by Delia Parr
Since her mother always insisted she couldn’t sleep unless her bedroom was in total darkness, Ellie sensed immediately that something was amiss. Praying silently, she started toward the door on tiptoe to avoid startling her mother.
She thought she heard a faint sound coming from the room, and with every step, the sound grew more and more distinct. It sounded alarmingly like a groan of pain or distress. With her heart racing, Ellie set the empty plate and bottle on a chair and hurried forward.
“Mother? Are you all right?” she whispered, in part because she didn’t want to frighten her mother in case she was just having a bad dream, but mostly because the lump in her throat made it hard for her to speak any louder. She pressed the palms of her hands against the door, but when she leaned forward and turned her head to hear better, the door started to creak open.
“El-lie.”
The sound of her name was scarcely above a whisper, yet held the undeniable roar of pain and desperation. She pushed the door open, rushed inside and immediately experienced absolute fear.
The sheets and blanket on the bed were in total disarray, but her mother was not in the bed. She was lying on her side on the floor in front of a bedside table. With her hands clutching her nightgown at the base of her throat, her face was ash gray, and her eyes were dull with pain. Her breathing was shallow and ragged.
“H-help me, El-lie.”
Ellie rushed to her mother’s side, dropped to her knees and put her face close to her mother’s. “I’m here now. I’ll help you,” she crooned, further alarmed to see her mother drenched in perspiration. There was no sign of blood or trauma, which indicated her pain was most likely the result of another, more severe, heart attack.
Her mother closed her eyes. “H-hurts.”
“I know. I’m going to call for an ambulance,” Ellie replied. She rose to her feet and reached for the cordless telephone on the bedside table, spying the Total Care bracelet sitting beside it. Her hands were shaking hard and her heart was palpitating, but she managed to tap in nine-one-one on the first try. She explained the emergency to the dispatcher, and hung up.
Praying, Ellie lowered herself back down to her mother’s side. Her mother was now lying very still with her eyes closed.
“The ambulance will be here in a few minutes,” Ellie whispered, and wrapped her hands around her mother’s. Frightened to find them cold and stiff, Ellie gently massaged them. “Don’t try to speak,” she said when her mother said something Ellie could not understand. Then her mother took several shallow breaths and her eyelids fluttered, but she didn’t try to speak again.
While the sound of distant sirens grew louder, Ellie pressed her forehead to her mother’s and continued to pray. Father of all comfort and mercy, please look upon us now and grant my mother the gift of Your healing touch and Your loving presence. Comfort her fears and ease her pain, Ellie’s tears flowed freely down her cheeks.
Her mother stirred and opened her eyes. Tugging one hand free, she laid it gently against Ellie’s cheek. “Loved,” she murmured. “Al-ways loved. If…” She sighed, as if the effort to speak was too great, and closed her eyes again.
Ellie choked back more tears and waited, but the rest of her mother’s words remained unspoken. “I love you, too,” she whispered, praying silently with her heart that the tomorrow they had both planned to share together had not come too late after all.
With her mother gravely ill, Ellie had not been allowed past the waiting area outside the emergency room at Tilton General Hospital, where her mother had arrived by ambulance shortly after two o’clock on Sunday morning. Several hours later, after being told her mother had suffered a major heart attack, Ellie was also told she could finally see her.
She followed the directions the nurse had given her to the coronary care unit, or the CCU, on the main floor, where her mother was listed in critical condition. Even when pressed, however, the doctor hadn’t been able or willing to tell Ellie if her mother would recover, and Ellie was not certain what to expect.
When Ellie arrived at the CCU, wearing a green plastic visitor’s pass given only to immediate family members, she read the instructions on the double doors at the entrance and pressed a red button on the wall to her right. On her left was a small waiting room, which was empty—not surprising at this hour.
As the double doors swung open, a man in wrinkled blue scrubs with a stethoscope around his neck came through another set of doors several feet directly ahead. He had silver hair, and walked with authority. Ellie assumed he was a doctor until he got close enough for her to read R.N. after his name on his employee badge.
“Mrs. Waters?”
“Yes,” she replied, surprised that he knew her name.
“They called me from the E.R. to tell me you were on your way, so I thought I’d meet you here. I’m Raymond Tanner. I’ve been assigned to take care of your mother,” he said, but did not extend his hand. “Is this your first time visiting someone in the CCU?”
She nodded.
“We take extra precautions with visitors here,” he explained as he led her to a small room off to the side. He opened the door and turned on a light, and she could see it was a bathroom. “Before you visit your mother, we’d like you to wash your hands. Everything you need is right in here. Once you’ve done that, you can come through the second set of double doors. I’ll be waiting there to take you to your mother.”
“Is she…is she all right?” she asked.
His gaze softened. “She’s resting comfortably. We’ll talk more once you’re inside,” he replied before leaving her.
Ellie went into the bathroom and shut the door. After hanging her purse on a hook, she walked to the sink. When she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she quickly looked away. She was not surprised to see that her face was red and puffy from crying, but it was the fear and exhaustion in her eyes that upset her the most.
She splashed cold water on her face, hoping that would help, then she washed her hands with the liquid antiseptic soap and dried them before grabbing her purse.
As he had promised, Raymond Tanner was waiting on the other side of the second set of doors, in a very large room divided by curtains into patient cubicles along two walls.
“Your mother is right over here,” he said, keeping his voice low. He led her toward a far corner.
“In the CCU, the nurses each have responsibility for two patients, because the care required is very intensive,” he explained. “We’re a bit slow right now, so I only have your mother assigned to me, but that could change at any time. As far as I know, Peggy O’Hara will be working the day shift with your mother. Feel free to speak to either of us about any concerns you might have.”
He slowed his steps. “Do you have any questions before you see your mother?”
She shook her head, unwilling to let questions delay her any longer. But when she was led toward a bed where an elderly patient was breathing on a ventilator, she felt her heart drop. She looked at the frail, aged woman lying there comatose—her mother—and gulped back tears.
Between the whoosh of the ventilator, the beep of monitors and the IV line, Ellie had the impression her mother was alive only because of the technology that surrounded her. “Why can’t she breathe on her own?” she asked.
Nurse Tanner moved to stand opposite Ellie on the other side of the bed. “We’re trying to ease the burden on her heart, at least for the first twenty-four hours or so. We’ve got her sedated so she’s able to rest more comfortably and so she won’t fight the ventilator.”
“Can she hear me?” she asked.
“Probably not, although I’ve had a few patients tell me later that they could hear well enough. But they weren’t able to respond, of course, so you might want to keep that in mind and keep what you say very positive. I’m sure she feels your presence, though.”
Ellie swallowed hard. “How…how long will she be…like this?”
He reached down and tucked the end of her mother’s hospital gown over her shoulder aga
in. “The first twenty-four to forty-eight hours are the most critical after any heart attack.”
This time Ellie had to clear her throat before she could swallow hard again. “May I stay with her?”
“Of course. But you might be better off going home and getting some rest,” he said. He pulled a business card and a pen from his pocket and wrote something down before he handed her the card. “Here’s the number for the CCU so you can call here directly. Ask for me or for Peggy O’Hara, depending on what time of day it is. We’ve got your cell phone number, and we’ll call you, day or night, if there’s any significant change in your mother’s condition.”
Ellie tucked the card into her purse. “I’d like to stay with her, at least for a little while.”
“That’s fine. There’s a chair at the end of the bed if you’d like to sit down.”
“Thank you. I think the sign said I could only visit for fifteen minutes each hour. Is that right?”
“Don’t worry about what the sign says. Come when you like and stay as long as you like, at least until your mother…stabilizes,” he said gently. “Would you like me to pull the curtain so you can have some private time with your mother?”
Touched by his sensitivity, Ellie nodded, unable to speak as she tried to absorb the reality that the time for private moments with her mother was ebbing away. Once she and her mother were secluded behind the curtain, Ellie set her purse down on the chair. When she saw a stack of cloths and a pitcher of water on the overbed table, which had been pushed to the side, she moistened one of the cloths and wiped her mother’s brow.
Fearful that her mother might never be conscious again to talk to her, Ellie set aside all but the heaviest burden of her heart. After whispering a prayer that her mother would hear her, if only with her spirit, she leaned close and pressed a kiss to her mother’s pale, cool cheek. “There’s so much I need to say,” she murmured, “but most of all, I want you to know that I’m sorry, Mother. I’m so sorry, and I—I wish…I wish I could have been the daughter you always wanted me to be.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Hour by hour, day by day, Ellie’s mother rallied.
By Monday night, she was actually breathing on her own again. She was weak, but slowly recovering, much to the amazement of her doctors. The following day, both of Ellie’s sons, Alex and Richard, arrived, and stayed until Wednesday afternoon, when they flew back to their homes again. Early Thursday morning, Rose Hutchinson left the Coronary Care Unit for a private room in the regular cardiac unit on the fifth floor of the hospital.
Once Ellie was satisfied that her mother was resting comfortably in her new room, which was not until just after lunchtime, she finally ended her four-day, nearly round-the-clock vigil at the hospital. She had scarcely left her mother’s bedside, and had only gone home occasionally to shower and change, take in the mail and feed the turtles before heading straight back to the hospital.
On her way home, Ellie stopped at the high school several hours after both the students and staff had left to begin their ten-day spring break, which traditionally coincided with Easter. She let herself into the building with a master key, and only stayed long enough to pick up the work her students had done in her absence and collect the papers overflowing in her mailbox.
Ten minutes after she got home, she collapsed into bed and slept through the night for the first time since her mother had been rushed to the hospital.
When she woke at 10 a.m. the following day, it was Good Friday. She was tempted to snuggle back under the covers, but she doubted she would get any sleep until she ate something to make her stomach stop growling. She also needed to get back to the hospital. If her mother was still making good progress, Ellie hoped to visit for a while, leave for three-o’clock services and return to the hospital until visiting hours ended at eight.
After showering and dressing, she went into her home office to play the phone messages that had accumulated over the past four days. Most of the calls were from well-wishers. Charlene had called twice, and Ellie added her name to the list of people she needed to call back. She played the last message, which had come at nine o’clock that morning, wondering how she could have slept right through it.
“This is Gail Brown in the social services department at Tilton General Hospital. Please call me back regarding your mother’s transfer. My number is—”
Ellie pressed the delete button. She had already met with Gail Brown after her mother had been transferred from the CCU to the regular floor. Twice. As far as Ellie was concerned, if Gail Brown needed more help wading through the insurance and related paperwork, she would simply have to wait until Ellie got back to the hospital. Besides, she had told everyone at the hospital, including Gail Brown, to call on her cell phone instead of the house phone, but as happened so often, that directive had been ignored.
She tucked the list of people to call in the corner of the blotter on her desk, confirmed with a quick glance that the land turtles had not emerged from hibernation yet and went downstairs to the kitchen. After existing on cafeteria food for so many days, she treated herself to a cheese omelet and whole wheat toast. She checked the voice mail on her cell phone while she ate, and deleted a message from Gail Brown that was nearly identical to the one she had left on the house phone. Feeling badly for assuming the woman had not called her on her cell phone, she grabbed an apple to eat later and drove back to the hospital.
Despite all the time she had spent with her mother, Ellie really had not had the opportunity to have any sort of serious conversation with her. Until late Monday night, her mother had been sedated and on a ventilator. After the ventilator had been removed, her mother’s voice had been very raspy, and she had complained about having a sore throat the entire time Alex and Richard had been there.
Her mother had been able to talk more easily by the time she had been moved into her private room, but the constant traffic of doctors, nurses, aides and technicians had made it almost impossible to speak privately for more than a few minutes at a time. Even when they were alone, her mother seemed to be almost withdrawn, if not outright distant, and Ellie sensed she was now finally facing the reality of her own death, and trying to come to terms with it.
Unfortunately, her mother had never mentioned hearing what Ellie had said to her that first night in the CCU, and Ellie had not had the courage to ask her about it.
Grateful that her mother had survived this second heart attack, Ellie prayed that her mother would grow even stronger over the next few days and be able to come home while Ellie was on break from school. By then, Ellie hoped to learn if there was any hope at all of establishing peace between them before her mother died.
Ellie arrived at Tilton General Hospital and got her visitor’s pass in the main lobby. Instead of stopping at Social Services to speak to Gail Brown first, however, she went into the gift shop, bought a pot of white hyacinths, her mother’s favorite Easter flower, and took the elevator to the fifth floor.
Since her mother had been hospitalized so frequently in the past several months, Ellie knew her way around well. She didn’t stop at the nurses’ station to ask for directions to room 528 as she passed by, but it would have done her little good if she had. There wasn’t a nurse or an aide in sight.
When she got to her mother’s room, the door was closed. She stopped, reluctant to enter and interrupt if a doctor was inside examining her mother. She leaned closer and listened hard. When she didn’t hear any voices or movement inside, she knocked once and waited. When she got no response to her second knock, she assumed her mother might be sleeping and opened the door very slowly. Once the door was open and she slipped inside, however, Ellie’s heart skipped a beat, and she began to tremble.
The bed was empty, stripped right down to a plastic-covered mattress.
All of the cards her mother had received, which Ellie had pinned to the bulletin board above the headboard, had disappeared. The box of tissue and the plastic pitcher and cup that had been on the overbed table were
missing, too.
Her mother was gone.
Ellie backed out of the room in fear, disbelief and confusion. When she ran into something, she swung around and found herself staring at Cindy Morgan, the young nurse Ellie had confronted when her mother had been discharged earlier than expected after her first heart attack. The memory of that mix-up, when no one had remembered to call Ellie on her cell phone, was still vivid.
Latching on to the faint hope that the call from Gail Brown might have been to tell Ellie that her mother had been transferred again today, she choked out, “My mother. Where’s my mother?”
“Oh, you’re Rose’s daughter. It’s Mrs. Waters, isn’t it? I’ve been off on vacation, so I didn’t know until this morning that your mother had suffered another heart attack.”
Fear had formed such a huge knot in Ellie’s chest that she fought to breathe, and clutched the pot of flowers hard against her body. “My mother. I can’t find my mother.”
“She transferred to a sub-acute unit early this morning. Didn’t Gail Brown call you?”
Ellie’s heart rate dropped back to double time. “I had a couple of messages to call her,” she admitted, “but I haven’t gotten back to her yet. I wanted to see my mother first. What floor is the sub-acute unit on?” she asked, mentally kicking herself for assuming the transfer Gail Brown had been referring to had been her mother’s transfer out of CCU. This time, however, she had no one to blame for the mistake but herself.
Cindy put her arm around Ellie. “You’re as pale as those flowers you’re practically strangling. Why don’t you let me get you a glass of water and I’ll have Gail Brown come up to speak to you.”
“I don’t need any water, and I don’t need to speak to Gail Brown. I need to see my mother,” Ellie insisted, and pulled free.
“I know you’re upset, and I’m sorry for the apparent miscommunication, but your mother’s fine. In fact, she was doing so well, the doctor agreed to release her to the sub-acute unit at Havenwood Care Center, where she can build up her strength with some physical therapy before she goes back home with you again.”
