It was half past three in the morning when I climbed into bed with my mother. By bed, I mean a hospital stretcher, located in a narrow “room” lit by unforgiving fluorescent lights with walls made of very thin shower curtains.
We had been in New York University’s Tisch Hospital ER for 12 hours and seen by several folks of varying levels of kindness, humanity, and medical expertise. The diagnosis was made, they had figured out what was giving my mother such horrible abdominal pain, and they told us we would need to be admitted. “Okay,” I said. “Any idea when a bed might open up?” Sometime. Someday. No idea when. Could be an hour, could be a week. “Okay.”
In the meantime, my mother writhed in pain, her vitals skyrocketing and setting off alarms that I soon learned to silence myself since they did little other than wake my mother up. They certainly did not result in any sort of care. That was not served at the ER.
The place was packed with patients: in hallways, in corners, tucked in front of berths, everywhere were the sick, the old, the confused, the pained, every sort of person, every sort of life. There was a man on speaker phone (why do folks use speaker phone in regular conversation in public places?) talking very loudly to his friend about his most recent trip to the opera in Vienna and how simply marvelous it was. I felt like saying: “Darling, this is the ER not a fucking cocktail party.” I did ask him to keep it down, told him my mother was trying to rest. He looked at me like I was insane, but then I think he realized I might be insane, and he hung up quickly. Wise man. Don’t piss off a daughter when the mama is sick.
The place was overrun: people were there for incidents, for headaches, for not feeling quite right, for falling, for broken bones, for injecting too much testosterone in their pecs. Everyone seemed to have a hernia or an inflamed gallbladder, or a lot of puss, or some bowel obstruction. I know this because I heard all of the complaints. All of the interviews. That’s because there is no privacy.
The nurse interviewed the man in the bed next to us, separated by a curtain as thin as plastic wrap. I heard his entire story. He and his wife had spent 55 years together and she retired from the DOE at the end of April. He brought her flowers every Friday. She was the love of his life. They had planned a trip to Greece, they had looked forward to it for decades. A retirement cruise together! To all the islands. And then he started to feel sick and found out he had Stage 4 Pancreatic Cancer. There would be no trip. As he told his story to the nurse, my mother dozed on and off, and I thought about all the lives in these berths, in these cots, crushed together in this windowless dungeon of sorrow under the city. “I feel worse for my family than for me,” he said. “They are left behind.”
Mom screamed in pain again, the cramps coming in waves like she was in labor. She was impacted and the mass would have to pass. Until that happened she would endure days of unfathomable pain and humiliation. I was the witness to her pain. I do not recommend it.
Across from us on another cot in the hallway, a young woman Facetimed with her boyfriend. She had short dark hair, a pixie cut, and big round dark eyes; she was just adorable. She and her boyfriend seemed to be chatting about this and that, who would pick up the Trader Joe’s kombucha, that sort of thing. Truly the backdrop of the ER didn’t appear to be an issue. Then a young doctor showed up. “I’m here to drain your abscess,” he said. “Oh, I gotta go honey,” she told the boyfriend, as though her table at a restaurant were ready.
The doctor draped her up like a dentist would before a cleaning, wrapping blue paper dressings around her neck like an Elizabethan collar, turned on his headlamp, secured to his forehead like Tefillin, took out a scalpel, made a straight clean incision, and pressed. “Oh, here we go, it’s draining. You’ll feel some pressure!” She screamed. I nearly puked. Wonderful! I had a front row seat to all the puss. So much puss. It went on and on.
On the next cot, an octogenarian was complaining of depression, stomach pain, and lethargy, giving his daily diet to a nurse which included instant mashed potatoes and eggs for breakfast. I can understand why he was depressed. I would be too. A man dressed like Rod Stewart in leather pants lined with metal studs and a tight vest dressed with fringes was just sleeping, slumped over in a chair. No one bothered him. He didn’t seem to mind.
I wondered at 3am, sitting in the hard chair by the side of my mother’s stretcher, using a Purell hand sanitizer dispenser as a headrest (which automatically dispensed hand sanitizer down my back every few minutes, but was actually a surprisingly comfortable neck pillow)— do famous people have to do this? Like would Brad Pitt come here?
I realized that the ER is like the dressing room at Loehmann’s, if you remember Loehmann's and its big open space dressing rooms without dividers and with out any privacy. Or like a sample sale with everyone in one room, tits out, stripping and dressing, trying on clothes, considering and judging. No privacy at all, just a big trough of problem areas and a pile of clothes hoping to cover them.
Except the problems in the ER are not solved by flattering lines or pretty prints. And no one has the time to care for you or try to fix you. There is a sense that you are a bother, a burden, a fly to be swatted away. There is no care in medicine that I found at NYU that night, or really at all during our 10 day stay. There is no nurture. A car in a mechanic’s garage would get better care.
We were lined up, lambs to the slaughter of life’s indignities and diseases, hoping for someone to help. In our case, no help came. A nurse would pop in occasionally if I rang enough times and she would change and clean my mom with a huff and a face. When mom was given an enema it was inserted into the wrong orifice and my mother, a retired nurse, shouted: “THAT IS NOT MY RECTUM!” My poor mother.
By 3:30am, I had realized that the Purell Hand Sanitizer pillow was not really working for me. I could not sleep or really rest. My ass hurt from the hard plastic chair. I decided to try the floor. My mom was staring off into space in the bed. She couldn’t sleep either, listening to the cacophony of alarms and bells and beeps.
“Mom, is there enough room for me to come sleep next to you in there,” I asked her. “Of course, she said. “Come on.” So I climbed into her stretcher. I was the big spoon, she was the little. She had gotten so much smaller this year she was barely 4’ 10” and lost so much weight. We fit easily together. “The last time I slept with you was the night Janet died,” I told her recalling the night her sister was killed in a fire in her midtown apartment. “I remember,” she said.
I didn’t know if she would make it through the night, the words “perforated colon” had been floated around. I was scared. She was too. But we were together. Craig had taken the kids back to his place, even though it was my night with them, and I was grateful to have a partner who had stayed my friend.
I also thought about so many friends who had lost people suddenly, without time to tell them what they meant, what they felt. So in between the beeps and the alarms and the puss and the pain, I told her how much I loved her. I told her what she meant to me. That she always made me feel better, that she always knew what to say, that having her in my life, supporting me, believing in me, made me feel seen, made me who I am today. “Whatever I am mom, it’s because of you. Because I had you to love me, and make me feel important and special. Thank you Mom. I love you so much”
“Andrea, you are my darling daughter, and I love you and thank you for everything you do for me.”
And then we slept. I heard her breathing get soft and regular and heard a little snore, and then I fell into a deep dark dreamless sleep. A few hours did the trick, and by dawn I felt a little less awful. It was just before 6am when I went out to First Avenue to get us some coffee and breakfast. We drank the coffee together behind the shower curtain of our “room.” It was steamy, hot and milky, so good.
We stayed in the ER another eight hours or so, hoping for care, recieving none, before a room became available upstairs, and a whole new level of horror began.
But I will say this: there is gratitude in time. Even if it’s full of pain and puss and misery. I felt it was a gift. That night on the cot together. My mother and me.
That is so beautiful
:( :::::::: So beautiful, Andrea. I love you, my friend.