The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters With the Human Race

by Sara Barron

  The use of the bedpan was especially upsetting. I’d always loved the idea of a bedpan, but what I learned from the reality of a bedpan is that they’re not nearly as decadent as you might think. They require quite a bit of abdominal strength, and that’s to say nothing of the angle guesswork involved. Talk about a small margin for error! If you aim right, you’re good. If you aim wrong, though, you’re soaked in your own urine, forced to wait for whatever length of time for a nurse to clean you up.

  I met my roommate, Terri. Terri I took to be a heroin or methadone addict, and our medical situations were different insofar as, well, Terri was on heroin or methadone. Also, Terri could sit up, stand, and walk, whereas I could not lift my sternum without the help of a motorized bed.

  Terri put her surefootedness to good use by wandering over to hug me. There had been a dividing curtain between us, and she threw it back the first time she heard me roll in.

  “Oh. Hi,” I said.

  “You okay?” she said.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Well, you gone be, girl. Someday soon, you gone be A-okay.”

  Then she waddled over, stroked my hair, and hugged me.

  It was a caring and sensitive action. However, my ability to appreciate it was curtailed by the fact that Terri smelled of shit-strewn barn, and looked—she always looked—like she was on the verge of throwing up.

  As for appearance/aroma combinations, this one is never my favorite.

  8. THIS PART IS VERY JEWISH

  I had pictured myself in a hospital before I wound up in a hospital. Involved in the fantasy were floral bouquets and sympathy cards detailing how much I meant to the hundred different people who had sent them. I’d pictured a chenille blanket at the foot of my bed so that visitors could come and sit comfortably beside me. They would sit and ask questions, while I, generous of spirit and heart, doled out the wisdom afforded to me by my illness.

  The piece I’d failed to account for, however, was the physical pain. Mine had stabilized at a more manageable level, as I said, but every inch of it—every second—was still mortifyingly oppressive. What came with it was a profound sense of isolation. What went with it was my appetite. Pain and stress are known as effective appetite suppressants, and so perhaps the loss should not have been surprising. To me, though, it was. Because I am my appetite. I eat like clockwork: once an hour, every hour, provided I am not asleep. And so to not eat at all? To not foresee a time when I would want to eat again? The whole thing seemed as strange as the precarious way my foot had dangled from my ankle. As strange, but not as traumatic. For as any daughter of any Jewish mother will tell you: There is always a destructive modicum of joy involved in weight loss.

  So it was that I asked one of the nurses for a hand mirror. I looked in it twice a day to see if my collarbone looked more pronounced.

  9. THIS PART IS SUPER JEWISH

  The first day in the hospital I met my surgeon, Dr. Dean. The first thing I noticed about Dr. Dean was that Dr. Dean was very handsome. He had hair that looked plucked from a Ken doll, and his shoulders were so, like, erotically broad I’d have licked my way across them if given the chance.

  Dr. Dean was the director of the hospital’s orthopedics department, and this meant that wherever he went—whenever he went there—a gaggle of medical residents trailed along behind. These medical residents were also very handsome. I hadn’t known I had a thing for doctors, but now I realized this was only because I’d never seen a slew of handsome ones together. The cumulative effect suggested I’d died and gone to Vegas heaven, to a place where the showgirls were not showgirls at all, but rather Harvard-educated, scrubs-clad show-boys.

  Except, of course, they weren’t. They were not Vegas show-boys, and I was not in Vegas heaven. I was in a hospital, and I had a question for my surgeon.

  “Will I walk again?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Oh, good,” I said.

  “But not like before,” he said.

  “Then how?” I said.

  “With marked limitation,” he said, “to your ankle’s range of movement.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” I said.

  “It means ‘with pain and discomfort,’ ” he said.

  “Forever?” I said. “Or just, like, for a while.”

  “Forever,” he said. “Or until there are advances in the field.”

  “Will there be … advances … in the field?” I asked.

  “It’s hard to say,” he said.

  There was a moment of silence between us.

  “Well. Okay,” he said. “I’ll see you on my evening rounds.”

  And after that he left. His residents trailed behind him.

  It was a depressing prognosis, and because Dr. Dean was an orthopedic surgeon—a style of individual who’s chosen of his own volition the most violent of surgical fields—it was delivered unto me with the sort of emotional sensitivity you’d associate with a waiter telling you he’s sorry but the kitchen’s out of steak.

  Not that I’m complaining.

  An orthopedic surgeon needs a bedside manner like a fish needs a bicycle. If you’re dead in the eyes and robotic of voice but you keep a steady hand while sawing human flesh, that’s fine by me, and it only gets more fine when you’re central casting handsome.

  To distract from my prognosis, I decided to obsess on this, the fact of the central casting handsome. It seemed strange that every orthopedic surgeon and/or surgeon-in-training would be in possession of such a particular quality. I decided to ask the nurse about it the next time she rolled through. I said, “I’m sorry to bother you, but may I ask a question about the doctors?”

  The nurse gave a knowing nod. “They’re all really hot, am I right?” she said.

  “Yes!” I said. “But why?”

  The nurse went on to explain that, by her estimation, the orthopedic surgical field drew the “hot jocks.”

  “They’re the guys who played sports in high school,” she explained. “The ones who played sports but are also pretty smart, and who decided to go to medical school. They’re into sports, they’re jocky, so they pick a surgical field that’ll let them work with athletes.”

  “Right,” I said. “I see.”

  “Also,” she said. “They have to be physically strong. They’re getting in there, breaking bones, resetting bones, amputating limbs, and so on. Wander past an operating room when they’re doing orthopedic surgeries, you hear electric saws. You hear”—and then she made that noise people make, that signifies either (a) an electric saw, or (b) a car going fast—“and you think, Oh. Right. They’re just carpenters. Of the flesh. They’re just sawing things. Like your ankle. I mean, like, literally: They saw through the flesh, and through the bone, and …”

  “Right,” I said. “Thank you. I think now I understand.”

  10. THE STUPIDS STEP IN

  After ten hours alone, my parents arrived. They entered the hospital room I shared with Terri to find me looking slightly thinner, I’d like to think, but otherwise not great. I couldn’t move much. I had various IVs. My leg, for the moment, was wrapped in miles of gauze and had been suspended at a seventy-degree angle from my body. It wasn’t an ideal setup, but it wasn’t cancer either. Nonetheless, when my dad saw me for the first time he released a traumatized gasp, which he then followed up with the sputters of willfully restrained hysterics.

  So my mother shuffled him back out. They huddled right outside my doorway.

  “Joe, take a breath. And do your crying here, okay? This—right here—is your little spot. Ask a nurse for a chair if you need one.”

  My mother came back in.

  “Hello,” she said. “I think you look well.”

  “By ‘well’ do you mean ‘thin’?”

  “Maybe a bit. What I meant, though, is you’ve had a bad twenty-four hours, but you seem, you know, coherent. Aware.”

  To prove her point, I asked, “Is Dad okay?”

  “Oh, yes,” sh
e said. “He’s fine. He just … went out. To get himself … a coffee.”

  My dad’s spot for crying was a mere ten feet from where I lay in my hospital bed. So although I couldn’t see him, I could hear him: Sniffling. Breathing. Gasping.

  “Dad, I can hear you,” I called.

  “JOE, SHE CAN HEAR YOU,” my mother called.

  My father took this as his cue to come back in. He did so with his hand cupped over his mouth to show he was working to restrain himself. He sat in a chair at the foot of the bed.

  I heard Terri rustle behind her curtain. She whisked it back and looked around.

  “Hello,” she said. “This you momma and you daddy?”

  “Hi, Terri. Yes. These are my parents, Lynn and Joe.”

  “Hello,” they said.

  “Hello,” Terri said. She pointed a finger at my dad. “You too sad,” she said. “But you don’t gotta be too sad. You seem rich, and okay.”

  My dad sniffed, and wiped his eyes.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “You welcome,” Terri said, and then waddled past my mother and me, and over to my dad. She hugged my dad, and as she hugged my dad, he stared at us, wide-eyed, from over Terri’s shoulder.

  “She seems nice,” my mother whispered.

  “She is,” I whispered back. “But the smell.”

  “Yes. Wow,” she said. “The smell.”

  We stayed silent for a moment.

  “What is it, anyway? Vomit?”

  “No,” I said. “She looks like she’s going to vomit. But the smell itself is actually more like manure.”

  My mother sniffed the air.

  “Right,” she said. “Now I can smell that you’re right.”

  11. MY MOTHER, THE WIND

  The days rolled on. I’d spend them in surgery, or recovering from surgery. My father would sit in the chair at the foot of the bed, bleary-eyed mostly, but more composed than he’d been when he arrived. My mother, for her part, would stand at my bedside and perform what she referred to as “my Reiki.” In recent months, she’d been studying Qigong at her local senior center, and was now of the opinion that the skills she learned in seniors’ Qigong were Reiki-translatable.

  “I’m going to recite the script from my Qigong class,” she told me, “but I’ll do it with my hands near your face. It’s very calming. Okay. I am doing it now: I am wind.”

  I’d close my eyes. Not because I was supposed to, but because I was troubled by the sight of my mother moving her hands above me like some Ouija-packing schoolgirl.

  Although I like poking fun at the seriousness with which my mother approached her Reiki, the fact of the matter was that she managed the impossible task of maintaining focus while in a hospital bedroom. Terri was always watching The Price Is Right and screaming her own bids at the television screen. A nurse was always coming or going with a shot, a pill, or a fresh bedpan. My dad was always puttering around, drinking coffee, sniffling. And through it all—and provided it was Reiki time—my mother focused in.

  The only thing that broke her was when Terri started smoking.

  12. AND THE WIND TAKES A STAND

  By hospital standards, it had been a day like any other. I had watched TV and my mom had done her Reiki. As per usual, she’d referred to herself as the wind.

  “I am a broom of wind,” she’d said. “The broom of wind moves through you, through us all.”

  The broom of wind did move through us all, but only for a minute. It stopped moving through us all when Terri found a cigarette.

  Terri lit the cigarette and started smoking.

  My mother opened one eye, then the other.

  “Is someone … smoking?” she asked.

  Terri was huddled near the window surreptitiously puffing away. The weird thing, though—or, rather, one of the weird things—was that she had not opened the window. She had placed herself near the window, but she had not opened the window. In an instant, the whole room smelled of smoke.

  A situation like this is tailor-made to explode my mother’s brain. Her temper, and her brain. My mother is put off by any and all lit cigarettes, even the more reasonable ones—those smoked out of doors and/or on the property of those doing the smoking. Even in those situations, my mother will perform a cough and say some combination of the words “son,” “deadly,” “asthma,” and “selfish.”

  I am therefore happy to report that when confronted with Terri’s legitimate smoking violation, my mother’s head did not explode. I am happy to report that she behaved—at first—like a completely normal human.

  “Terri,” she said, “would you please put out your cigarette?”

  Terri smiled, but said nothing.

  So my mother tried again.

  “Terri,” she said, “we’re in a hospital room. Would you please put out your cigarette?”

  This time Terri glanced up and feigned surprise.

  “Oh. Yes,” she said. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.” But then instead of putting out her cigarette, she shuffled into our shared bathroom and slammed the door behind her. From what I could smell—from what we all could smell—she then continued smoking.

  My father and I stared at the bathroom door, our mouths agape. Not at the in-hospital smoking, so much as the sight of my mother being flagrantly ignored. It’s not a thing that happens to her often, and that is because it is not worth enduring her response. My mother reacts to being ignored like you or I might react to an unanticipated butt plug: There is shock, and a sense of having been rudely abused.

  Terri ignored my mother and stole away into the bathroom, and my mother, in response, ran shouting out of the hospital bedroom.

  She literally ran. And she was literally shouting.

  “I NEED HELP! HELP! I NEED A NURSE WHO IS A MOTHER WHO WILL UNDERSTAND! SOMEONE’S SMOKING IN MY DAUGHTER’S ROOM! SOMEONE HELP ME SAVE MY DAUGHTER!”

  I looked at my father.

  “This is embarrassing,” I said.

  But my father just shrugged.

  “Say what you will,” he said. “Your mother gets things done.”

  13. HOW DO YOU TALK TO AN ANGEL?

  My father wasn’t lying. My mother gets things done.

  It was only a matter of minutes before she returned arm-in-arm with what appeared to be a Hispanic catalogue model.

  “Hello,” said the man. “I am Angel.”

  My mother was wide-eyed with delight, with a face that said, Oh, don’t mind me. I just went for one of my rage jaunts, and came back with a MALE MODEL on my arm.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hello,” my dad said.

  “Angel,” my mom said. “Here is mi hija, Sarita. Sarita is so sick in the leg, and she must breathe good air for to be fuerta again. The mujer who do the smoking, she in el baño now.”

  Angel nodded in response, then knocked on the bathroom door. When Terri didn’t answer, Angel reached into his pocket for what appeared to be a master key. He unlocked the door himself and went inside.

  He closed the door behind him.

  “Well,” said my mom, and let out a satisfied sigh. “So about him?”

  “Who is he?” I said.

  “What is he?” my dad said.

  “A physical therapist,” my mom said. “I ran into him in the hallway, and he said, ‘Mami, you’ve got to calm down.’ And he was just so cute! I thought, Okay! For you, I will calm down!”

  Minutes later, Angel emerged from the bathroom with a subdued, nonsmoking Terri.

  “Ms. Terri, she is finished smoking now,” he said. “She will not smoke again.”

  And he was right: She didn’t. Terri never smoked again.

  Angel had that sort of control over people, and that, I was learning, was a gift he owed to the combined effect of his handsomeness and warmth. The orthopedic surgeons had their own aforementioned brand of detached, robotic sex appeal. But Angel was different. Angel was as empirically attractive, but with the added bonus of being sensitive and socially adept. Dr. Dean would mak
e his rounds every day at 4:00 p.m., and every day Angel would swing by almost immediately after. The process of seeing one and then the other felt always like wrapping oneself in a heated Puerto Rican flag after a dip in frigid Aryan waters.

  14. LOS HUEVOS

  Every patient in the orthopedics department was assigned a physical therapist following his or her surgeries. There were dozens of therapists employed by the hospital, and the process of pairing them with the individual patient wasn’t a choice of the patient’s so much as it was the luck of the draw within the hospital system.

  The luck of any draw leaves my mother feeling less in control than she desires. As such, my mother used her connections to the Midwestern branch of the Underground Network of Jewish Hypochondriacs to reach her way through the East Coast branch of the Underground Network of Jewish Hypochondriacs. And, lo: She learned that her friend Marci Goldfarb knew Julie Glick, who knew Carol Feinstein, whose sister-in-law, Deborah Kagan, was on the hospital’s board of trustees.

  Deborah Kagan made a call on my behalf and requested that I work with Angel. For this I was—and still remain—very, truly grateful. Working with Angel was the singular part of my hospital reality that in any way mirrored my hospital fantasy. Here was a kind and handsome man who’d visit every day for the primary purpose of lavishing me with attention. We’d do a series of ankle mobility exercises and chat about a wide range of subjects up to and including my mother’s love of Central and South American cultures.

  There was one afternoon in particular when she, my mother, brought up the continents’ approach to swimwear.