waiting.
My phone smells dingy. My fingers smell like a hospital. I’m sitting in the critical care unit of the hospital basically waiting for my grandmother to die. Isn’t that awful? I’m waiting for my grandmother to die. We all know it’s going to happen. We all know that we’re to share the jewellery she’s left my cousin, sister and I. We all know that according to my grandmother we’re all to find each other and eat together, as it’s very important. She doesn’t want to suffer she says. She’s working so hard to stay alive, so she can lie in a hospital bed where her biggest achievement of the day is wiggling her toes. She’s tired, sick of it, she continues. So we wait. We sit and wait, periodically sleeping or going for McDonald’s runs and take turns going to hold her hand and hold back tears because somehow, in between the swelling, hospital gowns, face mask and IVs, she still manages to look like the cutest person you’ve ever seen.
It’s someone else’s turn, to go and hold her hand, gaze into her semi-vacant eyes and hope for great advice and wisdom to escape her lips. We think we can relax, sit for a while, while we wait. But no. Creaky doors open, uncompassionate doctors, nurses and volunteers climb through the miniature hallway that has become our living room for the time being, whispering apologies as they clasp stethoscopes and scurry through. We don’t sit long, just a small break, we have to enter the corridor of sick patients, impatient EMS workers, all bored, all sick, all waiting. Walking past into the emergency room, where beds are occupied by crying people, waiting to see the doctors, nurses – whoever has the pills – nobody’s phased anymore. Curtain number two. Bed number two. He’s been reduced to a bed number, because they can’t identify you any other way. Her bed is number nine. Ninety-two, twenty-nine. What was that movie with Jim Carrey, the Number 32? Or 29? I can’t remember, that’s what hospitals do, I think. I don’t know what day it is. I think I’m still jet lagged. I’m tired; I know that, regardless of anything else. Visitors in the hospital are probably more disoriented than the patients are.
My grandmother is in critical care. She is a DNR. That means a Do Not Resuscitate patient. When my grandmother has another heart attack, it’s a ‘when’ situation, not ‘if’, she will probably die. My grandfather is on bed number two, in the emergency room across the hall. His kidneys are dilating because his bladder cancer has progressed at an extraordinary rate. He must have emergency surgery to flush out the blockages in his kidneys so that they’ll start working again. We have to wait for that to happen. We had to have a conversation with him, a repeat one about resuscitation; he is now a DNR as well. They sit, waiting, patiently, impatiently. To die. And we sit, waiting, for something to happen. Unfortunately that something is to die. Isn’t that sad? But what else are we supposed to do? We wait. Read books, visit and listen and talk and laugh and try to joke and try to get our minds to think of something else. It isn’t possible, really. It’s all we think of nowadays. Death. And funerals. And machines. And priests. And rosaries. And everything. And I’m just tired, too.