the only thing worse
than bad memories
is no memories at all..
[dismemberment plan]
12.16.2007
Hello World.
It's been a while. I'm here. I'd like to tell you some things.
My mother is 54 years old and every night, she slips on her white imitation Crocs and pressed white slacks to go work the night shift in the ventilator unit of a hospital -- she's been working there for about 12 years now, I think. That's where patients (typically nursing home residents clinging to the fringes of death) stay for extended periods of time hooked up to a breathing machine, which provides air through a hole pierced through their necks.
The vast majority of the patients, from what I understand, are elderly and about to die, or are of varying ages but have suffered some kind of injury or disorder that has caused them to lose the ability to breathe on their own. There is little to no chance of these patients ever regaining their old life back, from what I've heard -- only a few of them recover from injury and can breathe and live on their own again. For the most part, between the steady blip-blip-blips of the monitoring devices, a plunger in a plastic vessel pumps air in and out of these bodies, these pods, to get the oxygen going, to keep the blood pumping, to keep them alive until the inevitable.
I never really thought of how morbid this environment is, and how depressing it must be to be surrounded daily by DEATH!DEATH!DEATH! until just recently. My mom never really told me stories about her experiences at work until the past few years, usually on our weekend drives up to CostCo to buy super-sized food items in bulk, wheeling around a gigantic cart through what is essentially a refrigerated warehouse/nuclear bunker.
I'll usually gently doze off in the passenger seat early on a Saturday morning as she dives into a story, her eyes ablaze, her hands waving wildly, her teeth bared. Unlike me -- who starts a story off on a bumpy road, getting caught up in explaining unnecessary details, veering off on tangents, and then hastily swerves back to the main point (identical to my dad's driving habits, incidentally) -- my mother is an expert story teller with an extensive array of gestures, sound effects, and facial expressions.
Her latest story was of saving an elderly woman from suffocating on a giant, gleaming, pit of dried mucus (which she described to me in grotesque intimate detail) stuck in her breathing tube. Despite confounding factors such as the fact that the last shift had misplaced the equipment my mom needed to help her (they left it on the back of her wheelchair), the clamp she finally found was the wrong size (too small), and that the nurse's aide was so groggy from being jarred from her nap that she tore the phone cord out of the wall while trying to call for assistance (and instead of running to the next unit for help, came to my mom almost in tears to tell her that the phone wasn't working), she was able to pull her from the grip of death.
"When somebody dying from suffocate, their face very much scary," she said, her steely eyes looking off at the road, her small hammy hands clenching the wheel. She then suddenly twisted her face up to demonstrate, her eyes rolling back into her head, her tongue diagonally protruding from her grimacing mouth, her nose crunched up. "Face turn gray, so scary," she continued in a hushed voice.
I don't know how she does it, really -- when I think about how I'd like to dedicate my life, working through the night with a ragtag gang of apparently incompetent, obese and hirsuite co-workers, struggling to keep alive a dozen nearly dead bodies does not rank high up on my list.
The last thing I want to do with my life is to spend most of my time struggling to keep a dying thing alive.
And yet, here I am.
Last Friday, I took a flight to Florida, and on the descent right before landing, my left ear went deaf, my head felt like it was going to explode from the pressure, and a piercing pain refused to stop stabbing me behind the eyes and nose. I cried all the way to the hotel, despite the pleas for me to stop or they were going to have to drive to the emergency room. And right as I curled up in bed in hopes that the pain could be slept off, my nose began to start pumping out blood, thick and red, and did not stop for two hours.
Up until last night, whenever I brushed my teeth and swished water in my mouth and gargled, a ribbon of fresh red blood would come out with the toothpaste foam. It wasn't from inside of my mouth, it was coming from somewhere in my head. It happened for a week, and as of this morning, it stopped, and there was no more blood. Until that happened, I wondered if the blood meant that something inside of me was torn and healing, or if some part of me inside of me had died.
I'm still not sure.
My mom is right, the look of death from suffocation is a scary one. I guess I haven't seen a person die from it, but I've seen plenty of other things come and go, shrivel up and die, and it is true, it does indeed have a gray and horrific face...
* * * * *
I guess since you and I have agreed to not speak to each other "for a while," we probably won't speak to each other on Christmas. So I figure it'd be okay to tell you about one of the things I got for you, since it just seems so fucking perfect now, given the circumstances...
It's certainly not a big present, but I got a glass teapot and a special kind of tea that I had never seen before. It's pretty much a bud-shaped bunch of tea leaves, sewn together that, when you put it in hot water, blossoms into a flower.
I guess one of the things I'm hoping for us to get out of all of this is sort of similar, in a way -- maybe it's a bit of a stretch, but try to bear with me... I feel like we were kind of like a beautiful flower that was plucked and eventually dried out and died, but, with some time and care, we'll be rejoined later on, stitched together piece by piece, and we'll spring back to life and bloom again. We'll be different then from our original form, yes, but I think it might still be beautiful, somehow.
[Peek-a-Foo]