Colette looked particularly exhausted this evening, and with good reason. The hospital was overstuffed with the sick and infirm. Every isle revealed another atrocity in the making, a headline or piece of legislation in progress. Every bed was a fine example of a textbook ailment that stretched over a human face and frail body. This is her world just as much as burgers and fry sacks became the world of her little sister; and in all of this she found refuge in standing above those broken bodies and proclaiming her will to survive. She did not consider it a virtue to attend these fallen victims of living; instead a triumph.
She would think to herself in the midst of her small breaks about the poor bodies she encounters every moment. She reflects to herself on the harsh lack of funding, on the old equipment and short supplies. This is all a conversation in her mind, and maybe more of just taking notes and recalling all the ways that people don’t have to suffer. Sometimes still she imagines this as her refuge from it all, the knowledge that her foresight can prevent some of the mess altogether.
Its back to the floor, and it seems a senile dementia patient just tried to walk out the front door. It would have worked flawlessly if he hadn’t been hit by the ambulance. Colette runs with the frantic crowd, them grabbing up any useful machinery in the passing; crutches, gurneys; a flash out the door to red white wailing lights and a still body below.
“Who was on his watch?” Screams a twisted face to a sea of white smocks.
Turn’s out nobody was on his watch; he slipped through the cracks, barely a chart on the wall. Is anybody to blame; we will have a revision committee to find some blame. You can bet your watch on that.
She watches a few minutes later, getting some cold water from the fountain, he’s wheeled in on a bed. Code red, I think he shattered his spine; thinks Colette, hating this place for another uncountable time tonight. It’s a place of uncomfortable beds and tragic moments exploding left and right.
She wanted to go to grad school to upgrade the nursing degree a bit. Hell, she could hand out pills and take the measurements, change any size diaper and initiate a code; but damn if she didn’t want to feel a little more helpful.
“Being here is like being part of a slow machine.” She once recounted to her mother on the telephone. “You abide by it’s pace, and it chugs along as people curl up and die all around you.”
“Well honey, the system works that way for a reason…”
That’s all mom could say? Wasn’t she listening when she talked about needle shortages and medicine rationing? Did mom forget the stories about botched watch schedules and now that old man that died from having his torso shattered by a white and red meat wagon?
No, it doesn’t have to be like this. She talked to herself and recounted enough grisly details to make her feel right again, justified.
Mom doesn’t know what people go through; she is a goddamn secretary. She keeps this talk up, building an inferno out of maternal misunderstanding until it becomes tiring enough to drown out her consciousness on the living room couch.
The watch says five in the morning and it’s some re-run of ER on the television that has been on for hours. George Clooney is checking up on a rather difficult patient with autism. This happens too; special needs and special circumstances. Sometimes an injured person in shock and with a mental deficiency can be a dangerous situation; it happens time and again. Sure the kid can handle a little abuse before he figures out what is going on, but now he is embarrassed, bleeding all over the checkup bed, looking dizzy and showing the blood pressure of a serious concussion, and nobody can get him down long enough to get an IV in him. MRI’s are out; he doesn’t like the dark.
The elderly come in by the dozens, though many in fact do not venture out again. Sometimes they come in just for some routine irrigation and a glucose check and end up leaving with heart failure. For the second, you do not use the front door. Sometimes its broken hips and femurs waiting to explode into gangrene, or it crippling arthritis, or a plethora of new cancers metastasizing from old worn blood.
Within a moment of introspection, Colette passed her eyes through the glass of the waiting room in survey of the timid faces. She sees beyond the needy looks and broken figures, instead her own face and family in a dense crowd of onlookers. It became difficult to discern them as the tears began.
Please eat; you beg the little old man who lays torpid in his elevated bed. His eyes fix with a glassy countenance on the television screen as it methodically scans the first five seconds of each channel. Some screens are just gray dust and static noise, but his eyes are unrelenting pivots. They were bloodshot; they reminded her of wet marbles trustingly flecked in gold.
A buzzer ignites in the uncomfortable silence between an immobile body and its keeper. Colette’s soft hand brushes over his forehead, wiping away the sweat from his straining with a light cotton cloth and then lifting a small sincere smile to his glaring face before rushing into the hallway.
She found the door open, and inside the harshly lit quarters dwelled a mass of plain clothed folk around the tiny bed. One grappled with a handful of deep rouge balloons that bounced gleefully at the low ceiling. Colette shoved her way through the bodies and found the six-year-old resident of the bed sitting with her bandaged legs crossed and a two tired cake upon her lap. Another push through the flanks of birthday goers and it’s the wide bed of a terminal leukemia patient. The monitors are stable; the morphine drip keeps his groggy body asleep even through the tremors of birthday songs. It wasn’t his buzzer; she is furious.
“Nurse?” one of the guests beckons her towards the celebration, ignorant of the dying boy in the periphery of the room. “We though we could buzz you for some plates or napkins?”
Collete’s first reaction pulled the curtain closed around the sick boy, his purple and punctured arm disappearing behind the zip of a white curtain. Her arm quickly found a guests elbow and spun his spindly figure around to meet her eyes. One push and he was out the door, the other side of the hallway and holding steadily the silver lift bar between the supply doors.
Instinct, and she looked back to the impenetrable cloth wall. Barely above a whisper she commanded every onlooker out the door along the path of her pointed finger. Her lip quivered and her voice shook as the giant cake was lifted out of a little girls lap and the relatives left with angry grunts and disappointed sighs. A few expensive gifts laid about the meal table, but it was again empty and quiet aside from the snobbish mother consoling her sobbing child and the automated breathing of the sick boy in the corner.
Death followed everywhere, and through careful metaphors it even sat in the corner of the room as an inconsiderate birthday celebration was carried out. It garnished precious gifts for a coming of age six-year-old, and Colette had to wonder how that money might save a little boy of death from leukemia.
Night came quick tonight, and the nurses made their rounds closing the curtains for the front side of the building. The streetlights glared with such a sodium luminance from the parking lot that without the thick dark drapes, the throb of Incandescent might trouble the sleep of every facing window.
Colette went again to the room of the little old man, and though with a start, greeted her co-worker as she stood over his bed. Colette noticed the unsure look in her eyes, perhaps even a distended silence. She was barely to speak, when Emily’s eyes lifted to hers and confirmed her suspicions. “I think he has passed”.
Colette reached over again to touch the spongy forehead that she not an hour ago wiped of perspiration. It was now cold and moist flesh, loosely hung as the muscles began their atrophy and decline.
Her fingers sunk into some of the fascia of his face, her fingers tracing a path down the ridge of his nose and across the edge of a lip. Her hand brushed the eyes, closing one lid and leaving the other open to glare dryly at the overhead light.
Emily laughed uncomfortably, her hands in a knot in front of her. She wrung her fingers in a neurotic fashion, losing control of the situation. She almost pleaded out loud for Colette to quit her antics, but lacked the resolve and in possessing the curiosity for this lifeless body, she watched.
Fingers and limbs still flexed in the dead and in the subtle decline of flexibility they become rigid and freeze with every pose. Fingers curled back into the palm give strongly poised middle fingers. His gaping mouth shut by the pressure of a strong palm, only to pop open slowly and toss the top denture onto his bare chest. His eyes loll deeply into the back of the head, face contorted by small girlish hands both mortified and fascinated with a fledgling corpse.
Colette stayed the bathroom, scrubbing her hands and pulling invisible phantom flesh from the undersides of her nails. Hot water revived her face, her eyes raw from the stinging chlorine and the residue of soap.
On the phone her mother asked another unconvincing spate of questions unleashed for the name of small talk. Colette was daydreaming about the springy bones and dry eyes of corpses that now littered her sleep.
Each day was an exercise of staying alive and passing the baton. Sometimes you could sneak out of the fate of a sufferer by seeing what they did wrong in spite of their illness. Sometimes still, it was just a matter of time. Old blood and broken bones; teeth spilled out like a giant pearl pathway to heaven…
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