by Tilda Shalof
When a nurse comes in to take my blood pressure, Justine nudges her. “Is Tilda giving you a hard time? Put the cuff around her neck instead.”
The nurse places the temperature probe in my outer ear canal.
“Why not take it rectally?” Justine suggests ever-so-helpfully, and the others cackle with laughter. “I hear it’s more accurate that way. Tell me, is she being a difficult patient? If so, I give you permission to ‘go nurse’ on her!”
“I thought you were my friend,” I complain. “Don’t make me laugh. It hurts.”
“You’re saying some pretty funny things yourself,” Frances tells me.
“Yeah, you’re a regular sit-down comedian,” says Laura.
I can hear myself muttering weird things like my IV “isn’t in straight” and something about “tuna fish in the aquarium.” It makes perfect sense as I’m saying it, but not at all a moment later. I can’t keep my eyes open. My friends have dealt with traffic, parking, taken time out of their day, and have come all this way to see me, but all I can do is drift in and out during their visit. Later, after they’ve left, I am only aware that they’d even been here because I happen to see a note on the bedside table, scribbled on a paper towel, from Justine: “We’ll come and see you at home when you get sprung from this joint.”
I get up from my chair slowly, clutching my bandaged chest, and move to the bed. I ache all over. My chest hurts. Breathing is a colossal effort. This must be why no one wants to be a patient. No one wants to be here! It sucks on this side of the bedrails. Nurses especially, prefer the other side of things. Can you blame us? On that side, you’re the boss, you call the shots. You get to decide when the patient gets the meds, when they get up or go back to bed.
But it’s not just the hospital that takes over – illness does, too.
Ray is my nurse tonight. He popped in at the start of his shift to say hey and is back again now. “How’re you doing, sweetheart?” He takes my blood pressure and temperature, then straightens out my bed. He gives me a med cup of pills and I don’t even ask what they are – or care. I swallow them down. “How was your day?” he asks.
“I moved from the bed to the chair, from the chair to the bed. I walked around the nursing station.”
“That’s fantastic!” He pats my arm. “After the pain meds kick in, I’ll be back to take you on nice stroll down the hall to the atrium. Here you go, sweetie.” He places the pills in one hand, a cup of water in the other, and dashes off.
There’s a reason nurses wear running shoes.
Later, Ray comes back, gets me up, guides me past the nursing station and down the hallway. It’s a long walk but worth it. The reward is the atrium, a huge-dimensioned room, generous with air, light, and space, plus plants and comfortable chairs. Civilization! Why can’t more of the hospital be like this, bright, spacious, clean, and inspiring? Along the walls are floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto bustling University Avenue, known as “Hospital Row,” with tall, imposing medical centres lining either side. There’s majestic Queen’s Park with the provincial government buildings at one end and the University of Toronto buildings – so me he rit age and traditional, others modern and futuristic – then foreign consulates and embassies, their colourful flags waving in the breeze, lining both sides of the boulevard.
Hey, world, you’re still out there. I’d forgotten all about you.
I’ve seen the wonderment on patients’ faces when I’ve set them up in a chair at the window for the first time after being in bed for any length of time. They look out at the world again, rediscovering it in amazement. That’s probably the look on my face, too.
Back in my room, Ray admires the baskets and vases of flowers friends have sent. There’s even a bouquet made of fresh fruit – pineapple, cantaloupe, and strawberries, cut into shapes of daisies and roses. He tidies my room and makes me comfortable in bed, tucking me in for a rest. Is it bedtime already? Not yet.
“Is Melissa off tonight?” I ask.
“She called in sick.”
Nurse Ray has blond hair, a beautiful smile, nice muscles, and lots of tattoos on his arms. I worked with a nurse who had a tattoo of a twelve-lead ECG on his bicep. “Is it yours?” I asked him. “Of course. It’s so I’ll always have my own my baseline ECG wherever I go.”
We nurses are nothing if not practical.
Later in the evening, Robyn arrives, bursting with her natural beauty and good health. She hugs me and I am embarrassed because I smell. She walks me down the corridors, slowing her quick steps to match mine. She handles me cautiously like I’m a fragile object. In the atrium we sit on a smooth leather couch, and, as promised, she begins to fill in my “lost time.”
“Do you remember me and Ivan being there? In the ICU?”
“No, not at all.”
“Well, we were. It took so long for you to wake up and they were worried about you. You’ve always described your ICU patients as being ‘in between.’ Now I know what you mean. You told me ahead of time what I’d see in the ICU and how you’d look. It helped me to know that beforehand, but even so … seeing it, and you like that … it was a shock.” She shudders thinking about it.
“Nothing prepares you for that,” I say.
She shakes her head in agreement.
“It was probably harder for you than it was for me.” A recovered patient once told me she had no memory of the ICU, but her husband did and he was still recovering from the experience. I wonder if Robyn is, too?
“I’ll never forget how Maria watched you like a hawk,” Robyn continues, clearly needing to tell me every bit as much as I want to hear, all that happened. “She didn’t take her eyes off you, except for quick glances at the cardiac monitor, then back at you. I felt like a kindergarten child suddenly plunked down in a science lab. “Eighty-six – eighty-five – eighty-two – the numbers kept going down. The measurements of your life! ‘Is everything okay?’ I kept asking her. She looked concerned. I tried to gauge from her face how serious it was. Watching those machines, I felt how it was possible to embrace technology. Then I went back out to the waiting room to check if Ivan had come back to the hospital. He was there when you came out of surgery, but then went home for a while to be with the kids.
“Did they let you come back in right away?”
“Well, no, I stayed out there for a long time before they said I could come back in. I’d been in so many waiting rooms that day – I counted seven in total! Finally, I couldn’t wait anymore so I called on the phone at the desk. ‘Can I come in to see Tilda Shalof?’ Either the nurse on the other line didn’t hear me or something was terribly wrong. There was silence. ‘Tilda Shalof, can I see her?’ I asked again, now in a panic. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, dear. Someone was asking me something,’ she said. ‘Who do you want to see?’ This place was making me paranoid. I was thinking the worst. It’s like your surgery was a flight and your plane was delayed. A storm is brewing and you’re two hours late.
“Call back in a half-hour, dear,’ she tells me. ‘Half an hour?’ I felt desperate, like I’d swum across the ocean only to be told to turn back and wait for further instructions. I almost cried, but I didn’t. It was now long past shift change and the nurses had finished with their report when families are supposed to wait, so I worried that something was not right. ‘What’s going on?’ I wanted to run down the hall and yell, ‘What’s happening?’ ‘Why is she still on the ventilator at ten o’clock at night, almost eight hours after her surgery? Why have others who went in at the same time woken up and she hasn’t? Oh, I had a million questions, but what I needed was for them to look after you, so my questions had to wait.”
She sits at the foot of my bed and tells me all that happened, like a bedtime story.
“Ivan called to see if you’d woken up yet and when I told him you hadn’t, there was a long pause. I didn’t know if everything was okay, but I reassured him that you were resting. He said he was waiting for the kids to get back home and then he was going to feed them and co
me back to the hospital.”
“Where were the kids?” I ask in sudden alarm. “Why weren’t they home?”
“They were home, but your brother and sister-in-law – Tex and Bonnie – had taken them to hockey camp and they were on their way back.”
“Oh … I see. I forgot about hockey camp.”
“So, Ivan asked me to call if you woke up or if I heard anything more. I sat down and stared at the clock. What a serious face it had – maybe they should change that up? – but then I couldn’t wait any longer. I called to see if I could come and check on you again. Finally, I was told I could come in. When I came in there was the night nurse, Maria. She was standing with a doctor at the foot of your bed. There were both studying you, staring at you like you were a painting in an art gallery. They were concentrating deeply and looked worried, but when they noticed me they smiled.
“ ‘Is she doing okay?’ I kept asking them.
“ ‘Her heart is fine,’ they told me.
“ ‘Why is she not waking up?’ Maria told me she was keeping you sedated and on the ventilator because of the bleeding. ‘Not unusual for a major operation like this,’ the doctor said, ‘but a worry, nevertheless.’ Your blood pressure was very low and they’d already given you one blood transfusion and were giving you a second. I asked myself how worried you would be if you had a patient like this.”
“Pretty worried,” I said. “I guess I gave you and Ivan a scare …” I’m beginning to realize how close I came to dying, that I could easily have died if not for all the people caring for me and especially the unknown blood donors who saved my life.
“Then Maria put the siderail of your bed down and helped me move closer. She told me I could hold your hand. I don’t know why, but I was scared to do that. I was careful not to disturb any tubes, and I placed my palm on your hand and held it for a long time. Do you remember me doing that?”
I scan my memory bank, but I’m pretty close to E on the gas tank. “No.” I shake my head. “Not at all.”
“I’ll tell you, Til, throughout this entire ordeal, the possibility that you might die had honestly not entered my thinking. I know you’d thought a lot about it, but I couldn’t go there. I had travelled across the country, over mountains, Prairies, and the Great Lakes, to go through this with you, and maybe make it a little easier for Ivan, but I did not come here to witness your death. But as I stood right next to you, my hand resting on yours, which was so pale and still, not moving at all – I suddenly realized that you could die tonight. So, all of a sudden I am thinking about death and reviewing my own life. Do you think our death dates are predetermined? My intuition was telling me that it was not your time to die, Tilda. I found myself breathing in sync with you on the ventilator. I saw that we are not the deciders here. There’s something bigger than all of us.”
“So, what did you do next?”
“I found a washroom and there was a metal bar by the toilet and a red help button. I felt like pushing it. I looked in the mirror, faked a smile, and then gave in to tears. I splashed cold water on my face because Ivan was going to arrive any minute and I didn’t want him to see I’d been crying. Then I went back out to the waiting room and took a seat. I looked around at the decor. There were lots of chairs, navy blue with yellow, green, and beige subdued polka dots – not bright neon colours, but not too cheerful either, just in case. A man and woman sat across from me. When he noticed my red, puffy eyes, he offered me a box of Kleenex. In an East Indian accent, he said, ‘Very hard waiting.’ ”
“ ‘Yes,’ I said, holding back tears.
“ ‘We wait for …’ he said, but his wife hushed him by placing her hand on his knee.
“So, I can tell you, Til, there were forty-two chairs, three fake green plants, two living-room lights, eighteen squares on the rugs … Counting things calmed me down.”
“Where was Ivan?”
“At about eleven-thirty, I heard the elevator door and I knew it was Ivan. When he saw me, he thanked me so much for being here. I could see how grateful he was. Then we walked arm-in-arm down the long hallway to go in together to see you and ask Maria and the doctor lots of questions. ‘Is it harmful for her to be on the ventilator for so long? Why is her blood pressure so low? What are all the IV’S for? How many blood transfusions is it safe for her to have? Where was the bleeding coming from? When will she wake up?’ Oh, Tilda, you would have been proud of our good questions. We stood around your bed, me and Ivan, Maria, and a doctor and a respiratory therapist and it didn’t matter who had what expertise or which titles. We were all taking care of you, worried about you together. But they didn’t have the answers or were just too busy taking care of you to tell us more. Ivan stood there looking at you, just touching your arm lightly. It was such a simple, caring examination of the woman he loves, the mother of his children. I think he was afraid to disturb you. He wanted to be able to tell the kids you’d woken up from the operation, but knew he wouldn’t be able to do that.
“ ‘What happens if her blood pressure keeps dropping?’ Ivan asked Maria. She said that Dr. David was coming in to decide the next move and that he may have to take you back to the operating room and have a look. Then we asked Maria what we should do and she told us to go home and get some rest. She promised if there was any news, she’d call us. I’ve heard you say this to patients, so I felt it was okay to leave your side. Ivan agreed, so we left.”
I absorb these details, her comforting presence, and the soothing peppermint lotion she’s massaging into my feet and legs as she continues the story of my two lost days.
“So, we got into the car, exhausted, trying to sort out what was happening. We were halfway home when Ivan’s cellphone rang and it was Maria. She told us that Dr. David was there and he was going to take you back to the operating room to fix the problem. Ivan pulled off to the side of the road and stopped the car to talk to her.”
“If he stopped the car he really must have been worried. He’s always driving and talking on the phone.”
Robyn nods and continues, “We didn’t know whether to return to the hospital or go home to the kids, but Maria said she would call us when she had more news, so we headed home, talking about nothing, just random thoughts to keep our minds off things. We were almost there when the phone rang again. It was Harry. He asked Ivan if you were okay.”
I’m glad I wasn’t there to hear that question or Ivan fumbling for an honest answer.
“He said there were a few problems but that you would probably be all right, but he couldn’t give the guarantee that Harry was fishing for. He asked Ivan to buy him an Archie comic. He said it would help him fall asleep.”
He hasn’t read Archies in years!
“Ivan said he’d try but didn’t think he could find one at that time of night. He was so sweet and patient with him. When we got home, Harry was leaning over the staircase banister, waiting for Ivan to come upstairs and lie down with him. Ivan said he’d be there in just a minute. I made myself a cup of tea and Harry a hot chocolate – and Ivan poured himself a whisky.”
We have a laugh over that. So Ivan.
“I told him to give me a swig so I could brag to you later that I’d needed hard liquor to get me through this night! Then I went upstairs to give Harry the hot chocolate and he was still awake, sitting in his bed, fully dressed, staring at his books, all lined up on his shelves. Funny, it was exactly like you would do, Til. I wonder if something like that is genetic? ‘You’re just like your mom,’ I told him and that pleased him. ‘Is Mom okay?’ he asked me. ‘Everything is fine, but they are watching her closely,’ I told him. Earlier, he’d made Ivan promise you would be okay. Finally, he went to bed. The phone rang about two in the morning and Ivan, Bonnie, Tex, and I were all still up. It was Maria calling to say they didn’t take you back to surgery after all. Dr. David managed to fix the bleeding and your blood pressure stabilized. Then Ivan got off the phone, let out a sigh, and poured himself another whisky. What a relief! It was like fresh air after a s
torm. I went to bed, but before I fell asleep, I worried about if you woke up and were frightened, but I knew Maria was with you, so I conked out, knowing I had to be rested for the next day.”
I am beginning to connect the dots …
My head is clearing. I look over at the wide windowsill. Tall flowers, purple and red, stand upright in a glass vase. Today was hot and sunny and the water level dipped down as these intelligent flowers gulped water. Now, in the evening, they take tiny sips, leaving the water level nearly constant. It’s meniscus, so maybe I don’t have pumphead after all? I need to find that wise balance, that clever self-regulation, for myself.
“Do you remember any of what I’m telling you?” Robyn asks.
“Very little. I felt safe and that I was being cared for. That’s about it. Oh, and I remember thinking I understood what was happening, but I realize now I didn’t.”
“Where were you? That’s what I kept wondering,” Robyn muses. “I felt you were here, but I couldn’t find you, which was strange because even though we live far apart, I’ve never felt like I can’t reach you, but during the surgery and when you were in the ICU, I did. It felt like you could easily slip away while I was out in the waiting room, so I needed to be with you as much as possible.”
“Was there anyone else in the waiting room?”
“A mother and her teenaged son and daughter were waiting for news about their father, who was undergoing complicated surgery. The mother smoothed her hands up and down their backs as they sat on either side of her. ‘What can we do?’ the girl asked her mother. ‘Pray,’ the mother told them and that’s what they did.”