by Toni Jensen
Back at the hospital, I meet Dr. Lawrence Martinelli, who begins my treatment and tells me about my bacteria, about the difference between viral meningitis and bacterial. The viral kind is contagious and clears up on its own, usually in about a week; it’s not deadly. The bacterial kind requires intravenous antibiotics, a hospital stay of at least a week, and then outpatient IV treatment for several more weeks if all goes well. I don’t ask what happens if all goes poorly.
My bacteria is called Serratia marcescens. Despite how it can be deadly, it is beautiful under the microscope. A cluster of these bacilli looks like someone spilled a box of Hot Tamales—they’re similar in shape and shade, except the bacteria are even brighter, the shade of red leaning more toward coral.
Dr. Martinelli explains some of the bacteria’s storied history. Because of its bright color, Serratia marcescens was used as a tracer agent, to track the movement of other bacteria. Before science knew what it was, the bacteria was the cause of a “miracle” when communion bread in a Catholic church turned red. Much later, from the 1950s through the ’70s, the bacteria was used by the U.S. Army to test biological weapons.
When I go into the hospital, I have just moved back into the city, into Lubbock, from a house at the edge of a cotton farm. I won’t think of it till much later, but while at the farmhouse, I had one day gone outside barefoot and stepped onto a spent spine from a cactus. It had gone more than an inch into my right foot, my driving foot. I had pulled it out by myself, then, bit by bit. It went something like this: pull, wince and shudder and wait, and then pull some more. It healed fine. I didn’t think about it much, after. I don’t think about it when Dr. Martinelli asks about puncture wounds, but later it occurs to me this may have been the source.
I like Dr. Martinelli straightaway for how he explains the history, how he makes it into a compelling narrative for me, how he seems to understand this will help me stay calm. He’s funny and smart. He says repeatedly, “You don’t seem that sick,” and I agree. I say again, “I have a strange high tolerance for pain.” I say, “It’s not always helpful,” and he agrees.
We never do figure out for certain how the bacteria entered my bloodstream.
I spend the first day in the hospital making calls to my family, my friends, and my department. My classes are covered easily and well, and because of the double vision, I spend the rest of the time watching television with one eye shut and then alternating. I have a steady stream of visitors—fellow graduate students and friends—who bring me balloons and candy, who walk my dogs and clean my house.
As the days pass, the antibiotics do their work, so my fever abates and my vision begins to be less tilty, but then I’m awakened one early morning by someone turning my left arm this way and that, by hushed and then raised voices. My fever has spiked in the night, and a nurse—the one I think of as the “good nurse”—tells me she needs to change my IV.
I can’t hear all of what’s being said, but I do hear the last phrase: “If you’re trying to kill her, you could have done worse.”
When Dr. Martinelli returns from the hall, he says only that I gave them a scare, that my fever had spiked, that the other nurse—the one I’d come to think of as “the mean one”—had installed my IV incorrectly, and a new infection had bloomed bright and colorful along my left forearm.
Dr. Martinelli has paged the nurse, and I hear him—we all hear him—dress her down in the hallway outside. I never see her again.
I also never see my family during this time. On that first day in the hospital, when I call to tell my parents about my bacteria, about my hospitalization, each wants to know if I called the other first.
My mother wants me to decide whether it’s serious enough for her to come. She wants me to tell my father to quit being an asshole. My father wants me to apologize for how long my mother seems to have known I was in the hospital before he did. He wants me to explain myself.
I never do any of those things. Instead, I practice being grateful—to the nurses for their care, to Dr. Martinelli for his good humor and good care, to Dr. Dubose for his good care and for the advice he gives after.
“It’ll take your body a full year to recover,” he says, “at least.”
I nod like I understand, but I don’t—not really.
“Try not to put it under unnecessary strain. Maybe don’t get pregnant,” he says, “for example.”
I nod again.
In my last days at the hospital, I’m grateful for my friends who bring me peanut brittle, who wheel me around until they get kicked out because we’re too loud. I’m grateful for how they check on me, too, once I’m home with my central IV line, with my new equipment. I give myself IV antibiotics for a few weeks, and I’m grateful to my brain for remembering the instructions. I’m grateful to my body for beginning to heal.
It’s hard work, practicing gratitude, when you also are experiencing both the temporary loss of your health and the loss of your family. It’s a breach, a rupture. I entered the hospital with a family, even if damaged, and I left without. It felt a lot like a puncture wound I couldn’t quite explain. It also felt a lot like being born.
VI.
In Pittsburgh, after my daughter’s birth, my blood pressure rises and rises, and my daughter’s weight drops and drops. She is born a healthy weight—and all newborns lose some weight before beginning to gain—but she’s shrinking and she’s quiet, so quiet. First the nurse and then the doctor says “failure to thrive,” which is, of course, terrifying in a way few phrases are.
We stay in the hospital longer than is usual, then, and they also say “postpartum preeclampsia,” but I pay less attention to this, given the other phrase. Much later, I’ll google and learn postpartum preeclampsia is when blood pressure rises dramatically after the birth. It’s uncommon. I have none of the known risk factors—obesity, family history, diabetes. The possible outcomes include stroke and pulmonary edema.
We have to stay until her weight begins to stabilize, until my blood pressure begins to drop, and they’re sure I’m not developing postpartum eclampsia, which is like the condition I already have, except with the addition of seizures and possibly permanent damage to my brain, eyes, liver, and kidneys.
I listen to the doctors and begin taking blood pressure medication. We begin mixing formula with breast milk to feed my daughter. We wait. My boyfriend stays in the room with us for most of these days, and there’s a chair that folds out into a makeshift bed. The nurses are nice—all of them. I like and trust both my doctors. There is a menu from which we order our food, even, and it tastes good. I focus on these things because it’s necessary to focus on the good if my blood pressure is to fall, if we’re going to be home before Christmas. It seems urgent to me, for some reason, that we be home for Christmas. And I trust my impulse toward this urgency.
When I had meningitis, I learned to respect this sense of urgency when it arrived, to trust it. At the Lubbock hospital, I also learned that in order to be released on a weekend, you have to advocate for yourself; you have to make repeated noise.
When my Pittsburgh doctors insist that we stay longer, I use the skills I’d practiced. If they released us Christmas Eve, I would agree to bring my daughter back for daily weight checks. I would agree to take my blood pressure medication for one month. I would agree to accept a pain medication prescription, a narcotics prescription, with the understanding that I wouldn’t fill it.
“Stop saying that!” my doctor says over and over. “You have to take it.”
I smile back at him with my best calm smile. In this, our America, once they’ve strapped you down and cut you open for your C-section, they will not release you until you agree to take a prescription for narcotics. Never mind that you’re feeding a baby from your body. Never mind that pain medication filters directly into breast milk. Never mind that the narcotics also will make you feel better tha
n you really do or than your body really does—that you might rip your new incision, strain muscles already overstrained from labor.
“Give it here,” I say to my doctor. By now, nine months in, he’s learned to read my face. He sighs.
“You don’t have to fill it,” he says, shaking his head.
“Oh,” I say, “I know. Whatever you think is best.”
We both laugh a little at that, and he still shakes his head, but he signs the release paperwork, and my daughter and I make it home for Christmas, where my boyfriend’s family has made the house smell like good food and floor polish and cookies.
The day after Christmas, in nearby Penn Hills, Joseph Hall’s mother, Cecilia Coleman, says goodbye to her son. She sends him to Indianapolis, to stay with her brother, after learning the police are looking for him. She reports to Bill O’Driscoll that she’s afraid for her son’s life, that the police have reported him as “armed and dangerous.” Later, Joseph Hall will say he’s never shot a gun other than a paintball or BB gun.
Back at our home, in the South Hills, the Texans stay after Christmas only a few more days, but they fill the house with food and laughter and enough presents for at least four children. The gifts they give our daughter are beautiful and plentiful—row after row of tiny, improbable onesies and colorful T-shirts, plush-footed pajamas and a snowsuit with matching mittens and hat. They had to be instructed repeatedly and with considerable force not to buy for our daughter one or more of those giant stuffed animals. This was made easier because they had been arguing, apparently, over giant panda versus giant giraffe.
In the days after giving birth, I began to understand, then, that this man, my boyfriend, the father of this daughter, was one of those people who had been cared for, who had people who would care for him. And I suppose, looking back, I began to resent the withholding of that care.
It’s a fast-moving thought, though, as all thoughts are in the first days when a baby is new. Most thoughts are only for her. She is still too quiet, is still not gaining weight at a good rate. The only time she cries is when the relatives dress her in a Christmas outfit for yet more photographs. One of the sisters has cleaned the house, has been taking care of the dogs, has made the most delicious food—enough that we’ll be eating it for weeks. I am grateful.
On one of the trips to the doctor for a weigh-in, we’re out front the same time as the next-door neighbors.
“A girl,” the wife says.
“I told you,” says the nice old man. He pats our daughter on the head with care.
The Texans leave soon after, and my blood pressure goes down and my daughter begins to gain weight. At home, in her room, I fold onesie after onesie, line her dresser with two rows of stuffed animals.
My family sent a few presents, what I would consider to be a regular amount, and I’m not sure what to make of all the rest. I have the impulse to sort, to give away. It’s Christmastime, after all, and there are other babies without.
“It’s too much,” I say.
“I had to talk them out of one of those giant giraffes,” my boyfriend says. “I had to threaten them that I’d throw it away.”
I don’t know what to make of this, either—that they would have bought one, that he would have thrown it out. It’s such a wasteful impulse, but his face is all righteousness, all indignation.
I sort and fold and sort.
“I’m surprised your sisters were able to come,” I say, in a quiet voice.
“What?” he says.
“The tickets?” I say. “The time off?”
They’re both in their twenties or early thirties, are just out of school, are not yet gainfully employed.
“My parents,” he says. He shrugs at the look I am probably giving him. “It’s Christmas.”
And just like that, I move toward almost understanding. The casualness of his delivery, the ease with which it’s delivered, this feels like the other sort of breach—a line, a divide.
I come from lace-curtain Irish married into Métis. I come from the land of pretending we have enough, of faces scrubbed clean with rough cloth, of generic cereal boxes pushed down deep in the trash, their contents having been poured into the one lone Cheerios box.
But it’s Christmas, a time when many people overspend, and we’ve been so poor the last year, I have a hard time putting together the pieces. I will have been with this man for several years before I learn he grew up with servants. He won’t call them that, but that’s what they were—women who were paid to come into his childhood home on the Mexican border near Brownsville, Mexican women who crossed the border to cook and clean, to mind the children.
I don’t yet know this. When he delivers the information later, it’s in much the same shrugging way as he delivers the tale of the oversized giraffe.
It still makes me furious in my body. I see the chicken thighs conveying and conveying. But maybe I’m not explaining this right. It makes my breathing change, my mouth set to the side, my eyes narrow, my arms tingle like they do in illness. It makes my body so furious it wants to do something to someone. It’s what I imagine people mean when they say “cold fury.”
Because this man comes from enough, but he believes it’s important to withhold it from me—both the enough and the knowledge of the enough. He’s been too prideful to ask his parents for help they certainly would have given. He’s been withholding this certainty perhaps because he understands I come from less, as did most of our graduate school friends.
I would never have entered into this relationship had I understood he came from safety, from financial, material safety and denied it to me while I worked and worked, while I carried and carried and carried our child. I would never have hooked my life to any man who came from safety and pretended otherwise. There is no greater betrayal than this pretending. I came from the opposite sort of pretending. I knew in my body its cost. There is no worse life than a pretending life. There is no worse house than a pretending house.
VII.
The night the neighborhood kids set our tree on fire, my boyfriend takes his baseball bat out to the front porch. The sky shifts from gold to navy. It’s just past the start of the new year, and from a further distance, the way the tree is lit against the shifting sky might look festive. The grackles squawk as they flap away from the sparking branches, and the song sparrows spin and dive but keep quiet, as is their way in winter.
Our daughter is sleeping upstairs, and this is what I say first to her father when he’s still inside, looking for the bat: “Stop stomping around. She’s asleep.” Next, I say, “Come inside,” but he stands there with the bat, staring across the yard to where the kids laugh and run back and forth along the chain-link fence.
Only a few tree limbs spark now. Both the tree and the kids seem to be working toward wearing themselves out.
“Come inside,” I say again.
One of the boys sees the bat, the stare, and he stops the running of the other two. They stand still and face our porch, their shoulders wide now, their faces backlit by the last of the sun. There had been a fourth kid before, a larger one, and I’m hoping he’s not gone home for reinforcements of any kind.
My daughter’s father has called the police, though I had said not to. This is his version of waiting.
“I’m going to go brush my teeth,” I say, “and if you’re still outside when I’m done, I’m locking the door.”
The worry line, then, has come inside, has been pulled inside the house. Or more accurately, I’ve brought it inside.
By the time I’m done brushing my teeth, the policeman has arrived. He’s nicer than the last one and seems smarter, too, or at least seems to understand his job as promoting safety and calm.
“Go inside,” he tells my boyfriend. “Listen to your wife.”
No one corrects him, least of all me. I’m ha
ppy in this moment to be the wronged wife. I’m happy in this moment to be the one he’s supposed to listen to.
After this night, I say it sometimes to my not-yet-husband—“Listen to your wife”—and it sometimes shifts the look on my boyfriend’s face, and it sometimes shifts the look for the better.
If he’d had his gun that night, if he’d brought more than a bat to the front porch, he would have been shot, or he would have gone to prison. The policeman tells him this, too, and ends with “think about your family.”
Cecilia Coleman was thinking about her family, about her son Joseph Hall, when she sent him to Indianapolis to stay with her brother. The police find him there in early January, around the same time the policeman comes to our house and offers his advice. After, Joseph Hall is held in the Allegheny County Jail. He speaks with his mother nearly every day, but he does not come home.
Later that night, the birds come home to roost in the burned-out tree—the noisy grackles and silent songbirds, the most everyday of birds, too, in the sparrows. A grouping of sparrows can be called a variety of names, including a host, crew, flutter, meiny, quarrel, or tribe. According to Webster’s, the primary and oldest definition for meiny is “company” or “retinue.” Both words conjure soldiers, their togetherness, their close proximity, one to the next to the next. Tonight both words conjure lack.
I go to bed first, our daughter still asleep in her bassinet beside me. I lie awake, thinking about the policeman as a strange ally, as unlikely company. It is strange indeed to have this policeman as my main or primary company. I have never before considered such a possibility, such a loneliness that would engender such a feeling. Outside, the birds are tucked together in their meiny. Because even the birds, after they’ve flown, know the comfort, the importance of being able to head back home.
