It Takes a Worried Man

by Brendan Halpin

  I mean, I become obsessed with this CD more than I have with anything else in years with the exception of the Carter Family. For about a week and a half it is all I can stand to listen to. I listen on the walk to work, and as Shonen Knife belts out their ode to Buttercup, the Powerpuff Girl with the bad attitude, tears come to my eyes. I mean literally. I am listening to the female Japanese equivalent of the Ramones sing about a cartoon character, and I start to cry. What the fuck is wrong with me?

  Well, besides the fact that my life has completely turned inside out and my best friend in the world is about to go into the hospital to receive a deadly dose of life-giving medicine? I don’t know. For some reason my emotional pendulum has swung completely away from the Carter Family, and I no longer want to hear anything about jilted lovers killing themselves; I just want to hear about cartoon little girls kicking a monkey’s ass. And yet it still moves me to tears. Is it because I associate Rowen with the Powerpuff Girls, and the Shonen Knife song is just this unremittingly positive tune about a little girl who can’t be stopped? I think that’s partly it. I think it’s also just that the whole thing is so appealing: living in a world where your greatest worry is that you’ll have to fight the same psychotic monkey who’s ass you kicked last week again and kick his ass again. It’s so unlike my life right now. And because it is a beautiful vision, or because it is so far removed from reality, I love it.

  Making Plans for Kirsten

  Elation quickly turns to dread as Kirsten’s hospitalization approaches. I mean, we are still glad that she is going in and getting started on her treatment, but I am starting to think about how incredibly much it’s going to suck to have her in the hospital for three weeks, and how it’s going to make me sad, and I wonder if Rowen is going to freak out.

  Kirsten’s mom is freaking out already. Not, you know, in a real emotional freakout way, but in a planning way. I swear she calls us at least three times a day, going , “what’s the plan, what’s the plan?” Once she calls at 9:00 p.m., which is damn close to bedtime around here, and then at 8:00 the next morning. And it’s all Kirsten can do to be civil and explain that no, we still don’t know exactly when Brendan’s mom is coming, we still don’t know all the details of the hospitalization, relax and we’ll call you soon. Again, the impulse is good–she wants to be helpful and she wants to know what’s happening, and yet for some reason it’s annoying.

  So I get increasingly grumpy, and I am especially worried about what’s going to happen with Rowen. The day before parents’ night, which I am going to blow off because I’ll be taking Kirsten to the hospital, the five of us who share a classroom get an email from the principal telling us very nicely that the room is a sty and we need to clean it up before parents come in. I think he is very nice to address the email to everyone, because I know that it’s really my fault. I have stacks of shit on top of my desk in ugly, chaotic piles, many of which are precariously balanced on top of two books, or a coffee mug, or some souvenir one of my advisees gave me. Next to my desk is a pile of books I never quite got around to shelving. And the bookshelf where my students’ independent reading books are housed is a complete mess, with books stacked on top of each other, sticking out at odd angles. These are the three worst aesthetic crimes in the room, and they are all mine. And I really wish I could claim that, you know, my wife is sick and I’m not paying the kind of attention to these things that I usually do, but the fact is that I’m just a fucking slob, and it was like this last year too.

  So I take it upon myself to do most of the cleaning, and at one point I find an umbrella. “Anybody want an umbrella?” I ask, and one of my co-workers says, “Yeah. Does it work?” so I open it. It does work. One of my favorite students, who is of Haitian descent, is sitting there while this whole umbrella thing happens, and she says,“opening an umbrella inside. Bad luck. Bad luck.”

  I look at her and say, “Josette, my wife has cancer. How much worse could my luck get?”

  She pauses for a moment and answers, with a totally straight face, “You could turn black…”

  And I know that I am her teacher and should spend at least an hour deconstructing the history of internalized racism behind that joke, but all I can do is laugh my ass off. It just paralyzes me.

  No Glove, No Love

  Wednesday is the big day that Kirsten goes into the bubble. I get a nice card from my advisees telling me that it’s all going to be okay and that they are praying for me and my wife, and I am incredibly touched. I remark on the fact that it’s kind of back-asswards that the sixteen-year-olds are supporting me, when that is what I am supposed to do for them, but they look at me like I’m an idiot. I guess I am. I have tried like hell for over a year to bring this group together, and in some weird way, I think I have finally done it. I’m grateful to be able to see them every day, and my gratitude for their ongoing kindness to me has not, thus far, stopped me from busting their asses about their grades, so that’s good.

  I leave work in the middle of the day and walk over to the hospital to meet Kirsten. As I walk, I think about how I have all these positive associations with this hospital. Since Rowen was born here, I sort of think of it as a place where wonderful things happen. I hope something wonderful happens this time. We meet in the lobby, and we head up to the bubble. It’s not really a plastic bubble like in the old John Travolta TV movie, but you do have to go through this airlock to get to the hallway where her room is, and we immediately associated it with that movie as soon as it was described to us, so we have been talking for weeks about,“’when you go into the bubble.” We go through one set of automatic doors and have to stand there and wait for the doors behind us to close before the next set opens.

  Inside the bubble floor we meet Kirsten’s nurse, who is very nice and takes us to the sad little lounge. I spy a People magazine of recent vintage, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t count, since this is a patient lounge rather than a waiting room. Odds are a patient left it here. There are also 2 TVs, and as we sit there waiting, a sad-looking older man sits there trying to get the news out of one of them, but neither one seems equipped to pick up any channels. This is a horrible thing that happened to TVs some time when I wasn’t looking. All the sudden you need extra equipment to make a TV pick up TV stations. Strange.

  Anyway, I hear the guy say that they are working on his wife so he can’t be in the room, and his wife is here for a bone marrow transplant, and I know I should feel like he is my brother, but I just don’t. I don’t know why. I don’t hate or resent him for being older and going through this, and presumably having had many cancer-free years with his wife. I guess I just look at this guy in his 60′s and figure, well, he’s the guy who’s supposed to be here. What the hell am I doing here? I feel for him, because he’s obviously sad, but so am I, and I just don’t want to talk to anybody else who’s sad right now. I don’t want to talk to anyone who knows what I’m going through.

  The nurse takes 3 vials of blood from Kirsten because, she explains, phlebotomy is delayed and they won’t be here for an hour. I have no fucking idea who phlebotomy is or why it would take them so long to get here. I mean, it’s a big hospital and everything, but it’s not that big.

  Kirsten is supposed to get “bedside surgery” today to implant a new hose in her chest–this one is a four in one!–and they tell her that the surgeon who was scheduled to do this went home sick. Great. So they are looking for another surgeon. After they leave, I say, “Well, we’re in a hospital, I guess there must be one or two around,” and Kirsten says she thinks it’s not that simple.

  They send us off to lunch so they can hunt down a surgeon, so we head off to the local brewpub in search of fries. I don’t mean to harp on the whole Irish heritage thing too much, but fried potatoes and beer just make my blood sing with joy, and I guess that’s as good an explanation as any.

  I order the imperial stout, and, since I am somewhat of a beer geek, I know that imperial stout is a special kind of extra-high alcohol stout, presumably because
that’s what the emperor wants, needs, or deserves, or something. I guess the serfs drank Bud Light or something.

  Anyway, the imperial stout totally kicks my ass, and even though we order an extra plate of fries after we finish the ones that came with my sandwich, I simply can’t eat enough food to compete with the kick this beer delivers. The buzz will last all afternoon, and I will be damn glad it does. I have no way of knowing this when I place the order, but I am really going to need that extra drunk feeling that a strong beer in the daytime provides.

  We head back to the hospital, and I return to the patient lounge while Kirsten gets ready. This involves her scrubbing herself from head to toe with antibacterial soap and getting into the hospital clothes. While I sit there, another patient, a Chinese man in his twenties, comes in and pops a movie into the VCR. It is some kind of Hong Kong comedy/adventure, and I can read just enough of the subtitles from where I’m sitting to see that it’s about some kind of idiot savant guy who becomes this accidental crime lord. In one scene I saw, he asks a rival crime lord to tie his shoes, and everyone is shocked at this blatant sign of contempt and disrespect that’s sure to cause a gang war, but the guy really didn’t know how to tie his shoes. So it’s that kind of movie. I can totally understand why this guy, who is also having a bone marrow transplant or he wouldn’t be here in a fabulous light blue johnny, wants to spend his days watching this. So do I.

  But Kirsten is out of the shower, so I will never know how it came out, though I suspect that the fact that the idiot savant guy can shoot a gun with deadly accuracy becomes important later in the movie.

  We both enter the bubble room, and for the first time, I go through the ritual I will go through at least once a day for the next three weeks. I remove my coat and bag and leave them in a drawer outside the room. Immediately upon entering the room, I wash my hands. I then put on gloves. I have a choice of 4 kinds–latex free, powder free–I ask the nurse what her personal favorite is, but she’s cagey, so I just pick the ones that say “Vinyl examination gloves.” They are uncomfortable. I am now also officially not allowed to kiss Kirsten on the lips. Feh.

  We get Kirsten settled in, we make jokes, we check out the view, the TV stations, and the food selection, and we sit there as a number of people file in–nutritionist, nurse, lady who gives the EKG–this is a weird experience because Kirsten has to strip to the waist to have the EKG, and of course I’m still sitting there, and, you know, she’s my wife, it’s not like I’m going to turn away from her breasts, and the technician is there, and she’s seen it all before, and we are all just hanging out there (well, Kirsten is really hanging out, ha ha ha) acting like this is perfectly normal. Shit like this just happens all the time these days, and I guess it all contributes to this feeling vaguely dreamlike. I mean, if you woke up and said,“I dreamed I sat and watched while you sat there bare-breasted and some woman attached electrodes to you,” your spouse would probably be like, “you fuckin’ weirdo! What a weird dream!” Yep. She’d probably also say you were a perv, but there is nothing even vaguely arousing about this scene.

  Anyway, I guess they eventually do rustle up a surgeon somewhere, because this guy comes in and makes a point of telling us he’s doing this while some other patient of his is being prepped for some kind of other surgery, like we give a shit. He asks me if I want to be there, and I say yes, and he kind of hesitates, and I say, “I promise I won’t scream or faint,” a promise I am confident I can keep because of the lingering effects of the Imperial Stout, and then he hesitates again and finds some kind of tactful way of asking Kirsten if she wants me there, and she says, “he should be here if he wants to be,” and in a global sense, of course I’d rather be just about anywhere else right now, but I also feel very much like I want to be here for this.

  They tilt Kirsten’s bed to some strange feet-up head-down angle, and this has the effect of cutting off my view of the actual cutting and stitching, which I think is just as well. Kirsten and I are both a little slap-happy, so we are just kind of irreverent and silly the whole time, which the doc seems very disconcerted by at first but then eventually seems to warm up to. I mean, you know they are irreverent and silly about all this stuff when they get behind closed doors. How could you spend all day cutting into people and not be? So, for example, when he whips out this little plastic tub full of iodine with a red-handled sponge, I go, “Hey! No fair! He’s got dunkaroos!”

  Kirsten looks at the tub with the red handle and says, “Hey, are you going to spread Cheez Whiz with that?” and the guy just has no response. I guess mocking the surgical equipment and procedure might change the power dynamic for these people in a way that makes them uncomfortable. So they cover Kirsten in a plastic shroud and shove some wires into her chest, and then shove some plastic tubing into her chest, and then remove the wires and sew up the opening, and I just sit there watching this like it’s something normal to watch, and when Kirsten finally sits up, she’s got a four-way hose sticking out of her chest. This is the hose they will use to pump her full of at least four different kinds of medicine in the next few days.

  Once the bedside surgery is over, it’s time for me to go pick up Rowen, so give Kirsten a hug but no kiss, strip off my gloves, and head off through the airlock.

  A Cold Night in Hell

  So while I’ve blown off parents’ night at my own school, I do make it to parents’ night at Rowen’s school. I am in a kind of daze even though the imperial stout has finally worn off. Rowen and her classmates perform a version of “The Three Billy Goats Gruff,” which has been the focus of a lot of activity at her school for a few weeks now, and which seems kind of ironic to me because we got ahold of a version of this story, about three goats who want to get across a bridge but are hindered by the evil troll who lives below, right about the time when we wanted to move to a new place but were hindered by the evil troll who lived below, and we even christened the Troll after the troll in this story.

  The play is short and predictably cute. Rowen plays the water under the bridge (when you have fifteen kids and a four-character story, you have to stretch a little), and she does a good job, and I’m impressed because she is terribly shy, and last time they had one of these events she refused to get off of Kirsten’s lap. The kids all sing three songs, and Rowen refuses to get off my lap for this part, but she is singing. Afterwards there is a potluck, and I like a lot of the other parents and want to be social, but I just can’t. Rowen and I kind of huddle by ourselves and eat and are joined by the seven-year-old sister of one of her classmates. She is very nice to both of us and talks about why she likes her school and hips us to the fact that her dad has brought these amazingly delicious dessert items, and again I guess I have to wonder about God intervening. On this night when I just can’t deal with talking to grownups, I find this gregarious kid in my path who makes this dinner a real pleasure for both of us.

  I go home and get Rowen to bed, and my friend Scott comes over with pizza and beer which I consume joylessly because I am so blitzed out, and at about 9:30 I start to feel chilly and check the thermostat and find that the temperature is 6 degrees lower than the thermostat setting. This is not something working furnaces allow to happen. I head down to the basement, flashlight in one hand, box of matches in the other, and if dining with a nice kid felt like God sort of patting me on the back, coming home after taking my wife to the hospital and having my furnace break when it’s20 fucking degrees outside feels like God kicking me in the nuts.

  For a little background, the furnaces have been the curse of this building. Since we bought the house, each of the three furnaces has broken, in numerical order, so now it is unit three’s turn. Each breakage has required at least two visits from the heating people. I have stopped calling the 24-hour emergency line in the off-hours (when, for some reason, each of these things has been discovered) because I found out that what these guys do is charge you two hundred bucks to come out at nine o’clock and tell you that they don’t have the part they need on the truck,
and you really should schedule a service call tomorrow. The sad part is that it took me three of these visits to finally see the pattern. I have learned a little bit about furnaces from all this. I know now what a thermocouple is. I also know something to try when your pilot light has gone out and you relight it and your furnace starts sputtering with flames licking back toward the gas pipe in a really alarming way. I try it, and it doesn’t stop the sputtering. Last time this happened I was told that I could run the furnace like this for a while, but, you know, don’t go to sleep while it’s doing that, so I run it long enough to make up the missing six degrees and then shut it down, hoping the house will hold the heat overnight.

  I wake up in the middle of the night stressed out, cold, and alone.

  Bubble Vision

  After a few days in the bubble, the days start to run together for Kirsten. The same thing happens to me. I go over to the hospital every day, but it gets harder and harder to remember if something happened yesterday or the day before, or even the day before that.

  One thing that happens is that my glove selection grows smaller and smaller. On the first day there were five kinds of gloves, and by day six, we are down to two. I have been experimenting, and I find that the powder-free gloves totally suck, because they are incredibly hard to get on your hands, and, once on, they give you that sticky, thighs on the hot car seat feeling, only, you know, on your hands. On day six, my only options are the vinyl powdered gloves, and these horrible blue powder-free gloves, which is really no choice at all. I mean, blue! What am I, a Smurf?