My Glory Was I Had Such Friends, page 15
I stood up and Lachalle slipped her arm through mine, buddy-style. “Good choice. You make me glad,” she said, and we strolled together through the late-night hallways of Six South.
Back in the room now, Jill is already in her cot and facing the wall. The iPad is turned off. I suppose the email has been sent; I gave her my okay, after all.
“Jill?”
She doesn’t budge.
Oh no . . .
Scott’s advice was crucial. It all comes down to how I want to live these days: I can try to force a deeper, more painful understanding of the situation on everyone around me (generating more alienation than empathy, it seems). Or I can find a way to love and be loved here in this hospital room. The time is not for forcing upon every friend who sits beside me the truth of what she could never quite understand before. My mistakes with first Jody and now Jill tell me this loud and clear. The time, as it turns out, is for good-byes.
Cardiogenic shock . . . galloping disease progression . . . neck vein worthy of a medical tutorial . . .
I look up at the blue number on the monitor—112. Then I close my eyes and speak to the turned back I can’t bear to see. “You’re the best friend any girl could hope for.”
No answer.
I slide under the covers and bring them all the way up to my chin, but there’s no hiding from the lesson of this night.
Friends—even best ones—have limits.
I must do better.
From: Jill Dawson
Subject: Amy
Date: April 3, 2014 at 3:56 PM
To: Ann Burrell, Lauren Steale, Jane Keller, Valerie Yablon, Jody Solomon, Robin Adelson, Joy Ceterra, Leja Babic
When I left LA early this morning, Amy was sleeping soundly. She had an ok night, up many times with chest/arm pain when the pacemaker had to kick in to keep her heart rate up. Her spirits were pretty good throughout the night—and, with all of you amazing visitors lined up for the coming weeks, and the uplifting presence of the West Coast steadies (Jody and Leja), here’s to hoping they will stay that way.
My time with Amy and Scotty was precious—we had some great laughs, and tears, some very honest talks and many long spaces of quiet. Just praying that a heart is coming soon. It’s an exhausting wait.
Some advice re. sleeping at the hospital: Amy usually wakes up very, very early—like 5am, 6am—and usually is dressed by 7am (so that she’s ready for her Dr. K visits around 7:30am). With the time change, that’s an easy one for the East Coasters. Morning is a good time for anything that takes energy, including long talks.
Also, it’s fine just to sit with her—no need to make conversation. Bring your computer, book, work, whatever. Amy needs her rest and needs to be able to doze off. Constant stimulation/conversation is not necessary.
Make sure Scotty knows that when you’re there, you’ve “got it” so that he is free to do whatever he needs/wants to do. One major benefit of being there for Amy is also freeing up Scott. He’s exhausted too, and needs time to do stuff and recharge.
The bungalow has a hair-blower, no need to bring your own.
These are things that just came to mind—some are probably obvious (sorry) but figured I’d share anyway.
Passing the baton of on-the-ground reporter to Jody for current updates. What an amazing network of family and friends Amy and Scotty have.
Jill xo
6
The next afternoon, Lauren arrives just as an IV nurse makes an attempt to slide a new needle into my forearm. My eyes are closed tight, but I can identify my friend’s footsteps as she enters the room.
“Lauren!” I open my eyes for just a couple of seconds to take in the happy sight of her.
“Hi, lovey girl,” she says, cheerful but terrifically serene. “I see you’ve got something going on there. Should I step out for a minute?”
I tell her to stay, please; it’s just an IV change. With eyes closed again, I hear her settle into the chair beside my bed. She takes my hand in hers.
“Darn it, darn it, ugh . . .” The nurse sighs with exasperation. “I didn’t get the vein this time either. Sorry.” She places my right arm gently on the bed and takes a deep breath.
It was her third try, and I was verging on tears when Lauren walked in. IVs are harder to insert when the heart is not pumping blood through the veins with requisite strength. The problem is only made worse over time by the daily (or sometimes twice daily) blood draws that inflict innumerable vein punctures, thereby making it even harder to find pristine spots for IV placement. And since IVs have to be removed and relocated every three days to prevent infection, the stretch of available real estate along the arms becomes overpopulated quickly with holes and hematomas. During the two months I spent in the hospital waiting for my first donor heart, I had more than fifty IV changes that became increasingly mangling and agonizing. And now, barely one week into my stay at Cedars, I see my veins moving quickly toward destruction—a portent of many grueling IV changes to come.
“I’m going to give it one more try,” the nurse says through a taut smile, “and if it doesn’t work this time, I’ll get the supervisor, okay?”
“All right.” I feel a tear slip through, even though my eyes are shut tight.
Lauren gives my hand a little squeeze. “Okay, honey.”
“You’re here,” I say, just because it comforts me to confirm this out loud.
“I most certainly am.”
“Good . . . because . . . sniff, sniff . . . it’s been so hard, Lauren, and I need . . . I mean, I . . . I’m just so . . . Thank you, thank you . . .” Tears stream down my nose, my cheeks.
“Love you, girl,” she says.
“Love you too.”
I exhale and settle into the moment.
Everything feels suddenly easier. The unfamiliar hospital room and fraught IV scene that Lauren just walked into do not intimidate her, and I feel at once the power of two in her company. This sense of confident togetherness is something we’ve earned; it’s not a trusted closeness that happened on its own through friendship dating back to childhood, like Jill and I have experienced. Lauren and I didn’t meet until we were young adults—and it didn’t go too well at first. But our relationship has grown steadily and beautifully since our somewhat shaky beginning.
If you ask Lauren about the first time we met, she will say without hesitation that I wasn’t nice to her. “Oh, Amy didn’t like me,” she’ll chide, sort of teasing. Lauren was dating Scott’s best friend and law school roommate, Lenny, back then (he’s now her husband); getting along as a cozy foursome had been my immediate intent. And yet, as Lauren would tell you, when I answered the doorbell and first laid eyes upon her one Sunday afternoon back in 1987 (Scott and Lenny were in the living room watching football), I hardly offered a warm welcome or introduction. “You said, ‘Uh, hi,’ and walked immediately into the kitchen,” is how Lauren remembers it.
“It wasn’t exactly like that.”
“Yah-huh, it was.”
Whenever Lauren and I revisit this early scene, I try to explain that I’m shy by nature, which happens to be true, but she sees no trace of timidity in me at this point in our long friendship and doesn’t buy it. We end up tossing our hands in the air and laughing: We were so young. Who can remember the forces at work when we first met?
I could, actually.
I remember Lauren on that doorstep perfectly. And I have an idea of why I turned away from her at that moment and why still, to this day, I’m taken aback for the first few seconds just about every time I greet her—at the coffee place in town or on the street corner where we start up a neighborhood walk or anywhere, really, even though we’re the closest of friends. There’s something about Lauren that delays an easy hello.
It’s not so much the way she looks, although her attractiveness is striking enough to ignite high-school-level envy and comparisons. Now, at fifty years old, Lauren carries herself effortlessly, with toned muscles and unfailingly perfect posture. But it’s not simply physical loveliness that commands Lauren’s effect; it’s more the way she puts her mind to use and orchestrates success.
I squeeze her hand so tight now, she calls out “Ouch!” right along with me. Even though I’ve turned my head away from the insertion site, I can feel that the needle isn’t in correctly—because it’s painful. When an IV is a well-placed keeper, it doesn’t hurt much at all.
“Your vein, ugh! Just can’t get this in . . .” the nurse laments, removing her gloves and wiping her forehead. “I’m going to get the supervising nurse so I don’t have to keep sticking you, sweetheart.” She gathers the paraphernalia from atop my blanket—a mess of rubbery tourniquets, paper and plastic discards, used needle sleeves and gauze—and tells me not to worry. “Maybe she’ll get lucky and find a good vein—somehow.”
Maybe? Somehow? I careen my torso up and away from the pillow stack. My mouth flies open to make room for a blast of frustration. Lauren’s hand lands on my thigh.
She exhales through her nose and floats at once to standing, as if tied to a helium-filled idea. Taking hold of my left forearm—the one the nurse has not tried yet—Lauren inspects its condition at close range. “Quick question before you go?” she asks amiably, meeting the nurse’s eyes directly. “Why not try this arm? I defer to you, of course, but look . . .” She points to a few green-blue veins visible close the surface of my skin.
The nurse tells her that the previous IV had been placed in that arm, and that it’s preferable to switch with each change.
Lauren pauses for a second, finger to chin. “Oh, okay, I see. And I respect that, of course. But Amy’s had a lot of sticks already—as you so kindly pointed out. Wouldn’t it be great to get a sure thing on the next try? Unless you think that having two left-arm IVs in a row would pose a risk to her . . .”
I shift my eyes to the IV nurse—what’s her reaction to this layperson suggesting how she might do her job differently?
A slow nod. A kind smile.
Three minutes later, I’ve got an IV perfectly in place—on the left. If Lauren’s solution seemed like an obvious one, it was only because she led us all to it with such ease. In hospital settings, where things are done the same way over and over, whether driven by protocol or mere habit, an agile, genteel approach like hers can save the day. There is a lesson for me in what she has accomplished here—I feel it in the calm that pervades the room in the wake of her grace under pressure. It would do me good to channel it in the days to come. But can I really? Her coolheaded decorum isn’t easily emulated, even under the best of circumstances.
As long as I’ve known Lauren, she’s been a thinker. A measured assessor before action. A careful calculator of this moment and the next, and the one after that. When I first met her, I could tell she was confident and prepared, at twenty-three years old, in ways I hadn’t given even a moment’s consideration. I didn’t have the wherewithal to integrate my sense of her into concrete thought just then, but I could gather this much: This girl has got it together in more ways than I can tell.
Unlike me at twenty-three years old (or fifty), Lauren was and is completely and consistently in control of her presence. The extent to which she’s got her wits about her is instantly apparent and, in my repeated experience, a little daunting. It’s not so much jealousy that hits me; it is more a sense of awe at how she lives the cognitive ideal. Careful thought precedes all action. I can’t imagine Lauren ever running out of a hospital room and hiding from her friend in a darkened hallway. She’d get a hold of herself.
“Listen to this—I water-skied for the first time in I don’t know how many years,” she told me just last summer, “and I dropped a ski and did the rest slalom” (on a single ski, that is). “I fell once and told myself, Lauren, you’ve got to balance more accurately—pull in that stomach and lean thirty degrees to the left and ten degrees back. Then I thought about my arms, rotated my left wrist, and brought my right hand into a more dominant position . . .”
I’d gone water-skiing not too long ago as well and, unlike my more analytically gifted friend, gave it no thought: no self-evaluation of my technique, no purposeful adjustment of my position. I just let the boat pull me willy-nilly for a few feet and then belly flopped into the cold lake.
Every time I say hello to my dear friend Lauren, I feel some of that splash.
Leja is holding her breath. The tip of her nose has turned red and she’s pulled in her chin like a turtle; I’m sure of it, even though I can’t see her. We’re on the phone. Leja is back in New York for a few days of well-earned rest after spending a month here in California. She blows out a gust of air now and takes in another gulp. This is how Leja weeps.
I’m glad I picked up her call. I had ignored all the other rings and pings from my cell phone over the past few days, but when I saw Leja was calling I told Lauren and Jody I wanted to take it.
“We’ll run down for a quick coffee, then,” Lauren whispers, giving Jody the nod to join her as I say hello into the cell. I gesture toward the door—Go ahead . . . I’m fine.
There is loud sniffling on the other end of the phone. “Leja, breathe,” I say gently. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“I do not want to bother to you. You are in hospital.”
“Don’t be silly. I’m always here for—”
“Okay, I will tell to you—it’s that Brenda! I hear that she is telling to the mothers at the bus stop that I go with my friend to California for fun trip and this is why I quit her house. For fun trip!” Leja explains that she’s worried this will ruin her reputation and cause trouble when she tries to find another job after returning from California. Beyond the economics of it, she prides herself on being a hardworking and highly trustworthy nanny and house cleaner, and she can’t fathom her former boss Brenda speaking ill of her. Leja has made a point of being nothing but discreet and private, never sharing with me anything she sees or hears on the job, never criticizing mothers, fathers, kids, or even unruly dogs in the households where she has worked. And while she has cried to me many times over the last couple of years that she’s unhappy working for Brenda (whom I know only as a mere acquaintance), she refrained from saying exactly why; instead, she remained loyal and earnest, wondering aloud to me what she can do to handle the job better and bring a happier attitude to it day after day. She finally decided to return to her affirmations, sitting at the computer for ten-minute concentration sessions once or twice a day, watching her preselected messages trail across the screen: I enjoy my work . . . I do an excellent job and I feel appreciated . . . Work stresses do not bother me . . .
When Scott and I asked Leja to consider coming to California with us for an unspecified number of months, she knew this meant ending her job as a nanny and housekeeper for Brenda. And while the prospect of quitting was not an unhappy one for Leja, she was intent on handling it professionally and giving proper notice. Scott and I talked with her about it, and we decided that two weeks was typically fair, figuring that Brenda likely would have given this same duration of additional employ were she to fire Leja.
“Brenda tells to people that I did a bad thing to her family when I decide go to California for fun trip with you. How can she say such!”
Leja had explained to Brenda that she wanted to help me in this terrible time—that I had been a good friend to her, and that in Croatian culture, good friends do all they can for each other without thinking of themselves. But, according to the chatter, Brenda would not believe that Leja’s motives did not include California fun. “I felt inside me so terrible when I quit her job. I said to her this, ‘Amy is dying’ . . . but she kept telling to me, ‘Two weeks! How can you leave in two weeks!’ I said again to her, ‘Amy is dying’ . . .”
Leja lets out a squeak of anguish and blows her nose. I’ve got to assure her that she has done nothing wrong. “Two weeks’ notice—that’s standard stuff. You shouldn’t feel bad about it.”
“I feel angry . . . I do a good thing and Brenda says this about me. I do not deserve!”
“No, Leja, you do not deserve it one bit. You are a good person and an excellent worker. You are fair and kind. And you are saving my life.” I feel my eyes fill with tears. “Let’s talk about it more tomorrow, okay?”
I sit up against some pillows, pull my laptop toward me, and dare to open it. I don’t have sufficient strength for emails or even texts; I write almost none these days, and most of the ones I receive go unanswered. But I’m rallying myself to try to set things right for Leja.
Dear Brenda,
I thought of you this morning from my hospital room at Cedars-Sinai, where I’m waiting for a second heart transplant. The biggest help to me as I struggle here is Leja, who is and has long been my Croatian sister, friend, and supporting spirit. It was quite hard for me to ask her to leave her job to help me. But it was quite wonderful that Leja responded to my desperate need with such selflessness, thinking of nothing but how she might help. Just know, for what it’s worth, that Leja is doing an angel’s work here as I struggle for each breath, hoping for a miracle.
I do hope that things are going great with your family these days . . .
I lift my fingers from the keyboard and fall back against the pillows, exhausted and nauseated. One email is more than my heart’s energy allows. I open my night table drawer and reach for my Tums and Tylenol stash—contraband that my friends know I’m harboring against the rules, naughty, naughty. No one wants to wait for a nurse to fetch a doctor’s written order when they’ve got nausea or a headache. Secreting away my own Tums and Tylenol is a trick I learned many hospital stays ago, and thank goodness for it: right now I feel close to vomiting. My abdomen has stretched to second-trimester distention, suspiciously firm to the touch and full of the same fluid that has inflated my ankles and feet to near bursting. My liver is now enlarged (due to right-side heart failure, Dr. K tells me), which makes it hard to eat much of anything and inches me toward malnourishment (my blood level of the vital protein albumin is declining, which is a dangerous telltale sign).
