Two weeks ago, a team of surgeons removed a benign acoustic neurome from my mother’s brain by rolling her ear up like a towel and drilling through layers of muscle, fat, bone, and fascia until they could stick a suction tube into the mass and debulk it from the inside before teasing it away from her left facial nerve. The procedure is known as the translabyrinthine approach, or a translabyrinthine craniotomy. It took about nine and a half hours and went as well as could be expected, with the only obvious effects being a total loss of hearing in that ear (she had lost more than eighty percent of it anyway), some muscle weakness on her left side, and difficulty balancing. She was put on oxy and Tylenol and released to go home three days early because the hospital needed her ICU recovery bed for incoming COVID-19 patients. No one could have known she would be back so soon, but I will admit I’m always nervous when things seem to be going well. Call it anxiety, or call it realism about the year of our tragicomic lord 2020, but I was waiting for a shoe to drop.
Four days ago, my mum’s mind and conversation began to wander. She sounded a bit drunk, but at the time we thought it was just fatigue and her oxy speaking. It was evening, and I sat beside her on the bed as she patted my hand and told me she really didn’t understand or like science fiction, but she let me describe the plot arcs of Star Trek: Discovery’s first two seasons without interrupting me.
Three days ago, she told me that she saw a skull with a screaming mouth in the bathroom tiles. Dad called my sister and then her doctor’s nurse, and both thought it unnecessary to bring her in. I argued that she was hallucinating. She tuned in just long enough to roll her eyes at that. It was evening, and she sat up straight in bed and told Dad “NO! I don’t need to go. I am NOT hallucinating just because I see patterns.” Her facial weakness from the neurosurgery was pronounced and her skin sallow. She dropped her water bottle twice and ate only a single mouthful of her evening yogurt.
Two days ago, around noon, I went up to her room with some hand-stitching to do by her bedside, but she was completely asleep. I tied off some literal loose ends, snipped some excess threads away, and spent some quality time at the ironing board. But in the late afternoon, Dad leaned over the edge of the stairs from the second floor and told me he needed me upstairs. Like, right now. He’d been woken from a deep sleep by a text from one of Mum’s friends who had received a series of increasingly nonsensical text messages from her while we were out of the room. When I sat on the end of her bed, Mum was lying on her good ear like a good patient. I could see a pinprick pupil in each iris, surrounded by a ring of porcelain. Nothing had ever prepared me to see the actual whites of someone’s actual eyes until I found myself smelling my mother’s breath and she breathed through a frozen face. Dad asked what I thought he should do, and I said we needed to take her to the hospital immediately. He spoke with both of my sisters. Then he spoke once more to my mother’s doctor’s nurse while I lay on the bed next to her and held her hand. Her grip was fantastic. Her eyes would skip from me to the middle distance. At one point she snapped into lucidity and raised a hand to point at the door. “I don’t want … Montana in one,” she said, so quietly Dad didn’t even hear., even though he stood at the foot of the bed on the phone. But I knew what she meant: She didn’t want me driving back to Montana in one day like I had on the way down here. “I’m not going anywhere right now,” I said, but that was a bit of a lie. I had to go downstairs to let the EMTs in and give them her medication list. Six tall creatures in actual respirator masks took her away––but slowly, about three miles under the speed limit. She was not able to respond to any of their questions.
She went directly into the ER with Dad nearby. I stayed in the car––her car, but don’t tell her that I’ve been driving it almost every day to pick up her library books, visit her at the hospital, and pick up almond milk at King Soopers. It was cold enough in the car that when I eventually went in and the hospital staffer took my temperature at the door, I was only 95.7 ‘ Fahrenheit. On Wellbutrin, my baseline temperature is an entire degree above my unmedicated average, at 98.5. I had brought her Lands End slippers, but the nurses ended up sending us back home with everything we’d brought, and the light cotton pajamas she’d been wearing. She was having seizures, lots of them, none of them apparent to the eye beyond a slight tremor in her hands. As the ER team intubated her, they sent Dad away and we met in the tiny ER waiting room. I watched her reports come in over the hospital portal (I’m allowed) and interpreted them for him, while also beginning the process of taking over text updates for both sides of the family as well as her friends and coworkers.
It’s entirely too easy to be strong for someone else’s sake. I calmed. I cracked jokes. I nodded encouragingly at the ER doctors as they came out to update us, hoping that I didn’t look too much like a child in my sweaty cat-furred hoodie pulled up over my toque, attempting to hide the worst of my stress-induced eczema. I wasn’t wearing a bra but that didn’t strike me as unprofessional until later, when the doctors gave us just the briefest moment to touch her hand and say what are now utterly forgotten words along the lines of “We’ll see you soon” as the nurses warned us that only one visitor was allowed at a time and gave us totally deserved side-eye.
Still, I got to be in the room with her for a few seconds. It probably wasn’t a comfort to her, but seeing her surrounded by competent-looking people with nicely muscled arms for lifting and supporting and intubating was a definite comfort to me. It didn’t occur to me until later that this was the first time I’d been inside an ER since I smashed my forehead into a metal door as a toddler, and the first time I’d seen someone intubated. My mother’s mother was conscious and able to speak the last time I saw her in 2014––and even if she didn’t quite recognize me she was lucid enough to point out that I had oily skin. I don’t know what it is about me and hospitals and a skin health fixation. I swear I don’t give a flying feline what my skin looks like most days, especially under a mask.
We missed the right turn on the way out and ended up chatting with Dr. U., who assured us that nothing was likely to change overnight and encouraged us both to get a good night’s sleep. I’m not sure about Dad, but I actually made good on his advice, after rereading all of her new blood panels and EKG report, and after Googling both the ER PAC and the doctors in charge of her care. I will admit to feeling deeply happy to be useful for perhaps the first time in four months. I was good. And I’d far rather had have Mum in an ICU than going in and out of lucidity at home. Doctors actually know what’s what, whereas I’m just good at text messages and baking far too many muffins.
Yesterday, dad spent a couple of hours on the couch in Mum’s ICU room, It has a handle so that you can pull the backrest down into a rather unpleasantly stiff bed, like a futon that you can actually sanitize, but I doubt anyone is allowed to sleep in this hospital with all of the recent regulations. When I picked him up from the hospital entrance, Dad was unable to stop talking about Mum’s eyes. Mum’s big beautiful brown eyes, the eyes he’s been looking into for almost forty years, looking at him but not seeing. Her helplessness as she lay in bed waiting for the ambulance to arrive. I had spent the last two hours at a table in Starbucks, watching the latest episode of Star Trek: Discovery and preparing to record a recap episode that evening with Tony and Eleanor. I drank her favorite latte and tried to figure out which window was her ICU window, since Dad texted to say he could see the Starbucks from her room. We got home to hot spaghetti and carefully labeled caesar salad ingredients delivered by a couple of family friends, the elderly wife of whom is in hospice herself. We ate it in front of the TV, watching My Octopus Teacher on Netflix because Dad needed to focus on something outside of his own mental landscape, and because I was the one with access to Netflix.
He went to bed. I stayed up, working on my very first embroidery project until 5:30 AM. Dad thought I went to bed several hours earlier than I actually did, and I let him think that. Obsessing over my lopsided sense of symmetry was my very own way of thinking without … thinking.
The sun has set over the Rocky Mountain front, and if that’s not a time-tested melancholy trope trotted out in every movie about grief, loss, death, or chronic illness I don’t know what is. Still, it’s a beautiful high desert sunset, with blues blending into a pale green at the toothy horizon, popped here and there by a bright hole of strawberry cream cheese cloud. Starbucks is lit up inside, out beyond the hospital parking lot and the enormous flat roof stretching out from the second floor ICU windows. (I’m determined to turn this into a rooftop garden. You’re on notice, local UCHealth branch.) Every now and again a noise comes from the bed where Mum is hooked up to a catheter, ventilator, respirator, stomach tube, electrodes, and an array of industrial strength tech pieces. It’s a brand new hospital and the room we’re in is more than double the size of my bedroom in Montana. It’s probably the size of my parents’ basement, only without my cat living in a tent in the corner. The nurses are in and out, quieter than the sound of my fingers on the laptop keyboard, and incredibly polite. They rarely talk to each other, but once I overheard them talking about the shortage of ICU nurses, and I’m not certain if they were talking about just this hospital or this city or this state or this nation or the entire goddamn state of things circa November 2020.
My mother is hooked up to a machine that breathes for her, but she doesn’t have COVID-19. Silver lining, perhaps? She was surrounded by family when brought in by highly competent EMT workers who arrived in the most timely of fashions after a calm 911 call. (Dad would knight the dispatcher if he could. I’m trying to catch names so that I can send thank-you cards. I’m terrible at cards. But I’m worse at knightings.) The facility is clean and new, and only ten minutes from home. Five minutes, if you’re behind an ambulance so that no one cuts you off. She’s safe, she’s cared for, and she’s the luckiest unlucky mother in the world at the moment. I don’t have any concrete conclusions about all of my observations other than that I appreciate when Medicare works, but I’m still mad that this isn’t the treatment that everyone gets. Is getting. Right now. All across this country.
There are six bags of fluid on her IV stand. They have her arms turned so that her palms are down and she’s swaddled beneath a blanket that feels like the reusable cotton diapers she used on my sisters and which still lurk about the house today, serving as safe-for-eyeglass-wiping wipers. She has rotated her right foot until her toes point straight up seven times since I arrived three-odd hours ago. She has lifted her right hand four times, and I have held it twice. Once, while I read the emails my sisters sent for my Dad to read aloud to her. They’re very biblical, but I know for my sisters the language of the christian bible is their language for unexpected and hard times. At other times I’ve tried to say encouraging things like “Look at that hand! Look at that foot! Way to go!” but I just feel dumb. In all the ways. If Mum is like those coma patients who wake up and report having heard everything around them while apparently unconscious (“locked in”), I don’t think she’d be too thrilled with my creativity. She’d be even less thrilled if I started talking about wasabi. Or horseradish. Apparently she hates those.
The on-call ICU doctor, neurosurgeon, and infectious disease doctors (I will have to look up their true titles later) have consulted, and I have been told that her condition is only mildly improved so far. They have successfully treated the meningitis-causing bacteria in her blood, but due to the blood-brain barrier they are only making minimal progress on the infection there. She needs an MRI, but there are complications due to the high contrast introduced by the synthetics now in her skull. She needs to be transferred to the main UCHealth campus so that the surgeons who originally performed her surgery can treat her. The neuro specialists here are not equipped to surgically go in and clean the source of infection out if it is, as they suspect, beneath her surgical incision. Things are picking up around here now that the sun has gone down, and m own plans have changed from a languid read-aloud from the most annoying science fiction novel I packed with me to possibly following her to Aurora if a bed opens up at Anschutz. They are, however, out of beds. I don’t know how to feel about wanting there to be a bed for her, knowing that it’s COVID-19 occupying all those beds. Get better soon, unknown someone! They say my mother is very sick.
I wish I were allowed to bring a therapy cat into the ICU. Only, I don’t really. I know that’s a terrible idea. But I need a living creature around who isn’t affected by this situation at all, just to remind me that there is a world out there and it is still full of good and beautiful things. The on-shift ICU doctor in charge of Mum’s case said this was, and I quote, “a shitty time.” That’s … yes. Accurate.
There are people running in the hallway, and an alarm I haven’t heard before. Not loud, but a lot of people. More people even now. Some walking quickly, adjusting their PPE, and others actually sprinting. Someone is flatlining between room 207 and 211. They aren’t springing for Mum. Not yet. But upwards of twenty people up and down the hall has me … yes. Yes, I am nervous. I am hopeful. But I am anxious.
