My shoes were missing, my arms were tied to the hospital bed, and my chest was exposed to the ceiling. I remember thinking that my boobs looked so small lying there drooping east and west toward the gurney, washed out and nearly disappearing in a sea of electric wires and fluorescent light. My whole body (jaw bone, teeth, soft throat, open airway, rib cage rising and falling, and rising again), my essence, my bearing, and the way I am a loudmouth; my ideas and dreams; my history, lineage, personhood, character, and all of who I imagined I was . . . it was small. The only big thing—the only ginormous, fantastic, real, and over-the-top thing—was the ER nurse’s face and the way it seemed to appear out of nowhere to tell me, “Deann . . . Deann . . . Stay with me! You are going to be okay.”
“Okay,” I puzzled, sounding out the word in my head as if I’d never heard it before, like the nurse was speaking Italian and pretending to know me like my mother, because only my mom would call me Deann.
The day after my foggy dreams in the emergency room, I woke up in an intensive care unit. One of the nurses told me I had fainted and landed there. I’d been resuscitated, once in the ambulance and again in the ER, only to wake up there: lucky and thankful and profoundly confused. The day before (or maybe it was the day before that), I had been a normal, middle-class, middle-of-the-road woman with a mortgage and a job and friends, who went running and climbing and paddling, racing in a thousand different directions at a thousand miles per hour. I was a homeowner who could rewire a bathroom fan, an inspector who had taken a class in “verbal judo” but still got tongue-tied when it came to seeing how nature and some people never really have a chance in life; I was a friend, a sister, a daughter, a wannabe comedian; and now I was a cardiac care patient.
And I was trapped; pinned to the machines that beeped and shooshed all night long, checking blood pressure, respiration, oxygen level, and heart rate. I was tethered to a urine bag and an IV pole, and a heart monitor that seemed to go off every ten minutes, sending a nurse rushing into the room to flick on the fluorescent light, check my IV, and yell, “Deann, you need to keep the cannula in your nose,” as she rearranged the plastic tube across my face, behind my ears, and in my nose.
A few days later, I was moved to another room (a sign that I was on the mend), where I could get up to go to the bathroom and order my own meals. I found that the hospital menu confused me with its “heart wise” meals that included coffee and a noodle dish with chipped beef, and then there was the sheer willpower that it took to sit up, organize the various wires, tubes, and electronic gadgets that made reaching for the phone a mystery. It was easier to have them bring whatever food they thought I might like: pudding or red Jell-O cubes, decaffeinated coffee, saltine crackers, meat loaf and mashed potatoes. It was the food they served my grandma at her old folks’ home.
Everything was confusing, especially the number of medical people who would walk in and thumb through my chart, then ask me to sit up so they could examine me like a plastic dummy who wouldn’t mind a cold stethoscope on her back and under her left breast, then the right; then back to the left, but this time above the areola, squarely over the heart, where the scope would sit for a long time while I listened to the doctor’s breath whistle into my ear. There were doctors and interns, two shifts of nurses, phlebotomists, X-ray technicians, a cardiologist, and an electrophysiologist, who seemed to talk right past me.
“You have ventricular tachycardia with torsades,” he said, staring at me like I should have a reaction; like I was born with an encyclopedia in my ear and at any moment would reach up, flip to page 864, and know exactly what was going on. “You’ll need to make some changes. You won’t be able to drive a car for a while, and we’ll have to run more tests.” I blinked and cocked my head like a spaniel, trying to understand how their commentary fit with what I knew of myself. They continued the discussion, making wa-wa-wa talking sounds while I nodded my head in the affirmative. I was lost and assumed that whatever the problem was, the best solution was to leave the hospital as soon as possible. When I asked one of the nurses about that, she said, “Oh, well, we’ll see what the doctor thinks.”
I was trapped, left conjuring which was the best way to escape—thinking that if I could fine some nurse scrubs in the hallway closet, or perhaps convert the IV stand into an axe for tunneling through the floor . . . If I could somehow become someone I’m not then everything would be okay.
My roommate was a lady in her fifties or sixties (actually, I wasn’t at all sure of her age, only that she was old enough to have grandkids, and she was sad she couldn’t smoke in bed). She was a large lady with a kind, no-nonsense face, reminding me of the cafeteria ladies in grade school—strong women who we all bet could beat up the principal but who would also give you a little wink when you said “Thank you.” My roommate would holler over the noise of the television, over the loudness that she had programmed into the TV, to ask me if I was okay. She was maternal. I wasn’t. I’d yell back, “Yes. YOU?” secretly praying she wouldn’t take the opportunity to talk.
After a few days, when I was feeling more like myself (weak and thin, but me) and like I just wanted to go home, I wandered to her side of the room and asked why she was in the hospital. She went into a long story about cancer and her heart, and then she started crying, sobbing more than any human I’ve seen, crying about how her boys still needed her even though they were all “growed up,” and how she couldn’t “go and die” before her second grandbaby was born. I sat on the side of her bed with my hands in my lap, overwhelmed but trying to be sympathetic, as she dug her hands into her eyes like lava was pouring out of them.
The next night, she died.
It was three or four in the morning, and I woke up when one of her monitors started to alarm; and then there was a rush of shoes and more alarms, and a nurse took the curtain that separated us and quickly threw it shut so I couldn’t watch how they pulled off her hospital gown and exposed her chest, before yelling, “One, two, three, clear!” They barked orders at one another and yelled “Clear!” half a dozen more times, while I sat on the edge of my bed like a little girl, dangling my feet a few inches from the floor and gripping the edge of the mattress, not breathing, and flinching every time they yelled “Clear!” and hearing her body lift as a jolt of electricity rammed into her rib cage.
Everything grew quiet after that. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, listening for her raspy breathing, the way she occasionally sent out an enormous phuft of breath like a teakettle about to boil over. But all I heard was my own slow heartbeat, banging so hard it made the plastic liner on my bed crinkle, over and over; and it made my head throb, and everything got so hot, my tears dried up before they had a chance to come out of my eyes and the wax in my ears started melting. I sat there for ten, fifteen, then twenty minutes as a steady stream of people came, shuffled around my roommate’s bed, and exited. I was waiting. Patient. Wondering how I was supposed to live normally, like always, like an everyday person doing everyday things after this.
I had called my housemates the day before, explaining that I’d fainted at the store near a salad spinner and an onion bin. I made a joke about how the hospital gown made me feel more naked than if I really was naked, and that I was certain the Jell-O cubes were full of wood dust. They told me they were worried, and I’m fairly certain (although I have hardly any memory of it) that I joked around about that too.
Now nothing was funny. I was scared, confused, and angry all at once; so, at any given moment, I wasn’t sure how I would react. If the nurse got busy (it was a hospital, after all), I might respond normally with a little joke or at least a smile when she finally popped her head in the room; or, as it happened, I’d react like a freak show . . . so over-the-top frustrated that I imagined I could just rip the IV needle out of my arm, get dressed, and go home.
I stayed. I ate Jell-O and sipped my decaffeinated coffee, which tasted exactly like warm black water with a splash of something resembli
ng what I remembered as “coffee”—a trick, a concoction that plays with your mind, like maybe real coffee wasn’t as great as you once thought. They seemed to do this with all the food.
I was released with various heart medications and a promise that I would be evaluated in another couple of weeks to see how things were going. John, my housemate, picked me up and we immediately drove to a burger joint, gripping the curbs like an ambulance, so I could order a chocolate milk shake. It was perfect, and John was perfect. The car was perfect, and the way the sun filtered through the clouds and made the seat belt buckles glisten . . . that was perfect.
And when we got home, I realized the house was perfect too—even with the front porch steps tilting a little left, and with the drafty windows that we’d sealed up with plastic for the winter making the house look like it was squinting (ogling its way past filmy Coke-bottle glasses). It was inviting and warm, and as I walked in, I took a deep, overly exaggerated breath, the sort of over-the-top gesture that was filmed for commercials about scented laundry detergent, but in this case was my way of trying to absorb every molecule of my old normal life. I loved the smell of the living room, the kitchen, Jenna’s recycling porch, the cupboards, and the basement laundry room. I loved everything, and it seemed to love me back. It was as if my heart had grown to three times its normal size, and it could now hold the specialness of every person who crossed my path; it could track how phenomenal every scent, sound, taste, or texture was. Everything was beautiful, even if it was just the laundry that I’d pulled out of the dryer, still warm, and hugged like a small, lost child.
Over the next few weeks, things continued to be weird. I fainted and got sweaty, and felt that rumbling vibration in my chest far more often than I like to admit. It was as if my heart was weathering a storm, a tornado blowing out transformers and knocking the windows, just like the tornados I saw as a kid growing up in the Midwest.
When I was a junior in high school, a small tornado hit Liberty, Missouri—the town located a few miles from our family’s farm. The day after, my friends and I drove around in a stupor, looking at the damage: cars flipped over like toys, like someone had picked them up and simply turned them upside down in their parking spot. There was a horse in a tree, and the oaks and elms near the junior high school had been stripped of their leaves and now looked like a collection of giant pitchforks. It was horrifying, and then there were the unbelievable-but-true stories we heard: how one family was in the middle of a birthday party, sitting at the dinner table, when they heard the tornado sirens in town. They had just enough time to race into the bathroom, where all four of them lay like sardines in the bathtub as the wind invaded their house. In the kitchen, the tornado opened cabinets, threw dinner plates, and smashed canned goods into the dishwasher. It snatched spoons and forks off the table and shot them through the walls, and launched the roast chicken like a wrecking ball into the ceiling. Minutes later, when the family finally crawled out, thankful to be alive and happy to see their house still standing, they found the kitchen looking like a bomb had gone off, but—this was the weird part—the birthday cake that had been sitting in the middle of the kitchen table was perfectly fine. They found it still sitting in the same spot, without so much as a finger-dab in the frosting.
My cardiac problems were confused like that: like a horse in a tree and a surviving cake. And I needed to feel less wonky in the world; I needed to feel like me.
I threw myself into my routine—walking the dog, making dinner, racing to work, paying the mortgage and bills. I happily hid behind the chaos of each day, and then alone at night I thought about what had happened and what was happening. I kept replaying that feeling of waking up in the hospital, of seeing the nurses race through a series of moves, setting IVs and prepping me for the next series of moves. It felt like death, or my mortality, or something bigger still, was leaning into my bed with the moonlight, clattering when I moved hangers in the closet, buzzing behind the sound of the shower running or my car idling in traffic. The wall that kept opposites in place—life, death, me, others, lucky or not—had been toppled; nothing made sense anymore.
I sat in the kitchen one day after buying a bag of clothespins, a simple task, engineered so I could dry my laundry in the basement near the hot furnace, and then months later in the summer sun. As I was pouring them onto the kitchen table, I realized the technical genius in this simple tool. Perfectly shaped wood pinchers and a dime-size metal spring that creates just enough tension to hold a pair of pants on a clothesline—there must be a dozen patents assigned to clothespins. I looked a bit closer, and without much imagination at all, I could see birch trees growing in a forest, gathering sun (having a life), when all of a sudden everything shifted. The trees were cut down and rolled through a mill, and turned into a million three-inch pinchers with precise quality-controlled diameters, lengths, weights, and future function. Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, iron ore was being blasted out of the ground, then melted and extruded and formed into long bits of wire that were eventually twisted into the springs that were shipped halfway around the world to a factory where they could be joined to the wood pinchers to make clothespins. And all the while, on both sides of the planet, there were any number of human workers (having a life) being paid pennies a day to run the machines or to hand-count the clothespins, bundling them into bags and inventorying them into boxes that were then loaded into crates to be sent by barge to America so good environmental stewards and penny-pinchers like me could pin up their clothes in the sun.
I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I set the bag aside and took my dog for a walk.
A Moment of Genius While Waiting
A month later, I returned to the hospital for an echocardiogram—an ultrasound that takes a movie of your heart much like the sonogram I’d get if I were pregnant, awaiting the first tiny snapshot of my peanut baby with flipper arms that I would show all my friends and coworkers. It was like that, but no one would send me home with a photo of my heart. Instead, they’d send me home with news about how well my body would work, and for how much longer. By now, I’d come to trust my cardiologist and understood that he was trying the best he could to help me, to get me running again (literally), and to see me do more than scrape by; he wanted me to thrive. He was the kind of man who laughed a lot—probably the sort who often cried or peed his pants while laughing (my personal favorite). I trusted him, completely.
I was waiting for my turn, thumbing through magazines, trying to ignore how all the people around me were ten thousand years old, and how, like them, I had a ten-thousand-year-old’s cardiac problems, when I came across an article about a guy who’d built a tiny house on wheels, a house smaller than my garage, smaller than a parking spot. It looked like a cabin that would be used in a commercial for pancake batter, or in a painting titled A Simpler Time.
The article indicated that the owner had built the house himself, a fact that caused me to pull the magazine closer so I could examine the guy’s arms. To my surprise, they didn’t appear to be overly manly or even any stronger than my own. The article went on to explain that he had built the little house and then moved it to a spot behind his bigger, 1,200-square-foot house, tucking it near a low fence and scrub oak tree.
I was curious about Tiny House Man. Apparently, he rented out the big house and lived “for free” in the backyard, while his renters paid the mortgage and utilities. No bills. No overwhelming debt. A house the size of a Tic Tac to clean.
Suddenly, a light went on. Literally: a flashing red light. There was an emergency code somewhere in the bowels of the hospital, and as the lights flashed, my cardiologist fled down the hall, and I was left sitting there with the tiny-house article for an hour. I just stared at it, mulled it over, daydreamed, and then thought: What would happen if I just . . . sort of . . . did that?
What if I sold my big house with its rats in the front yard, the mortgage, the hours of dusting, mopping, cleaning, vacuuming, p
ainting, grass cutting, and yard pruning? How would it feel to live so light?
I wasn’t sure why I was so drawn to the photo, but the best I could figure was that it reminded me of everything I’d wanted as an eight-year-old, when I’d have been happy living in a tree stump or a tree house, or even in the scratchy little caves that my brothers and I carved out of the blackberry bushes along the fence line of our farm. The point was that I’d have a place of my own where I could hide from my chores or my family, where I could cry my eyes out if I needed to and make sense of the world by viewing it through a tiny spyhole. I had big plans for myself: I’d live in the woods and learn to speak to the chipmunks and squirrels. I’d spend my time examining the small bones and rocks found in the nearby creek bed. I’d make “sit-upons,” leafy sort of seat cushions, just like we did in Girl Scouts, and whittle tiny stick figures for my mother. I’d do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and in the end, all the woodland creatures would become my best friends forever, but for even longer. That was my dream life, so perhaps you can understand why the idea of building a tiny wooden house would click for me. Plus, building a house would be fun!
Then there was another voice. The idea of living in a tiny wood house appealed to my inner eight-year-old, but what kind of adult does that? I wondered if Tiny House Man was happy; if he had good friends who would come over for dinner despite the cramped quarters, if they packed themselves into the living room (which was also the kitchen and bathroom), where they’d balance their dinner plates on their laps and play mini Scrabble with tiles the size of their teeth. I wondered if he had lumps on his head from sitting up in the night and smashing into the ceiling. Was Tiny House Man dogged by his decision to live so small, perhaps shunned by his neighbors, who secretly joked about his house; or did people love that he had downsized himself into the equivalent of a toolshed?
The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir Page 5
