Keep Moving
Mom, we watch you in room 10 of the intensive care unit of The University of Maryland Hospital in Baltimore, under the care of one of the best shock trauma surgeons in the world. We watch you lie, bloated and pale, something akin to the Michelin man, as the swelling from your latest and final surgery makes your skin weep. Behind you a spice rack of plastic bags drips saline and fentanyl (a narcotic for pain) and amio (amiodarone, a drug that regulates heart rhythm) into your veins. On your right, a kidney dialysis machine and respirator help you filter your blood and breathe. There is a catheter bag collecting your urine, and inflatable leg cuffs increase the circulation in your legs. The seven of us — me, your son Scott (my twin brother), your sister Michele and her husband and two boys, as well as my partner — take turns holding your cold, unfeeling hands and telling you it’s okay to let go, to move on, to let go of the pain that you battle in your body.
We watch you breathe on your own, fitfully, your mouth only a smear, as the respiratory specialist removes the breathing tube from your throat, leaving blood and spit on the front of your hospital gown. We listen as the nurse explains that the dose of fentanyl she gives you will relax you, keep you from gasping for breath. We watch your eyes, yellow, wet, half open, as they stare without seeing at a spot above our right shoulder. We take turns telling you we love you, that it will be okay, that it is okay to leave us behind, keep moving. We tell you everyone is waiting for you on the other side — you won’t be in any pain. We watch your chest, to make sure it rises and falls. When will we know? How can we tell? We don’t want to see you like this. We want it to end, but when it is over, it is really over. There is no coming back tomorrow to room 10, no chance of you coming home to sleep in your own house.
We sit like this for ten minutes, twenty minutes, trading places, repeating our mantras. We love you. It’s okay to let go. Go to the light. Be at peace. We love you. When we think you won’t take another breath, you do. Outside, a helicopter flutters, a giant dragonfly bringing another shattered soul to Shock Trauma. No one speaks; our choked tears fill the silence. The hospital floor is hard; our feet hurt. Our backs ache. Still, you battle on. Shouldn’t we? It’s been less than a week that you’ve been here, brought from the regional hospital two hours away to drain an abscess in your leg that had been removed three months before and mysteriously returned, only four days since you were conscious from surgery and seemingly on the mend. Only two days since you’d slipped into delirium, then shock, and you underwent two emergency surgeries, including one exploratory into your abdomen. There was talk of removing your colon, of amputating your leg; perhaps you had an overexaggerated inflammatory response. Why, with the three different antibiotics continuously administered to you, did infection still seethe through your veins?
In five days, we’ve seen you go from eating soup and a turkey sandwich bought from the Subway several floors below to having a nasogastric tube sending liquid nutrition through your nostril to her stomach. We’ve seen you become hypothermic. We’ve seen your heart beat 180 times per minute at 4 o’clock in the morning, an event that brought twelve members of the shock trauma team into your room, where they shocked you over and over until your heart slowed, caught the beat, kept beating. And now, we are watching you, our mother, our sister, our aunt, die. How have you gotten to this point, in less than a week? Why has every visit to room 10 been a terrible new discovery, one we have made peace with somehow, before returning to the hospital the next day to confront a new terrible discovery? How have we gotten here, and how much time do we have left? We had wished decades, years. Now, we wish it were over. Do we? Are these the only two choices: death, or this?
The nurse returns. Before she left, she turned off the computer monitor above your bed so we would not watch your vitals, watch the dipping blood pressure, your erratic heartbeats, the bells of alarm sound off as you slid closer to the edge of death. But, out in the hallway, her monitors are still on, and the line on them is flat. Without us knowing, you have slipped away, like a breath, like a shadow across the wall. This room is the last place you have seen, a plaster ceiling, bright lights, the blips of machines. No flowers. No sunsets. No oceans or lakes. We kiss your forehead, rubbery like a Halloween mask, one last time. We thank the doctors for trying their best, for working their hardest, for not — unfortunately — diagnosing you until it was too late. We walk through the hallways of the ICU one last time, take the elevator. Back in room 10, you lie still as we sink downward floor after floor. Every memory we have of you, everything you are and will ever be lies in a sheet five floors above us, a door that has closed as swiftly as the elevator doors behind us. Outside the hospital, people hurry in and out. Traffic snarls down Green Street. It is an unseasonably warm October. People swarm around us as we stand on the corner.
Now what? We cannot turn around, go upstairs, and bring you back. As we stand here, room 10 is being prepared for someone else, the next patient who will live or die. Who knows where you are at this moment in the hospital, even, where your soul is beyond. If it is anywhere. All we know is that we are still here. Cruelly, unluckily, we are still here, at the corner of Green Street.
What now? How do we move from this spot, when the needle point of our compass has been removed? We seem to have forgotten how to live, for a moment, how to breathe. But things that come to rest are taken away. They are put into morgues, into the trash. We put one foot forward, then another. It comes back to us, how to walk, where we are parked. And, somehow, if we keep moving, we will also get away from here, get home.
