Four Eyes, page 8
My dad was still asleep in my mom’s room, sawing logs per usual. I wondered if that was calming to my mom at all. She was also asleep and looking rather grim. She had lost a lot of weight over the past five weeks and was fairly pale. The small break I had from her overnight allowed me to see some of the changes in her more clearly. I could see what Dr. Stevens was talking about now.
I sat down, waiting for rounds, recalibrating myself to hospital time. My long brown hair was getting longer and longer, and I spun it around my fingers as I waited. Another game of “hurry up and wait,” I thought. Just like airports. My mind drifted to the conversation about final wishes and organ donation I had shelved. Are we there now? My stomach flipped, and I hoped that meant we weren’t.
I didn’t know this hospital nearly as well, and the rooms were much smaller, almost half the size of the ones at MCR. It was a massive hospital, and the drab tan walls looked dingy in the fluorescent lighting. The weathered trim of the cabinets and furniture gave away its age. It was overwhelmingly impersonal. We found ourselves on the ninth floor, which wasn’t even halfway up, and I missed the familiarity of MCR. I wondered if they had any free pop or poxicles or stale graham crackers for folks here.
The lights suddenly flicked on as a team of eight people slowly filed into the shoebox space and lined themselves one by one around my mom’s bed. This woke my dad up, but my mom kept sleeping.
“Good morning, folks; I’m Dr. Wolf,” the oldest of them all began, barely glancing our way. “So, this is patient Sharon Bashaw,” pronouncing our last name “Buh-shaw” instead of “Baa-shaw,” a small detail that made me feel very cold inside. “She transferred from Medical Center of the Rockies last night after a quadruple bypass surgery over a month ago, and she is not able to get off dobutamine with an ejection fraction of 25 percent. She is weak from lack of food after nausea, pneumonia, and a tracheotomy. She has a peg tube in, and we’ll need an order here from dietary to continue that. She is allergic to heparin, and it looks like she lost some toes from that.” He paused to pull up the bed sheet and look at her feet, still in the wrappings.
He continued. “She is very weak and diminished,” he said toward us, his face slowly following. He stood around five-foot-eleven, with a slender build and dark eyes. His nose was small, and his glasses covered most of his face. There was a no-nonsense air about him.
“Hello, I’m Butch,” my dad began his familiar speech whenever we met a new doctor. “She goes by Sherri, not Sharon; she hates Sharon, and I am her husband.” The doctor’s eyes glanced my way.
“Hi, I’m Alisha, her daughter,” I said, suddenly conscious of all the eyes on me, still in my pajamas after a night on the hard lobby floor. I was certain I was a sight, and nothing in me could bring myself to care.
The crew surrounding my mom was an eclectic group of residents or interns, I assumed. There were three women and five men, and one of the men looked more like a teenager than a young adult—a real-life Doogie Howser. I surveyed the ping-pong game they played with their eyes, back and forth from Dr. Wolf to whomever was speaking. I wondered what they were all thinking. More so, I wondered what my mom would have thought about all of this a month ago. Slowly, through this process, she had become more of an item and less of a person. She was always the topic of conversation in rooms these days, but rarely was she a part of the conversation. I felt protective of her in that moment, of her personhood. She was not a problem or a number or an experiment; she was my mom, with a whole lifetime of experiences and a personality and dreams and a strong voice. It struck me how differently she was being presented right now. Frail, fragile, diminished. The doctor was right. Diminished.
“Sherri has been struggling to come off of dobutamine for the last few weeks and can’t seem to function without it,” my dad began the story of how we ended up here.
As my dad filled the onlookers in on the details, I saw the doctor process this information through many different facial expressions, some I recognized, others I did not. As my dad wrapped up, Dr. Wolf’s expression landed on a soft smile as he sighed.
“This has been a journey for you all, I can tell,” he started. “And I’m sorry to say, but if she had been here a few weeks ago, we’d be in a very different place. She has needed the type of cardiac management she has not had. We will do the best we can with where she is right now, but she is very compromised. We are going to start with all the basic blood draws to get her levels, and we will make a plan from there.”
With that, he turned to his team and began speaking in medical terminology, ordering this and that to “get to know her.” I reflected on that phrase and thought how bizarre it was that a bunch of levels and numbers could ever suffice as “knowing” someone. Yet, when life is on the line, I wasn’t sure how much room there was for favorite colors and the like. It just seemed cold, sterile. Like a job more than a purpose.
Starting with blood draws and levels seemed like a waste of time to me, and I was frustrated that this felt like a step backward. She was again not receiving food, and she looked terrible, not like herself at all. She needed to eat. Why were we starting with baseline bloodwork? Couldn’t they get that information from MCR? We just gave them all the information they could need about her, and we’ve been with her, more present than she was even, to all the details. I didn’t understand. Who knew how long the liquid food order from Dietary specific to her diabetic diet would take. They seemed to lack the urgent promise of relief we had felt so deeply at MCR about this transfer. I looked at my dad with wide eyes. His scared ones stared back. There was nothing we could do but continue to be her advocate, and this felt like starting all over at square one.
We took a few moments to gather ourselves as they continued talking about next steps. By this time, I started to feel that we were very important team players—maybe more important now, since my mom was so out of it and couldn’t speak for herself. It was very strange to be thought of as a number to strangers who didn’t have our backstory. How do you catch people up on who my mom was and entice them to treat her as if they loved her as much as we did? It was a very powerless feeling.
“Doctor, is there any chance we can get her some food ASAP, please?” my dad asked. “She just started making some improvement with food through this peg tube less than a week ago, and I am worried that with the continued lack of nutrition, she will regress further. We had to wait a long time to find something that could work for her with food, and I just don’t want to see her backslide,” my dad pled his case.
“We’ll get Dietary down here to do their assessment, yes. In the meantime, she will need many heart tests after we determine what is happening,” Dr. Wolf responded before turning back to his students and giving them the sign to exit the room.
They filed out of the room in the same way they had entered, in a single-file line, Dr. Wolf bringing up the rear.
“We’ll be in touch soon, and back on Monday,” he called over his shoulder to my dad and me.
I sighed heavily. My dad looked at me and echoed my sigh. I had forgotten what day it was. Friday meant that the weekend was coming, and the weekend feel was very different from the weekdays in many cases. Not a lot could happen on weekends, and weekdays provided the structure we all knew we needed right now. I could feel my eyebrows furrow as this reality began to sink in.
“We have to start over with them, kid,” my dad said. “And the nicer we are, the more they will like us and hopefully give Mom care that is above and beyond.” I knew he was right. It was that much harder to treat a patient when those the patient came with were less than pleasant. We had seen that play out plenty at MCR. Not that we would ever be mean, but we did find that sharing as many details as possible very directly with the medical staff, in their language, bought some credibility. Yet too much sharing could bring annoyance and less credibility. It was an interesting space, and a very tender balance to find.
Here we go again, I thought. Weekends at hospitals were the worst.
CHAPTER 27
May 26, 2012, 8:30 A.M.
IT WAS SATURDAY morning, and I was still in my clothes from Thursday. Gross, I thought as I stood up. I could really use a shower. Things like showers became afterthoughts when you were on autopilot. Time and space seemed to pass in another plane when so many unknowns were present. My dad and I decided to split the shifts of overnighting with Mom. He had gone back home to Loveland late last night to get some sleep in a real bed and to grab Sniff from neighbor Lisa, who had been calling periodically for updates, offering her support.
“Anything I can do, I will,” she said, repeatedly. “I just feel so badly for Sherri, and I want her to know she’s not alone. And Butch needs breaks too,” she kindly relayed.
Sniff wasn’t allowed in the Denver hospital, and Lisa had graciously volunteered to take care of Sniff for as long as we were here.
I had slept on the chair-bed thing in my mom’s room that was plastic and not quite flat, which made sleeping in my favorite position, on my stomach, impossible. I had asked for a toothbrush last night, and the night nurse gladly obliged. I was very grateful, and snuck past my mom, snoring softly, to the bathroom down the hall.
The lights flickered as I flipped the switch, bringing the yellowed light into sharp focus. I brushed my teeth and thought about how privileged I was to be able to walk down the hall, go to the bathroom, and brush my teeth. A privilege my mom had not had in months. She had had many catheters and bed pans for bathrooms when she was too weak or sick to get up. How perspective changes in moments like this. I grabbed a handful of water and swished the toothpaste around in my mouth, feeling like a brand-new person. I would take it until I could get home to shower. My dad was coming around midday, and when he arrived, I could take the car home and not come back until tomorrow evening. It sounded like the best vacation I had ever planned.
Back in my mom’s room, I was shocked again at how much weight she had lost, and at the extensive curliness of her hair after all the medications and procedures. Her longtime hairdresser had come to give her a “haircut” back at MCR to get her bangs out of her eyes and back to her short curled-for-extra-volume cut. She was only able to cut the front, resulting in a mullet-esque shape, and though her bangs were still out of her eyes, her tight curls were now falling lower onto the tops of her gaunt cheekbones. There was still no order from Dietary for food.
A nurse walked in. “Good morning,” she said. “How are you this morning?” She was tall and slender and had a very nurturing air about her.
I yawned and stretched before answering her.
“I know that feeling,” the nurse chuckled. “Can I get you anything?” she asked as I was beginning to soften to the idea of new people being able to help my mom as well as the MCR staff.
“I’m okay, thank you. Unless you have a magic button that could make all of this better?” I said in response and wished for her inner superhero to bust out of her fitted burgundy scrubs and set everything to rights.
She smiled. “If only” was her kind reply, laced with a tinge of sad. “I’m happy to start with some breakfast, though, if you’d like,” she said, handing me a menu.
“That sounds great, thanks,” I said, feeling a tinge of guilt at another layer of privilege I had stumbled upon—eating. I chose the eggs and pancakes with some coffee, and ordered it to my mom’s room, grateful I wouldn’t have to go to the cafeteria just yet. Dealing with a lot of people sounded hard at the moment.
When the nurse, Leah, came back in the room, I asked her about the dietary order for my mom.
“Still no word,” she responded, “but I put in another call this morning. As you know, they have to assess and then get a doctor to sign the order. The doctor this weekend is different than your mom’s weekday doctor, so it may take a little bit longer for the orders to push through. But we are collecting all her test results and hopefully will have a better idea of what the plan is later today when the doctor reviews them.”
I could feel the frustration build as I closed my eyes.
“You okay, hon?” Leah asked.
“It’s so hard to watch her get weaker without food, and I know it’s a whole process and she’s new here and it’s a weekend. It just seems like it should be so easy, and she is doing worse now without it, you know?” I replied, dejected.
Leah sighed a sigh full of compassion. “Yes, I understand. It is a really hard spot. Let me page the on-call doctor and see if he can write an emergency order. I know there were some concerns about her developing blood clots as well, so I am already anticipating his call.”
“That would be great, Leah, thank you so much!” I replied, my relief palpable.
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
My phone buzzed. It was my dad. I gave him the update on the latest dietary news. My mom was really out of it. He’d be up later this afternoon. I had some time.
There was a knock at the door. My breakfast arrived on the standard uniform gray plastic cart on wheels. The familiar black plate cover with the diagonal swirled design covered my pancakes and eggs. The scrambled eggs looked mass produced, and the pancakes were rather firm. The coffee was as dark as the night sky in the mountains when you can’t see your hand in front of your face, and the two half-and-half containers they gave me barely changed that. However, it was the best thing I had eaten in the last few days. Satisfied, I put my tray by the door and began to watch TV.
My mom opened her eyes at the sound, and I apologized for the noise as I greeted her being awake.
“Good morning, Mom!” How are y—?” She was asleep again before I could finish the question.
CHAPTER 28
May 26, 2012, 4:01 P.M.
MY DAD ARRIVED at the hospital, and we exchanged keys in the parking lot. My mom had woken up off and on for the whole afternoon as I dozed. Nothing had changed except my level of hope. I was feeling pretty low about my mom’s trajectory, and I was hoping some alone time and a shower would reverse that.
On the drive home, I tried to switch gears into school mode with the small amount of bandwidth I had left. My semester ended in a less than a week, and I had received a small extension on a curriculum I needed to create for adolescents processing grief for my Group Counseling class final. I hadn’t started yet, and I was wondering how you begin to help others through a time of grief when you are in one yourself.
CHAPTER 29
May 27, 2012, 1:02 P.M.
THE HOUSE WAS quiet, but I couldn’t relax. My head was scattered, and was I having trouble being in so many places at once. It had taken all I had in me to focus long enough to write one page of my group counseling curriculum yesterday. After fighting myself internally to press on, I conceded to my heavy eyelids and went to sleep around 8:30 p.m., not moving an inch until I woke up this morning at 10:30. My body was somewhat rested, but my mind would not stop whirring from the moment I opened my eyes. I called my dad for an update.
“Hey, kid,” he answered on the third ring. “Did you get some sleep?” He sounded sad.
“I did, yeah; how about you?”
“Oh, yeah, the best. You know how comfy this chair-bed thing is here,” he said sarcastically.
I laughed. “Indeed, I do. How’s Mom? Did she get food yet?”
“No. I’m going nuts. You know how the weekends go, though. Everything is just so slow. She is not doing well, still so sick and frail. She is barely awake. I talked to the on-call doctor last night, and Mom went in for a quick procedure this morning to implant a heart monitor to test each quadrant of her heart’s blood flow on a monitor we can watch, which will tell them where the problem is, and how to fix it. And of course, she couldn’t eat before the procedure, so it’s just more waiting. There’s a new on-call doctor tonight, so I’m going to talk to them as soon as they arrive for an order. This is awful to watch, and they need to know how important this is; she is dying without food here!” He got more passionate toward the end, then took a breath and calmed down with a sigh. “They are also worried about clots in her leg and neck area after some tests and scans came back, so they are figuring out the plan for tomorrow after they know more from the monitor. They started her on another blood thinner, not heparin, but needed something to help the clots from forming.”
There was a long pause as the air was sucked out of the room.
“How’s your paper coming along?” he asked, shifting the conversation.
I could feel my nervous system shielding me with its autopilot armor. “Oh, fine.” I said, throwing my loose plans to concentrate on my paper out the window. “I’ll head down in a few, and see you soon,” I heard myself say from a distant place. I didn’t know where that was.
CHAPTER 30
May 27, 2012, 8:39 P.M.
THE ON-CALL DOCTOR was my age, in his early thirties at most, and swayed back and forth as he spoke. I walked in to see my mom sleeping and my dad sternly talking with him.
“This is no longer an option,” I caught the tail end of the conversation. “She has been here for three days now and has not had any food after not having hardly any food up north for the previous three weeks. I don’t understand the rationale to wait any longer. Please order her the food. Now.”
The doctor responded in a shaky voice, explaining how everything is closed on the weekends and that her primary doctor would be back tomorrow. My dad protested, and the doctor agreed to place the emergency order despite it being Sunday evening and Dietary being closed.
