Writer in the Forest

Chapter 17

My windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the water on my drive across the west side of town and over the bridge. The puddled water slopped up my leg on my sprint across the parking lot to the ER. On my way down the hall I glanced at the bored/stressed people waiting in the ER with some small regard to what their situation was. They looked back with the same slight interest. The difference was, they just sat there. Me, I knew the drill. The ER receptionist knew me by name and ushered me through. I hit the wall door opener with authority and marched right in to the inner exam area. I had been here so many times in my work clothes that people thought I worked here. Even people who did work here.

Emergency rooms are cold. The doors open and close all night long. Everyone sits there for hours, cold and hungry. When you get sort of lucky, your patient gets called back into the inner exam area, Trauma rooms 1-9. On any night, after about four hours people start standing in the doorways, as if a doctor will walk by and say, “OH! There’s a patient in there? Well, if I’d have known that…!” But I was a regular here, and I knew it didn’t work. You would remain cold, tired, hungry and worried. And one thing was certain: It was a big secret as to where hot coffee lived.

Harry couldn’t breathe. His pale face surrounded panicked eyes, his usual calm gone with his breath. Should I pray? Would God listen to me now?

He had pneumonia. No guilt there. He told me he was freezing in that Assisted Living apartment where I made him live after he tumbled down the basement steps. They were telling me it was time for a ventilator and I panicked from confusion. Wasn’t that life support? We had an agreement, a Living Will. Those helpless eyes looked at me with such trust. Dad’s eyes were huge and I think mine were huge in return. The doctor repeated: Did I want the ventilator? We’ll do what we can and undo it later if I made a wrong decision. The chicken way out, but the best I could do in nano time with those helpless eyes asking me to take care of everything.

The first thing I learned about ventilators was that you have to be heavily sedated or they can’t put it in. He was out in a flash. More panic: What if these are Harry’s last moments of life, and we can’t say goodbye? To be unconscious was blessed relief for him, holy hell for me. As if to make up for his suffocation, I started breathing faster and faster. I leaned in to where my breath would have mingled with his, if he had any. I was as close as cold is to ice, but I couldn’t reach him to let him know I was doing my job. I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t know you were going to get pneumonia. This is a new path for me. I don’t know my way.

I thought of the night two weeks earlier, when he fell down the basement stairs. I’d taken Mom to a nursing home and took a week off to convince Dad that he needed to join her. He wouldn’t listen. Instead, he fell off the top step, crawled through the basement to his car, where he opened the door but could not pull himself up to reach the horn. He cried for help for three hours before a passerby heard him and went to a neighbor’s house to inquire about the noises coming from the garage at the little white house with shutters.  Leaving my card with a few neighbors in case of another emergency paid off.

I raced up the street in my Honda and swung around the corner to find a crowd gathered. My brain snapped a photograph in the time it took to register the pajamas and robes and slippers on people I’d never seen dressed in their nightclothes. It only took a second to realize they never come out for heart attacks anymore, but they’re out this time because someone’s trapped. Two or three ambulance rides a week for the last year, but on that night the marquee was all lit up and they were all going to watch the drama play out.

Ambulances were waiting. As I unlocked the front door and ran in, I was dimly aware that a cheer went up. I leapt down the basement steps. Harry, Harry, where are you? I found Dad on the floor of the garage, bleeding but conscious. I opened the garage door for the stretcher while a team of paramedics flew down the stairs behind me. Like angels, only real.

Two weeks later I could say for certain that our old basement floor had no heart for the man who religiously swept it and I had no religion period.