, revolving doors and elevators.

Side note: If you ever need to attract attention in a hospital, do this. You can stagger sobbing and bleeding through the lobby – but they’ve seen it all before. If you are bleeding profusely, some responsible soul will steer you to triage, but otherwise, well, they’ve seen it all before.

A supply caravan occasions smiles and nods and “Hmm, where’s THAT going?” I said gaily, and as it turned out, a bit prematurely, “We’re celebrating!”

I delivered the treats to the ICU break/conference room along with a Maya Angelou card that said, “Thank you. You are proof that one life can positively affect many.”

I added my own note – I was disconcerted to see how shaky and scrawly my normally poor handwriting has become. Nerves, you think?

The note said, “Thank you for studying when you wanted to party, for going to class when you wanted to sleep, for persevering when you wanted to throw in the towel. Thank you for letting God use you to help my husband. Thank you for all you know, all you do, and all you are.”

If you stop and think about it, a million things had to happen before the rescue of my husband could happen. Machinery had to be conceived of and invented, doctors had to pass medical boards, and nurses had to make the choice between a late date and an early class. Traffic had to cooperate to get the right people in the right place at the right time. It’s staggering.

The response to my gift of thanks was gratifying. I was taken aback when the ICU doctor came in to add his thanks and to mention that he had contacted my husband’s pulmonologist to come partake of the food. Not that I didn’t think wonderful doctors like shrimp, I just figured they could get shrimp pretty much any time they wanted.

I told all and sundry that the only reason there wasn’t a case of champagne was because it seemed contra-indicated in an ICU unit, and that I would have given them the deed to Louisiana and all the shrimp on the planet if it were within my power.

A favorite nurse came in to say to my husband, “Nobody EVER brought us shrimp cocktail before! Thank you!”

His motor skills are sludged by the medications and his hand drifted through the air to finally come to rest on my shoulder like a papal blessing. “My wife,” he lip-synched. The speaker works well, but it cuts off some of the air, and is a strain, only to be used judiciously.

“Your money,” I shot back, and he grinned.

For the first time in a week, they lifted him from his bed to a chair, and he sat up for an hour, found it exhausting, and requested to be returned to bed.

This hospital idyll was viciously interrupted by visits from the respiratory therapist every three hours or so, who thrust a vacuum into Tim’s trach and suctioned out secretions, cutting off his air supply and turning his face a dark red, and injected an aerosol bronchial dilator into the trach-tube, making him cough violently, but silently. As pleasant as they are, it’s hard for me to like the respiratory folks. I imagine Tim hates them with every fiber of his being.

The lovely shrimp-liking pulmonologist told us that improvement remained steady and that they were considering moving him to a step-down room the next day (today, Thursday).

The afternoon passed as pleasantly as an afternoon in ICU can, me reading beside his bed while Tim dozed, holding my hand. You probably should understand that he hasn’t had a bite of food or a sip of liquid in a week now, and because he is who he is, there has not been a whisper of complaint, not even a croaked, “Water, please?” Nutrients go in via a feeding tube, fluids via an IV. Air through the trach. Nothing is as it should be.

Some of my past ten days has been spent in the ICU Family Lounge, a long room with soft lighting and a couple of couches, many chairs, and a table. There is a coffee machine that also offers hot water for tea and cocoa, and tea bags and cocoa packets, creamers, sugar and sweeteners are kept there for our use.

We are passengers on a becalmed ship, riding endlessly and helplessly on the deep waters of medical crisis. There are no paddles, there is no engine, and we are not the captains. We wait for the phones to ring, for a white-coated doctor to appear in the doorway and with a gesture, beckon us to the adjoining conference room to deliver whatever news there is. We ask anxiously after each other’s loved ones. We feel our fates are intertwined, that if their patient is doing well, ours will also.

When the news is bad and they return to us sagging and weeping, we comfort them as best we can, and wait for the next shadow across the doorway.

We say to the newest sufferer – have you eaten? would you like some coffee? is someone coming to be with you? do you know where the chapel is? the cafeteria, the restrooms? would you like to pray with us? would you like us to pray for you?

The new ones say to us, how long have you been here? Their faces fall when we answer. We celebrate tiny victories. The white count is better by a fraction. He opened his eyes. They might move her out of ICU tomorrow! Virtual champagne corks pop at that one.

In the wee hours we share photos and fears. A slide into despair is halted sternly by someone saying, “You can’t think that way. You have to be positive.”

In the early hours of a medical crisis, a drove of family members and friends pour in, and sit at the table drinking coffee and chatting, laughing, seeming thoughtlessly noisy to the rest of us. Disrespectful. This is a holy place, a shrine, a place of quiet waiting.

When the initial acute situation has been resolved – the surgery is completed, the heartbeat has been restored, air is once more moving in and out of the lungs – the peripheral people have to go home or to work. The wife, the daughter, the husband, the son, the sister, the father, are the only ones left, and they move away from the table to a chair in the corner and begin the quiet waiting.

The ICU lounge is one long silent scream.

One of the families I have come to know came in the same day as we did, now eleven days ago. The wife is eighty years old, and save for one three-hour excursion to take care of another family crisis, has not left the hospital for an instant. We bring her food from the cafeteria and she eats absently, one hand on the rosary around her neck, eyes unfocused as she implores God for healing for her husband, who is two rooms down from mine.

She thankfully accepts our advice that she must take care of herself, and nods. She knows she must. But she never actually leaves to go to her hotel room across the street, paid for by a concerned son. We have all become superstitious. If we hold our mouths right and never think a mean thought, soon we will go home and this will be a memory.

When I return to the hospital after a brief night’s sleep at home, feeling guilty because I left, I bring bags of oranges and bananas, ginger snaps because she likes them and needs carbs. Others bring food, too, special fruity drinks rich with vitamins and sugars. We peel oranges for her because her hands are too weak. She sucks in the sunny juices and smiles sweetly. “Ah! Now I can go on.” She returns to her rosary.

As yesterday afternoon moved into evening, my elderly friend’s husband went into crisis, two rooms down from ours. Normally the ICU staff immediately evacuates all visitors so they can concentrate, but Tim’s nurse ducked in to say I could stay, but must stay behind the curtain as she drew it closed.

There is an affliction known as ICU psychosis. Tim already experienced it last week after his surgery.

We are creatures of habit and routine. We rise at the same hour, brush our teeth in the same bathroom, take our clothes from the same closet; eat breakfast in the same room. We greet the same friends and family. We get sleepy when the sky turns dark; we get hungry when the sun is high. When our bedroom is dark and quiet, we sleep. When the light pours in through the bedroom window, we wake.

In ICU, there is no time, no day or night, no winter or summer. There are no windows. The activity level is always busy; the level of light is constant. Monitors beep and chime, footsteps hurry up and down the halls. In Tim’s case, he has not had a bite of food or a sip of liquid for a week. Nutrients enter through the feeding tube, liquids via the IV. Air passes in and out through the trach, not his mouth and nose. Nothing is as it should be. He cannot even speak audibly without the speaker in the trach, which is only inserted when he requests it.

It is a devastating form of sensory deprivation, and causes psychotic behavior.

As the crisis two doors down ramped up, we could hear the heavy machinery rumbling past our curtain, the running feet, the barked staccato orders from doctors to nurses, from nurses to other nurses. The intercom blared a “STAT!” code over and over. Elevators down the hall dinged and the doors slid open and shut. Our curtain rippled as bodies hurried past.

I was experiencing empathetic terror because I knew this man’s wife. Tim was experiencing personal terror because mysterious things were happening on the other side of the curtain, probably dangerous things. He can’t even scream.

He began to move nervously, his eyes shifting wildly. The monitor reflected a rise in his blood pressure, a hastening in his respiratory rate. His hands began to pluck at tubes and hoses. I tried to stop him from pulling out IVs, tried to comfort him with quiet reassurances. He struggled harder, pulling against my grip, walking his legs across the bed to brace a thin sharp knee against my chest, trying to break my grasp.

He began to scream silently for help, fixing me with terrible eyes that said I had gone over to the enemy, that I was now one of his tormentors, that he could no longer trust me.

As the noise from the down the hall continued to increase, our own personal battle raged in room 20. He never actually struck me – even in his decompensation his own moral structure imposed itself – but he made fists and threatened me, drew his hand back in that “I’ll backhand you if you don’t get out of my face,” gesture.

It was a little less than an hour until at last I saw a nurse sitting at a desk through the narrow aperture at the end of our curtain, and, weeping, I called, “Brittany, I need some help…”

She and our assigned nurse came flying in, asking why I hadn’t called for help sooner. I said, “I thought you were busy…” It’s possible that I too am experiencing ICU psychosis.

The three of us were unable to calm him, and eventually, unable to hold him, and his nurse readied an injection of calming medication and he thrashed, screaming without sound, “No! No dope. Home. I want to go home. Now.”

The medication did not seem to allay his terror; it just made him unable to act on it. Just before his eyes drifted shut, he stared directly at me in profound betrayal and mouthed, “You b****.”

Absurdly, my feelings were hurt. He had never called me a name before and any semblance of control I had dissolved. One of the nurses put her arms around me and the other suggested I take a break.

I walked outside without a jacket and sat down shivering and sobbing on a curb. At that moment it seemed this was no longer an event, it was a state of being. I would always and forever be sitting crying on a curb or trying to keep my husband who now hated me from hurting himself.

At last I stood up and went back into the hospital, through the revolving door (which on several occasions has suddenly speeded up and spun much faster, making me visualize a number of us blurred and pureed in a blender, whirling behind the revolving glass) and found a restroom, where I splashed cold water on my face and then went into a stall and sat down.

Again I was overwhelmed, hiccoughing and choking on my tears, trying pathetically to keep quiet and discreet and failing miserably. When I stepped out of the stall, there was a small pretty black woman gazing at me with an expression I find difficult to describe. She looked compassionately purposeful, as though she knew she had been sent to that bathroom at that moment because I would be there, disintegrating.

She said, in a rich musical voice, “Honey, whatever you’re going through, it will be okay,” and as naturally as though she were my mother and I her child, she took me into her arms while I rained grief on her shoulder. She assured me that I was not alone, that God was watching over me and mine, and that it would all come right. She said something like sorrow like mine could only come from deep love, and that love would be a healing force. She stroked my hair and kissed my cheek. She held me with the confidence and comfort of long affection.

I asked her name. She said one word. “Delta.”

Delta, if you’re not back in heaven yet, whoever and whatever you are, you have earned another star in your crown.

Then, with a new calm and control, I went back up in the elevator to check on my elderly friend’s husband. They had discovered a blood clot in his airways and were taking him down to surgery. A beautiful young black woman, tall and stately, who had previously been one of the waiters in the ICU lounge, but who has achieved the coveted goal of having her loved one moved to a regular room, had come back to visit, because we do get attached.  

The elderly frightened wife asked us to walk with her, and hanging on to us and praying as we flanked her, walked slowly up and down the hall. How she can even move after eleven days is a divine mystery. She said to me (we have talked about my father), “What would your father sing?”

And so, tearfully and slowly, trusting and fearful, weak and weary, the three of us sang “Turn Your Eyes upon Jesus,” and then I sang more songs – “Beulah Land,” “Master, the Tempest Is Raging,” (“Carest thou not that we perish? How canst thou lie asleep? When each moment so madly is threatening a grave in the angry deep.”), “Sweet Hour of Prayer” while the two of them spoke in tongues, a manifestation I have never understood and have little experience with, but which sounded weirdly beautiful in the hushed hospital hallway.

At last the shadow fell across the doorway and in our presence she received the news that her husband was now stabilized and she sagged in our arms. We helped her to her chair, joined her in prayers of thanksgiving and then I went to the phone to call my husband’s nurse, who told me he was sleeping. I told her I was going home to sleep, and I did.

On the trip home, my daughter called on the cell and after hearing about my day, said, “I’m coming up this weekend.” I had always argued her out of it before, but this time I said, “Yes. I need you.”