Take a Load Off, Mona Jamborski

by Joanna Franklin Bell

  "Precisely. Best time to walk. Get that blood flowing, get the healing done. If you hadn't had a splenectomy, I'd have insisted you be on your feet already. Appendectomies, I make run. Gall bladder patients do hurdles." He winks.

  Wow. Who knew. I am almost happy – I like the idea of a new hallway to pace, with a nurse: someone helpful and non-judgmental next to me.

  "Hey … Doctor Hargest?" I ask.

  "Yes dear."

  "Can you find out what happened with my apartment, when the EMTs came? Do they lock it? Do I have my keys here? Do I have the clothes I had on?"

  "Ohhh, yes. All that. Well, usually," he says, patting his pockets of his lab coat, as if they might be in there, "there is a bag of all personal items, holding them during a surgery. I imagine the bag followed you into your room, here…." He looks around the room, on the floor, scanning the gleaming, bleached tiles. "I'll ask at the nurse's station. And as far as a key, when the patient is unconscious, often an EMT will grab a purse or a wallet, which will also have insurance information. If not, then, your guess is as good as mine. I'll send a nurse in. One of them may know more."

  He gives me a little bow.

  "Thank you," I say, my voice still foreign to me: very husky. Raspy. "I'd appreciate that."

  He pulls the door shut behind him.

  I use my hand to explore the bandage on the mountain of my abdomen. I don't have any pain yet, but I imagine it's coming as the post-op pain meds continue to wear off. I have a morphine drip that I can use when I need to. The doctor told me the incision was pretty big – obesity rules out neat little surgeries that leave neat little scars like laparoscopy. Being in the ICU is as much because of the ruptured spleen, as it is because I am a super-fat, double-wide flight risk. And no, they don't consider this a contradiction in terms. I'd laugh if I could squeak one out through my swollen throat. I know they already called for a psych consult – a middle-aged shut-in who eats is, apparently, crazy. And here I thought I was hiding because the rest of the world was crazy.

  Flight risk though – right. I'm pretty fleet on my feet, don't you know? Especially with a gigantic day-old wound I haven't seen yet and several IVs connecting my arms to rolling carts, and an automated blood pressure cuff that wakes up a few times an hour and squeezes my upper arm for all it's worth. I think there's some kind of monitor on my big toe as well. Yeah. Me and Usain Bolt – we could blow this place away. Maybe I'd grab a handy extra-large wheelchair I can fit in and just power-roll myself right down the express elevator, and right on across the city back home. Home being at the bottom of two steep flights of stairs, and the locked status of my own door is unknown. As is the whereabouts of my key.

  A nurse comes in – every 15 minutes. Often a different one. I had trouble stringing together who was on duty earlier, but, I was woozy for much of today. This one I've seen before. Chipper, no-nonsense, with blunt, caring, capable fingers but heavy on the lip gloss. People are funny.

  "How are we doing?" she asks, in the plural. Always. She moves right to my machines and drip bags and checks numbers and levels and writes things down. It's a whole different language, in here. I would not be able to read my own chart.

  "Alright," I rasp. "Just now starting to feel normal, and it's already almost nighttime again."

  She nods. "General anesthesia does linger," she says. "But it's a mixed blessing, since so far it's been controlling your pain. I'm sorry to tell you that won't last. Tomorrow might be tough. Tonight might be tough."

  "I understand."

  "Dr. Hargest said you're looking for your things? Did you come in with a purse? Jewelry? Just clothes?"

  "I don't know. No jewelry. I was already … unconscious. My clothes I'm sure. There wasn't a purse for anyone to grab. Everything of that nature was in a drawer. Even my keys."

  "The EMTs would not have been authorized to open a drawer, unless the owner was present and giving permission. So, their policy dictates they lock the door behind them, and the homeowner or resident can make whatever calls necessary to have a friend, or family member, take care of business. Do you own a home?"

  "A condo."

  "Perfect. Is there a building super, or a managing office? They can use a master key to let you in once you're released, or let in a friend who might bring you your insurance card, and bring you some books? Slippers? Whatever will make you comfortable."

  I hesitate. "I can call…."

  Whom will I call? I have sporadic email contact with a couple cousins, and the rare email from an old friend or two who notices my absence from Facebook and sends a chatty life summary. One of my college roommates sends me photos of her cat, her new house, and shots of the shows she's directing at some theater in Chicago. Am I going to call Moises? I have no other ideas. I don't even have his cell number. Do I call Food Mart?

  "You can think about it," says the nurse. Her pageboy haircut swings when she moves. Mousey brown, with an attempt at highlights that looks homemade. Not bad, though. "No hurry yet. We will submit to insurance whenever we have your card, and that will be an ongoing submission process anyway. Can we contact your condo management to have someone confirm your door is locked? Or alert them that you'll be away, so they can take care of mail, or newspapers?"

  "Sure." I nod. "Okay. That's fine. It's Warren Condominium Complexes. In Cockersville."

  "They may need us to fax a request with your signature. I mean, I don't know how strict they are. It can depend."

  "That's fine," I say. I feel lost. What if I had a cat? Or a houseplant? What if I'd left my oven on? Or my … my … curling iron?

  "How are you on ice? We won't have any doctor's orders for a changed diet for some time. You'll be on clear liquids, and tomorrow you'll probably get some broth. More jello. Juice."

  I rattle my Styrofoam cup. "Good on ice."

  "Sorry about the blood pressure cuff. It's on a timer, obviously, as you've noticed, and it can interfere with sleep. Necessary for at least 48 hours though. Just try to catnap best you can."

  I'm hooked up to so much stuff. Including, I did learn, a catheter. Some flight risk.

  "When does the shrink come?"

  "Hmm. The psychiatrist has regular daytime hours, so, it's possible the social worker on duty tonight will check on you, if you're awake. Otherwise, perhaps tomorrow. You're still in ICU, so there's no hurry. You're not going anywhere."

  "That was certainly my feeling. That I'm not going anywhere."

  She shrugs. "People can panic. And your chart says it's been a while since you voluntarily left your home. So. Better safe than sorry."

  "I'm not going anywhere," I reiterate hoarsely. I'm afraid to even shift in this bed, for fear a ripping pain will suddenly introduce itself across my torso. I'm afraid to adjust my bed's angle to sit up more, or less, in case the whole chassis collapses under me. I don't feel stable, laying here. Moving is not high on my list.

  The nurse frowns and looks at some of the red numbers on one of the digital gizmos. "Your heart rate just spiked," she comments. "Are you feeling pain now?"

  I shake my head. "No, no," I say. "I was just thinking about trying to move. Trying to sit up and not collapse this bed. Trying to roll over in case I am ever going to go to the bathroom under my own steam. You know. The stuff normal people panic about."

  "Normal is a dryer setting," she says. "This is a hospital. The ICU, specifically. We see every kind of person. Everyone's a person."

  I size her up. She hasn't spared me a smile yet, but she's straight-forward. Her name tag claims she is Tina. Her voice is deep for a woman. I like her, maybe.

  "You're no more incapacitated, right now, than anyone else in this unit," she adds. "And most of what ails you is reversible, which puts you ahead of the game. You're healing from a splenectomy, and you're losing weight just lying there. If you can keep that up upon release, you could be healthier than you've been in, probably, years."

  "So you all don't think I'm crazy?"

  "No one thinks anything at all. We see
a patient who needs to heal, who is probably anxious, and whose health we want to improve. That's the beginning and the end of what we see."

  I nod. I appreciate that. I'm exhausted again, suddenly, though.

  Chapter 19

  The night is terrible. I don't know if I sleep or hallucinate. I am vacuuming a yellow rug, bright and plushy, but dirty. The crushed potato chips are spit back by the vacuum more often than they are sucked up, and I am trying to find the perfect moment to turn off the machine, when it's collected enough but hasn't regurgitated them yet.

  Then there are flies. Only one, I think, but as I swat it and collect its juiced body from the mesh of the fly swatter with a tissue, there is another. And another. I swat and connect and collect, but there is always one more. There must have been a hundred, I think, wondering why I wasn't swarmed in the beginning, before I began to make a dent in their numbers. But here is another one. Swat, connect, collect its body, and get a fresh tissue.

  The blood pressure cuff brings me back to lucidity, briefly, as I register the room I am in, darkened as a nod to nighttime, but still busy with staff. Every fifteen minutes. Sometimes it is a nurse, I think, and sometimes it's a medical assistant who is collecting a different kind of data. Sometimes it's a creature with a grey protrusion above its forehead and a face that looks like a scribble, wearing a long cloak and fading into the back of the door.

  Now I am above my front porch, from my childhood home. Somehow, flapping my arms allows me to fly just high enough that my feet skim the awning above the front door, but no higher, no matter how hard I flap. Someone below is trying to grab my feet, and I concentrate hard and flap, but I am hovering just within his reach, dodging. I have a memory of having been able to fly better than this, once, but I cannot remember how.

  Daybreak comes as a relief. I am drenched in my own sweat and utterly spent, but my eyes are open and staying that way. I manage some brief conversations with the nurses, suck on my ice chips and work on a plastic cup of jello. To think that I don't even want food, right now. Please God, let that feeling last for the rest of my life. As soon as I think of the intensity of my hunger urging me to eat in the past, I think I feel a glimmer of that monster stir within me, but it's just the memory.

  I hurt. The top of my abdomen feels like it's been sliced open – which of course it has – and my shoulder socket throbs too. My skin is tender where the IVs are in, my finger is dying to get rid of the pulse monitor, and I could happily strangle someone with this blood pressure cuff. I cannot feel whatever is going on in my nether regions yet – so I will continue to pretend that they and their output don't exist.

  I'm filthy and I want to take a shower.

  I'm worried, for some reason, that my mailman will take the condo's mail redirect order as a personal rejection.

  I wonder how long Moises and Hallie might have knocked on my door yesterday before they gave up. That's if they came at all. I can imagine, that to be them, time is flying, and entire days could pass lost in each other before they'd remember another person, let alone me.

  A nurse turns on a small television for me, and I try to focus on the show, and avoid thinking about how many times I want to jab the morphine button. I am fairly short with everyone's questions, because I don't want to think about my pain level, and I don't want to hear about my blood pressure fluctuations, and I don't want to know that my temperature climbed strangely but is now subsiding. Just shut up. Leave me alone. Figure out a way to give me a shampoo. I am watching white people enrage each other on a talk show stage while an audience eggs them on, and a host who should be jailed for encouraging this fiasco, let alone broadcasting it.

  A trim woman comes to my door, tiny in a black pencil skirt, her high heels looking like something I could put on a Barbie's feet, so small and shiny are they. She has a lanyard around her neck with a few laminated IDs, a very straight nose that mirrors her straight, strong jawline, and jet black hair, moussed into shoulder-length finger waves, with severe black eyebrows. She isn't altogether pretty at all, until she smiles. And then suddenly, boom.

  Her smile gives away her age, though. She could have been 21 standing there, but now she's a good 45. Maybe 47 like me. Maybe 50.

  "Mona?" she says. "I'm Doctor Selnick. I'm the treating psychiatrist of the hospital. May I come in?"

  Ah, here we go. I want to dislike her but her smile already disarmed me. I nod and she steps into the room.

  "May I call you Mona?" she asks.

  "Sure," I say, embarrassed now by my voice. It's one thing to look like a dirty ogre, but it's another to sound like one too. "It'll be a nice change. Everyone here keeps stumbling over my last name."

  "I'm sure," she says. "Selnick isn't so bad, but my maiden name was Ciercweircz. And I know," she says brightly, "however you just mentally spelled that in your head, that you're wrong."

  I laugh. I sound like a dying otter, I know, but I can't help it. Maybe I am actually ready to talk to a shrink.

  "How are you feeling?" she asks, perfunctorily. She's not here about my pain level. She's here about my pain level.

  I wave my less encumbered hand. "It hurts," I say, shooing the question away.

  She nods. "And how are you feeling otherwise," she says, "being in the hospital? Are you anxious being away from home?"

  "Not anxious so much as…." I don't know how to describe it. My world is upside down, but my world had started to change right a bit before I was admitted. So being back in a version of the real world isn't as hard on my psyche as, perhaps, it might have been. And as Hallie says, it was only three years. "Concerned. About being here, but also about going back."

  "Are you concerned that you'll fall into some old habits again?" she asks, cocking her head to the side.

  "Concerned that I will, and concerned that I won't. There was plenty about my situation that I was perfectly content with…." I say. What would I change? Would I amend my diet, but still remain a hermit? Or would I take up swing dancing on Tuesday evenings as long as I can stay mobile enough to make it to and from my car? God, my car. It's been sitting in my spot in the parking lot, untouched, unused. I don't even know if it works.

  "Mona, let me ask you," she says. "You're here because ultimately, you were the victim of a crime. A break-in and a robbery and assault. Life is completely unfair – you were robbed and you were injured and you were blameless. However," she continues, "being here could be a mixed blessing, of sorts, as it allows you to get some help for maybe some other issues."

  She pauses to let that sink in, but this isn't news.

  "How would you feel about using your time in the hospital as a launch pad towards a new beginning, when you're discharged? Meeting with me here, meeting with a nutritionist here, and maybe even meeting with another surgeon who can look into some kind of gastric bypass, or a lap band, should you be healthy enough to qualify? I'm not," she says, gesturing firmly, "telling you this is what you need, but it can be a very effective measure towards achieving enough weight loss to regain mobility and, for lack of a better term, a place in the world."

  "All this before I am discharged?" I ask, and swallow hard. My throat hurts wickedly. "Or as some kind of ongoing outpatient treatment?"

  "Well, for now, while you're here. You could be here for another week, or even two, so we could really gain some ground if we can use this time."

  "Well god, I mean, I'm here anyway. What am I going to do. I'm not going to decline treatment, if that's what you mean. I know very well I could benefit from therapy. I also know that while a nutritionist might be interesting, it's not a lack of knowledge of nutrition that put me in my situation. It was a … disregard, more like. No, a compulsion, really. I know what's healthy. And what's not."

  She nods and starts to respond, but I cut her off.

  "And while I would love to have a gastric bypass surgeon cut me open and make half of me go away, it's those compulsions that will probably put me right back here. I mean, I've watched a little bit of Access Hollywood
over the years. I've seen the red carpet fat people shrink, and I know it's not their commitments to their gyms. And I see them gain it back too. I don't know if it's a weakness, or a, a, a disease, or a mental failing, but I know, assuming I do fully recover and get my old appetite back, that even with gastric bypass, I am destined to be a fat chick. A very, very, very fat chick."

  I let me head sink back into my pillow. Those are more words than I've strung together since I got here. My throat is on fire. I help myself to a mouth full of ice chips, enough to keep me from talking again for a while, and carefully arrange them into my cheeks, letting the barest trickles of water down my throat to swallow.

  Doctor Selnick chuckles. "Well, clearly you've had a lot of time to think. I usually don't write 'breakthrough moment' in my notes for at least a few sessions," she says, using the air quotes and all. "So you've identified your problem – compulsivity. You searched for a solution to your problem – cutting off contact with the outside world, at least physically, to restrict your ability to be compulsive, even while allowing your compulsivity to be indulged, in private. And now, due to nothing other than circumstance, you're in a position where you can be treated." She shrugs, and then claps her hands together. "This sounds like a winning combination, to me."

  I turn my head a bit to see her directly. "Is all this on my chart?" I ask, shifting my ice inside my cheek.

  "Well, I'm a bit of a cheater," she says. "Much of this you divulged to a nursing agency, which made copious notes after their nurse's visit and forwarded them here, plus the emergency responders' reports, and then the ICU nurses' notes and of course your surgeon. But it is a small world, is it not? Doctor Feigenbaum is my colleague, and friend." She smiles expectantly.

  Doctor Feigenbaum? Where is google when I need it. Doctor Selnick is looking at me like I am supposed to know Doctor Feigenbaum. Doctor Feigenbaum is not even a name I could say aloud without giggling first. Doctor Feigenbaum sounds like something a muppet would be named. I wonder if there were any muppet doctors. Or muppet dentists. I never watched many muppet shows – I preferred straight-up cartoons when I was a kid. Was there a muppet surgeon? A muppet Doctor Feigenbaum? I bet he had a deep green furry face and an unruly mop of dark hair, with a stethoscope around his neck.