With her fingers Molly spelled out “TV”—at the same time shaking her head emphatically, as strongly as the tubes allowed.
“Oh, you want turn off TV?”
Molly nodded. Yes, PLEASE. Yes.
With a slight frown, the nurse went over and turned it off, first giving an explanatory whisper to the orderly.
Molly was grateful; the room was a little quieter, but this did not help as much as she had thought or hoped it would. There was still so much light, and voices from everywhere, from the two other beds and from out in the hall.
“Rosa, are you in the hospital? Do you know where you are?”
The other woman, who seemed to be very old, only moaned and sobbed occasionally. And Rosa never spoke, but was only spoken to in those harsh, intrusive voices—voices that also interrogated one of the people who came to see Rosa.
“Are you married, or only boyfriend?”
“Married. Husband.”
The old woman sobbed.
This is a chapter of hell, Molly put it to herself, and then she thought, No, hell is not even near here. Hell is homelessness and AIDS and sick children and cold and out of food—sometimes all of those. Hell is not an expensive suburban hospital, with state-of-the-art cutting-edge doctors and machines. And heat,
and light. This is only extremely uncomfortable. It seemed important at that moment to know the difference.
A tall woman in white who must have been a new nurse, new shift, turned the TV on again, though not very loudly. Molly could not quite see the screen; although it was there she could not quite focus on it. Both clocks now said 5:35, or was there only one clock? Was she going blind?
“I’m going to take the tube out of your throat,” said the nurse, and as suddenly as she had spoken she reached and yanked. Excruciating pain. “That’s the only way to do it,” said the nurse.
But at least the tube was out.
“How many clocks do you see up there on the wall?” was one of the first questions a new young doctor asked Molly, a few hours later—a doctor new to her, that is; God knows where he came from.
Timidly she answered, “One,” having figured out that that was the desired response. And sometimes there was only one, but why should there ever be two? She was being visited by a cluster of doctors—far be it from her to try to count them.
“Sometimes,” a doctor began to explain to her, “after such a major major trauma to the head, vision is blurred for a time. But almost always this condition is temporary.”
Almost always? What about the times it is not temporary, but permanent? Double vision for life? Molly thought, How perfect that I should have married a twin. But maybe I’ve always had double vision, and there was really only Paul. This perfect senselessness made her smile.
Misreading her smile, the doctor responded. “I’m glad to see you smile! No problem there, your parotid came through fine, and the facial nerve. Our Bill here is really a genius, you’re a lucky young woman.”
And you’re a very dumb young man, saying everything twice to a woman with double vision, Molly thought but did not say.
“Well, I don’t know about any genius,” Dr. Donovan came
forth modestly to say. “Eight hours of damned hard work by all of us, and I have to say we had some luck. All of us did. But the tumor came out pretty clean, for such a big one.”
“You mean you got it all?”
“Uh, yes. We think so. But of course you’ll have some radiation, and that should take care of, uh, any other possibility.”
It was extremely rude to go to sleep when people were talking to you, were trying to explain something difficult. Molly knew that, but she was so terrifically tired, exhausted. She closed her eyes, and she must have slept for at least a little while for when she opened them only one doctor (clearly one) was standing at her bedside. Dave.
“… shoved your brains aside,” he was saying.
“What?”
He grinned, white teeth enormously gleaming. “They had to. But those guys know what they’re doing, believe me.”
Shoved your brains aside.
The words reverberated chillingly. Molly closed her eyes, hoping that Dave would go away—that everyone, everything would go.
“… guess you don’t feel much like talking.”
“No, I don’t.”
A nurse came, and in slow motion pulled out the tube from Molly’s nose. As with the throat tube, there was a very harsh strong pain, so that she cried out, “Oh Christ!”
“Sorry, but that’s the only way I can do it. As quick as I can, but you’ll feel better now.”
It was not the nurse’s fault, Molly knew that. The nurses did not mean to hurt her. But surely there was some other way to remove a tube? Maybe under a general anesthetic?
In some later interval of consciousness Molly mused, and wondered: Did the process that seemed to make most (nearly all) doctors so insensitive, so gross in their perceptions and their speech (“shoved your brains aside”), did that process or training apply also to nurses? Or was only a certain very definite personality type drawn to medicine in the first place? An imponderable,
but in her current state almost any issue was imponderable.
There was only one other woman in her room, Molly at some point realized: a very young South American woman who had just had a baby (who was up in the nursery, “doing very well”), and who was visited by a lot of Spanish-speaking relatives, including a very young husband. A woman who was somewhat disoriented, but getting better. But how could she, Molly, have imagined two women? From what dark part of her own imagination did the very old woman appear?
Perhaps her brains were shoved aside for good. However, at least it was clear to her now that there was only one large clock on the wall in front of her bed.
“You’ll feel much better in another room,” said a later nurse. “Your own room.” This seemed unlikely: She would not feel any better anywhere, was Molly’s thought; she could not move, or be moved. But it turned out to be true. Her bed with its surround of tubes and machines took up almost the whole space of her tiny new room, but there she was, alone. More privacy. Less noise.
Where was Felicia? Dimly, not urgently but often, Molly wondered. It was unlike Felicia not to appear with baskets of food and flowers. Or certainly to call. But no one came to see Molly except delegations of doctors, or nurses or technicians wanting blood. Or Dave, by himself. And no one phoned her but Dave. Darkly she wondered, Had Sandy Sanderson at last done something terrible to Felicia?
She remarked to Dave, “It’s odd about Felicia. So unlike her not to show up, or at least to phone.”
He grinned. “I called her and told her not to. And I told her you weren’t taking any calls. Except from me.”
“But, Dave—”
“Look, you’ve been through a major major trauma. I don’t want anything to go wrong.”
“But—”
In a sense he was right, Molly knew that. She knew that she was not up to even the smallest social effort. But still, Felicia in any form would have been a comfort.
Instead of Felicia, Raleigh Sanderson came to see her. She had been half-asleep, half-lost in one of the murky, uneasy private fogs in which she now seemed to spend most of her time. Not quite knowing him at first, she did remember that he was a doctor, and at first she thought, Oh God, one more, then recognized the familiar snowy white flag of hair, and the arrogant surgeon’s walk.
“Well,” he began—and proceeded to tell her about the brilliance of the surgery she had undergone. “Major major …” They all seemed to like that phrase, Molly noted. “And you did very well,” he added, implying that her performance was not exactly up to that of Bill Donovan, but that given her limitations as a patient, a woman and a non-doctor, she had done quite well.
Molly did not think Raleigh Sanderson had come all the way down to Mt. Watson to check on her condition—and she was right.
“I’m really worried about our friend Felicia,” he began—as Molly could almost have predicted.
“You are?” she asked. “Really, why?” She hoped it would not take him long to tell her; she could feel herself beginning to fade out, her shoved-aside brains to blur.
“… trip to Seattle—irresponsible—”
Molly heard all this somewhat indistinctly, but she tried to answer as clearly as she could, hoping to cut short their conversation. “I think she wanted to see Seattle. Everyone says it’s so great.” And then she must have blanked out entirely. She woke
up to find no one there in the room with her, and only the dimmest memory of a visit from Raleigh Sanderson. From Sandy. Was that possibly another thing made up entirely by her—like the second woman, the old and very feeble Spanish lady in Intensive Care?
Molly was not allowed out of bed so far, and thus was forced to ring for nurses or aides, whatever, for bedpans. She did not get used to this; it became only faintly less embarrassing as the days and nights wore on.
However, very late one night, at some unreal post-midnight hour, in answer to her summons, from the eerily bright outer corridor a mysteriously beautiful man appeared, white-haired but young, with smooth cream-coffee skin and large deep dark eyes.
Unable at first to speak to him, Molly stared.
But he seemed to know. He said, “Oh, you need—” and he went back out, not saying the humiliating word for what he was to bring.
After all that was accomplished—wordlessly (both embarrassed, they avoided each other’s eyes)—he came back into the room. “Is there something I could do to make you more comfortable?” he asked.
He was the first person in the hospital to use that word to her, Molly reflected: “comfortable.” Her grateful heart went out to him. She said, “It’s kind of you to ask, but I can’t really think of anything.”
“If you sit up for an instant, I could help with the pillows. There, that’s not too bad?”
“Oh no, that’s really better.” As if by magic, in that one instant he had improved the comfort of her bed. Gratefully, Molly lay back. “You’re a nurse?” she asked him.
He smiled. “No, nothing so elevated. I am basically what they call orderly.”
Molly smiled back, wanting to say to him, I too am orderly, an orderly person, I can’t help it. But he might not think that was particularly funny. And she really wanted to say, Please stay with me. And so she only smiled.
“In a general way, you are feeling better now?” he asked her.
“Yes, I really am, I think.” How nice of him to ask, Molly thought again.
“It was I who brought you to this room from the Intensive Care,” he told her. “But you could not remember.”
“Well no, I don’t. I couldn’t see very well then, everything doubled.”
“You kept your eyes closed, and I worried that you must be frightened.”
She said, “I was,” so touched by his concern that she could have cried.
“Now I will let you sleep,” he said. “And I will hope that you feel much better tomorrow.”
Thinking of him, her mysterious visitor, Molly lay awake for a while, but happily so. The fact that this kind and beautiful and exotic man was around, was somewhere near, was cheering to her. She could even ring her buzzer, and maybe he would appear to her again. She wondered about his life: Was he married, or living alone, was he possibly gay? And then she thought, How terrible, as though these days only gay men are kind and sensitive. She somehow thought that this man was not gay, not married, but a sort of loner. Her response to him was not sexual, despite his beauty; she rather felt a human, deep response to his kindness, his concern.
Dr. Bill Donovan appeared periodically, always surrounded by his group of acolytes. Or, more frequently, the acolytes came by themselves. They always seemed extremely happy to see her—not for any personal reasons, Molly was sure, but because she was regarded as a triumph, living proof of their consummate
skill. In a self-congratulatory way they spoke among themselves: “Beautiful nose, no scars. You can barely see that line across her forehead. Her hair growing back already. Great job!”
She looked great—they all said that. No one asked how she felt, and when she thought of it, Molly recognized that she did not feel too terrible, she guessed. Just miserable, for no reason.
“When do you think I’ll be able to go swimming?” she asked Dr. Donovan during one of his increasingly rare visits; she had been thinking about going home, things to do to get back in shape. (How to get rid of Dave.)
Donovan smiled widely, with his perfect small teeth and happy eyes. “Oh, probably next week.” He seemed to rethink this, and added, “You might have to wear one of those nose things.”
Was he kidding, was this a dark black joke? Swim next week?
Months or even a year later, Molly, still not swimming, pondered his advice, which remained opaque: no one could seriously believe that Molly could go in swimming the following week—or, for that matter, next month—when she was flattened by radiation. Did he simply not care at all what she did, once his surgery was accomplished?
Dave came to see her, very pleased with himself, with the hospital, the doctors, even with her. Much much later, when Molly was finally well and had parted from Dave, she said to Felicia, “I feel so guilty toward him—in his way he did help a lot.” Felicia told her, “Listen, don’t you feel guilty. The whole experience of your illness surpassed his wildest dreams of happiness—he’d never had it so good. And just remember, he didn’t do a thing that all your friends wouldn’t have done, if he’d let us.”
In any case, Dave clearly loved it there in the hospital. He took every possible chance to talk to doctors and nurses—even, to Molly’s horror, asking about her BMs in her presence.
“Good Christ, Dave, how could you?”
“You’re so squeamish about all the wrong things. People talking or even writing about sex doesn’t bother you at all, but an innocent bowel movement—”
“Dave! Please!”
“You see? You’re hopeless.”
“I’m having a lot of trouble sleeping,” Molly confided to the nurse who seemed most approachable. “The noise and all.” She felt that she should not complain about so relatively trivial a problem, but felt too that unless she slept soon she would die—which at this point seemed almost desirable, a long, long sleep.
The nurse, a large and handsome middle-aged black woman, was sympathetic. “The noise, you’re right, it’s pretty terrible. I don’t know how anyone can sleep. All this trundling up and down corridors.”