Take a Load Off, Mona Jamborski

by Joanna Franklin Bell

  I see my parents, smiling at me and waving, and I see my sweet Danny, who looks upset. Why are you upset? I ask him, trying to draw near. I miss you. I miss you so much. We had something so special, you and I….

  His dark bangs fall into his eyes, as always. Mona, you need to wake up, he says. Now, honey. You need to wake up now. Please, baby. You need to wake up now.

  I open my eyes. The pain in my left side is suddenly unbearable, and the rush of agony overwhelms my lethargy. I reach to the coffee table, straining as hard as I can, until my fingers close on the cordless phone, and the nursing agency business card.

  *

  "You should have dialed nine one one," says the nurse grimly, removing the blood pressure cuff. "One fifteen over fifty, and what did you say it was when the EMT took it last week?"

  "Closer to two weeks ago," I say. The nurse is frowning. She's older, maybe 50, and I am trying to decide if she's normally friendly, and I am just a horrific case load, or if the frown is part of her bedside manner. "I don't remember the top number, but the bottom one was a hundred. And she was concerned that was high, so, isn't this better?"

  "No. This isn't better. This means you have life-threatening internal bleeding. Get ready to go for a ride, Ms. Jamborski."

  "No. No, I cannot leave my home. I'll accept whatever treatment you can give me here, but no, I am absolutely not leaving. You don't understand. I cannot—"

  "It's not an option," she says. "Please calm down. You have run out of choices. As have I. Legally, and professionally, I cannot leave you like this."

  She removes a cell phone from her equipment bag and starts to push numbers.

  "No!" I yell. I have not raised my voice in … years. "No you cannot do this! I am not a mental patient being committed against my will here! I have every right to refuse treatment! How dare you come into my home and—"

  "Because you called me here," she responds smoothly. "Yes, I need a bus? And the extended stretcher with maybe an extra team or two of responders. I'm not sure, exactly. She's not cooperative. Well I can ask. Ms. Jamborski, how much do you weigh?"

  I am speechless. "Get out of my house," I say, my voice trembling. I am so angry I am seeing double and triple of her, with her neat little cap of gray hair and her thin, annoyed lips. "Get out of my house."

  "I would venture to say close to 200 kilograms. Yes, kilograms. No. If I meant pounds I would have said pounds. Yes I am aware what that means. Okay, well that's what it has to be then."

  She writes things down on her paper. "Yes. Yes. If that's the best you can do. Yes of course. Alright then, goodbye."

  She clicks off the cell phone and looks at me. "An ambulance will be coming for you but because of your weight, we will need more than the usual help getting you moved on the stretcher. They've asked us to wait about two hours while they round up a sufficient number of responders. And I," she says, "will be waiting here with you. Whether you like it or not."

  I feel the tears well up in my eyes, and I curse myself for calling the number. "Go to hell," I whisper. I am humiliated by my tears, and my helplessness. I want to push her out my door but I cannot even get to my feet. "I hate you," I whisper. I am even more ashamed that I am reduced to such childish language. I am officially less than human. I am a hunk of stupid meat with no dignity, and no rights.

  She clucks her tongue. "Well this isn't how I'd choose to spend my time either. But so it is. Based on the details you gave me when I got here, I'm going to guess you damaged an organ during your attack, which has been probably bleeding ever since. Lowering your blood pressure, and causing your light headedness. But not," she says, "responsible for your attitude. That, you can thank only yourself for."

  I wonder which one of the triple nurses I am seeing, that she is. The one in the middle probably. The cordless phone is still sitting on the arm of the couch, and without breaking eye contact with her, I reach my hand over, find it, and as fast as I am able, I throw it at her, hard. I feel my shoulder wrench in a ripping way that is probably going to be a big problem later, but the welcoming thud of the hard plastic phone against her sternum more than makes up for it. I've never hit anything in my life dead-center – not the catchers' mitts, not the target at the dunking booth, not Danny's open mouth when I tossed popcorn to it. Not the trash can when I am throwing away egg shells, not even, lately, the toilet bowl. But bam. This takes the cake. This takes the chocolate cake, the vanilla cake, and even the cookie dough cake with sprinkles. This takes every cake ever baked.

  I smile, and I cannot hear whatever she is saying. Her mouth is moving and her arms are waving, but I cannot hear a word. This has become a good day, again.

  And with that the world goes black.

  *

  Time both passes and doesn't pass. When I begin to be aware of my surroundings, I feel like I've been asleep for years, but that just a moment ago I was congratulating myself on my aim. I can tell that I have been unconscious for a long time, but the whole period of blackness only lasted a second. When I struggle to open my eyes, I feel like they've been shut for hours and hours, but that really, I had only just blinked.

  I'm in a hospital room. I can hear machines beeping softly, and the quiet whirr of a ventilation system. I can see curtains on my left and my right, and close to me, near the foot of my bed, there's a nurse who's busy with some kind of machine on a cart. I open my mouth to speak but nothing comes out.

  So I wait. I can see past the nurse, to a nurse's station and a row of other curtains. No, I'm not in a regular hospital room. This is the recovery room. Wow, I have just had surgery. Interesting. I've missed quite a lot.

  I try to assess myself, without moving. Breathing: check. No tubes that I am aware of. I don't feel anything in my nose, and there's definitely nothing down my throat. Swallowing: no go. I am out of spit. My tongue won't connect with the roof of my mouth. When I touch the backs of my teeth with my tongue, I feel like I am rubbing rocks with a numb fingertip. Moving my head: okay. I look left, I look right. Arms: too many tubes. Not gonna try. I see two different IVs going on in one arm, and some kind of monitor pinching one finger, and there is something taped to my other arm.

  Further down: am I catheterized? Would I know it if I were? I try to focus on whether I have to pee, and I cannot feel anything there. Unknown.

  Toes: check. Wiggle wiggle.

  I look back at the nurse and wiggle my toes at her. Wiggle. Wiggle. Hi, nurse. You are pretty and young and black. Only someone that pretty can cut her hair that short. Her hair is oiled in tiny tight waves against her scalp. Her scrubs are plain blue. She looks up.

  "Hi, hon," she says. "I'm going to give you an ice chip if you want one. I know you're parched."

  She comes to the tray up by my head and picks up a Styrofoam cup with a plastic spoon, and feeds me an ice chip. The tiny mouthful of water immediately drenches the desert that is my tongue, and I am suddenly desperate for more. I feel like the vacuum-packed sheets, midway towards inflation.

  "More, please," I croak out, and she spoons me a few more.

  "Good?" she says. "You're in recovery, hon. You had an emergency splenectomy."

  I had an emergency….

  "I had what?" I say, still with barely a voice.

  "You had your spleen removed, hon. The surgeon will come speak with you when he comes back around. It looks like you had a ruptured spleen, and that it had been bleeding out for quite a while. You're lucky to be alive." She raises her eyebrows at me. "Someone upstairs is looking out for you."

  I process this. My spleen has been ruptured since Javier knocked me down. That was almost two weeks ago. I wonder if that's possible. I'll have to google that …. or just ask the surgeon. Wow. Other people are going to be around me now. I will have to have conversations. Good thing I've had a little practice lately.

  "How … long have I been here?"

  "In recovery, hon? Well, about four hours. I'm sure the surgery was at least a few hours, maybe more, since you were a special case. On your
chart it looks like … the ambulance arrived at 8:44 p.m. And it's just about six, right now. Six a.m." She smiles. "We don't usually have a lot of patients in recovery at six a.m. but as I said. Yours was an emergency."

  "A special case. Huh." I attempt a dry laugh but it's a hoarse bark.

  "There have been tubes down your throat for a few hours, hon, you're gonna have a very sore throat when the drugs start to wear off. And laryngitis for a few days."

  "I think I'll have a sore right shoulder, too…." I whisper, trying to sequence the events in my head.

  "And why is that, hon," she says, writing on my chart. I can't see it but I can guess. Patient awake. Talking. Level of sanity unknown.

  "I threw something hard," I say. "Pretty sure I tore something. Not … that I should complain. I think I was in the wrong."

  "Yeah?" she says. "And what makes you say that." She's still writing.

  "Well, if I tell you, you'll blacklist me for assault against a nurse."

  Now I have her attention. "What's that now?" she says. "What is it that happened?"

  "I threw my phone at the home care nurse," I confess hoarsely, "when she called the ambulance. I didn't want to go. I … haven't left my home in a few years, and I … wasn't ready."

  I need more ice chips but I'm afraid to ask. But the nurse is smiling. She tuts and rolls her eyes.

  "Oh hon, those home nurses have seen it all. Believe me. I don't see anything in your chart about an assault charge, and no one ordered me to cuff you to your bed."

  She squints at the chart and says, "Oh wait, hang on a minute…." Then she winks at me. "Just teasing hon. No handcuffs here. Right now, I don't want you worrying about anything like that."

  I wave of relief rushes over me. She had me there, for a minute. "Can I have more ice chips please?" I whisper. "Since I'm not blacklisted…."

  "Sure, hon." She spoons me more, which dissolve wetly and coldly in my mouth, beautifully and moisturefully, and freshglacierinalaskafully….

  And I am out again.

  Chapter 18

  I learn eventually that my timeline went something like this:

  I passed out in front of the home care nurse.

  She called the hospital again to speed up the deployment of an ambulance and a couple of crews, and apparently left in a snit as soon as they arrived.

  I was loaded onto a double-wide stretcher, which they keep for cases like this and for cases where "two patients may be attached, or a patient is attached to a large object, such as a car part." Blechh. But I had it to myself.

  I was carried down my stairs without apparent incident, by I do not know how many sweating, burly EMTS, all of whom cursed Oreos and Tostitos and whatever people curse when they are inconvenienced by fat people. I am sure they cursed me.

  I was rolled onto the ambulance in the growing dark. I was hooked up to oxygen, IV fluids, whisked to Municipal General Hospital, given a focused abdominal ultrasound, which detected large amounts of blood pooling in my left side, confirming a ruptured spleen.

  I was intubated, anesthetized, and operated upon before midnight. My busted, broken spleen was removed. I was sewn up.

  "And the most amazing thing is," says the surgeon, a Doctor Hargest, an older guy with a lot of fuzzy grey hair and a big nose, "your weight actually worked to your advantage, throughout all this."

  "How's that?" I ask, nibbling on my ice chips. He has a nice face. His big nose works to his advantage. He's at least 65, I think, with lots of grey hair on the backs of his big hands too. His eyes are hazel brown, and many smile lines crinkle at the corners. I am in an ICU room now, where the setting sun shines in cracks though the slatted blinds in the window – another day gone. Apparently I will be here for a few days.

  "Because the thickness of your body wall, where you store your excess weight, acted as pressure of sorts, and really contained the bleeding. If the bleeding had been external, and you had clamped down with, say, a heavy towel, and pressed hard, you could stop or slow the bleeding. Internally, this is more or less what happened. I've never known anyone who could walk around for two weeks with a ruptured, actively bleeding spleen."

  "Well, I've been told I am a special case."

  He chuckles. "Indeed you are. But don't take that as permission to maintain your current weight. That's like telling the survivor of a car crash not to wear a seatbelt, because in this unique case the lack of a seatbelt was actually more fortuitous, say, in certain types of sideswipe accidents. No, these are the outliers. The exceptions. You got lucky."

  "I feel lucky. Well, a little," I amend. I haven't been awake for more than a few minutes at a time until the past couple hours. I'm grappling, still, with how much has happened, and where the time has gone. Living as I usually do at home, passing every minute, and every hour, is a conscious effort sometimes. "This wouldn't have happened at all, if it hadn't been for the original attack, but considering that, yes, I am lucky."

  He pats my leg through the sheet. "I imagine you've actually lost some weight since then, if you don't mind addressing the bigger issue here, so to speak. You didn't have much appetite when you were battling your fatigue and light-headedness?"

  "Correct," I say. "But I haven't weighed myself, so—"

  "Our operating table is also a scale. So I know how much you weigh, or how much you weighed as of last night. You've had nothing but ice chips and a little jello just now, so you're continuing to lose. Would you like to guess?"

  I sigh. "I know what I weighed a few weeks ago, maybe a month ago, when I last weighed myself. I have two scales, so I don't know how accurate they are. I add them together…."

  I stop, too embarrassed to continue.

  "Let's do this," Doctor Hargest says. "I'll tell you what you weighed on my table, and your expression will tell me how much weight you think you've lost. Ready?"

  I nod, feeling tears prick the corners of my eyes, and not knowing why.

  "You weighed 471 pounds." He watches me, and I don't know what to do with my face. I mentally scramble to do the subtraction. I weighed 528. Count by tens, backwards. 528, 518, 508, 498, 488…. More than forty pounds. I can't calculate the rest. I feel the tears roll down the outsides of my cheeks, and I stare into the doctor's face, seeing his kindness, his grey hair like a nimbus around his head.

  "So, a significant weight loss." He nods. "In the beginning, it comes off very, very quickly. It can be rewarding, and help you through the plateaus that happen when you're fighting your way down towards the next level."

  "I'm like … only two people now," I say, brushing my tears away with the back of the hand that doesn't have the pulse monitor on the fingertip. "Two big people, but still. I'm only a double now."

  He laughs heartily, rocking back in his chair. "There's one way to look at it!" he says. "Now you just have to get rid of one of you. And then maybe a little bit more."

  "I think I can do it," I whisper. "I feel like I have a head start now. I had even just started exercising."

  "Really," he says. "Since the attack? Or before?"

  "Um, the same day I came in. So, yesterday, actually." God, it feels so much longer ago. I've lost a whole day here. Two, if I count all the sleeping I did at home. I have to acknowledge now, that I wasn't sleeping. I was passing out. "Yesterday I started walking laps up and down my hallway."

  "It's really a medical miracle. I don't know how else to express that, dear," he says. "People with ruptured spleens, cannot do that. You really are made out of some stiff stuff. Hang on to that."

  "Oh, Doctor Hargest." The tears come again. "There's nothing stiff about me. I'm the world's biggest bowl of grape jelly. I don't even mean physically. I'm just not a fighter. I'm not brave. I'm a complete coward. I hide, I obey, I don't assert myself, I let people walk all over me—"

  "And yet there is one home care nurse who is refusing to return to your address for any follow up treatment. So clearly, you're made out of something, when you want to be."

  He pats my leg again and stan
ds up. He's smiling. The last of the sun from the window catches his eyes and makes them look golden. It also catches a couple hairs growing out of the tip of his lumpy nose, and more than a few coming from his nostrils. I'm ashamed for even noticing – he's an older man, and a kind one. "I'll check in on you tomorrow, dear. Keep eating your ice chips. Small bits of fluids. Later, in a couple days, we'll have you do some walking here too."

  "Really? Walking here? I just had surgery in the middle of the night!"