Sadness, Followed by Anger

 
Grief

This is a picture of a picture of a family in the waiting room perched on plastic chairs just inside the sliding doors. They will not answer because you do not call their names. You watch them, frozen in this slice of time: phones to ears, to tell others, surely, to spread this surge of grief thin into something that can be handled, passed around, tucked away. You say their names out loud this time because the next thing they will pass around is hope, and by then, it will be too late.

 

Anger

They say little about angry patients in medical school. I remember a patient actor instructed to play the part of an incensed patient who had spent too much time stewing in the waiting room. When he flung the fake exam room door open, I started to giggle, which he responded to with more anger, like any good actor, and the scene had something about his wife dying, or at least very ill—but it was too funny by then. And now I wish I had more patient actors in my waiting room getting fake-angry at the five-hour waits that I could giggle at until they got fake-angrier. You can’t play-practice absorbing anger and frustration, not like a wall, but something porous, so the anger isn’t reflected. I empty myself until I am a hollow-bellied vessel for all this hurt and anger, and then I pour it out.

 

Caution

He’s thirty-two with cerebral palsy. A shock of dyed orange hair interrupts his forehead like an act of defiance. The arc of the day had long ago reached its apogee when he fell from his chair, or more precisely, fell with his chair. I scan his body for obvious signs of damage: lacerations, blood collecting beneath skin—the blush of an early bruise. His elbows and wrists are held in a flexed, protective position over his chest. His legs twist like two opposing forces. His ankles barely move. I pause, realizing this is not a body I know. His mother guides me through the normal range of motion of his joints, which is not a normal range of motion for joints. A fiancé is put on speaker phone, turned up loud. Tell them he has no kneecaps, and then, his ankles are fused. He winces with most joint movements. I order images of everything, knowing they will probably be negative, but also knowing what a missed break or bleed could cost in this fragile life he’s scratched out for himself.

 

Distraction

A woman here for unrelated reasons and donning what can only be described as a coat made of pink feather boas gives birth to a howling infant. It’s not mine, she screams. But we all think it’s hers.

 

Hunger

I want to be gluttonous with this soft spring day. I want to shove it in my mouth and tear it with my teeth until it knows something of this world of which it knows nothing. I would chew until the grass lost its bucolic song and the trees fisted their bare hands. I would swallow the birds and their voices, stare down picnic blankets until they furled like crisped leaves against the hillside. The hydrangea, catching wind, would shut its thousand wide-eyed blooms, realizing it has become as insensible as loss beat to the drum of a dull basketball: dum, dum, dum, swoosh. No one tells you your humanity will slip in and out of focus like a lens you built by hand and broke, just to survive.

 

Levity

I’ve been jumped, I’ve been shot, and I’ve been spanked, but I’ll tell you, tooth pain trumps them all.

 

Honesty

You feel your body leaving itself over and over again, and each time, it comes back a little less whole, like if time were the ocean and the body sand, lapped away. Take me back to my first home, no, before that, when shade was just a place cooler than the sun, and I knew not what made it or how it could move in a day. I fantasize about lying in bed sick, calling a friend, or anyone, really. What should I do? I’ll do anything—which is to say—I’ll do whatever you want—which is to say—can someone else please do the healing? Each day comes like this, and I taste it on the tip of my tongue. It will be different, but ultimately the same in a kind of impermeable way. Each day comes, and I feel like an OPEN sign left on, hanging like a bright lie against the dark shut sky.

 

Thirst

It’s not the one she wanted, the soda I’m holding to her lips. Her hands lay at her sides, shaking like they’re commandeered by a puppeteer five espresso shots deep. I hardly write at all anymore. I am so afraid of saying the wrong thing. So tired of saying the wrong thing. I tell her that these rib fractures are not your run-of-the-mill-time-to-go-home rib fractures, but more the result of a cancer from-somewhere-we-don’t-know-where ilk, and relax a little when she looks at me incredulously and asks, So, bumping into the grocery cart at Safeway really did all this? There are few times I can confidently say no, but this is one. She’s still sad; it’s cancer, after all. Metastatic. The bad one. She sucks on the straw thoughtfully, gratefully, I think to myself before I’m embarrassed by my own thoughts. She says, Enough. This is diet, isn’t it?

 

Nostalgia

I revisit a city I left when I was five. There is nothing I know anymore, and yet I search for parceled memories impossibly tucked under the bulbous bottom of two-feet-tall hurricane drinks and crates and trucks street singers perch on so they can look down at me and ask who I know here, which is no one but the face of the magnolia I can find by scent, unabashedly overpowering like everything else. She lays it on thick and fat until I feel, or maybe am, intoxicated—at the end of the day finding there’s no difference. This is a story about finding and losing things. No, it’s a story about losing things you never found, like the nipples women flash in the street, all drunken smiles for the men above who throw down necklaces of shiny plastic beads, or don’t. The Spanish moss hangs down in thick lecherous fingers from the balconies. The necklaces on the ground are broken serpentine shapes that won’t take to a neck. I find a bag of beads—five dollars from a street vendor. There are ten necklaces. That makes each necklace worth fifty cents, which makes each breast worth twenty-five, and I buy it.

 

Hunger, Again

The lucky come with family who will intermittently leave and return, bringing feasts to cure their hunger and boredom. The smell of food fuses with antiseptic and the pungency of the very sick. When I walk into the room, they set down their drumsticks. I can’t get over the feeling I am not the person they have been waiting for. The truth is, I was not built to be a feeder. They watch me expectantly, a waiter with a dinner plate, late, their eyes hungry, starved. Most days, we have saltines. Some days, there are graham crackers. There are always sandwiches with several slices of deli meat in the middle, no cheese. I remember laughing when I first learned this, months after I’d been handing the limp sandwiches over like consolation prizes for those who had waited longest. I laughed about it until a patient asked for vegetarian options and was offered two slices of bread, the meat thrown in the trash. By then, it wasn’t funny anymore.

 

Sustenance

I like walking the block to Julio’s Empanadas when I get home. It’s the one place I know that only accepts cash. Whether this is part of some anti-modernization movement or they never got around to fixing their credit card machine with the “Sorry, it’s down =(” sign hanging since last January, I’ll never know. Either way, I save all my cash, which isn’t much. It’s a small 10-by-10-foot storefront. Everything you can buy is held in plastic display containers. It’s always a one-man show. I don’t think his name is Julio. He’s young, his head always bent at an angle toward his phone, perched on the stool just behind the counter. Occasionally, he slides from his stool to check the industrial-sized ovens in the back before wandering to the front of the store. I’ll perform a cursory scan of the day’s specials, so we can both pretend I’m not the sort of person who orders the same thing every time. I’ll hand over whatever cash I have, and he’ll hand me an empanada, warm and wrapped, along with the loose coins I’ll drop in the tip jar. I’ll marvel at the small things that sustain us.

 

Sadness, Followed by Anger

The nurse comes to tell me later, His wife died last week, and now he lives alone. I add it to the bottom of my note where I talk about his illness and why he came, like an afterthought. A bolt of sympathy, and then I see another patient, and it’s gone like a light someone turned off. I see him again several hours later, the hospitalist and nurse negotiating the admission. He’s another old man, angry with the system and life, and already, I have forgotten everything.