Sometimes I Miss The Hospital

The truth is that sometimes I miss the hospital where I’d stay with my mom when she was sick with ovarian cancer. I miss the plastic couch that turned into a bed, of sorts. Sitting there all day and then lying there, not really sleeping there, all night. In the morning, folding up the blanket and rocketing that piece of furniture back into its couch-like state, my face imprinted with the plastic design of the cushion. Looking back, I probably could have bought a twin fitted sheet for the bottom, but somehow every hospital stay when you’re a caregiver just comes at you. There’s no prep. You don’t expect another one, even as you become an expert, ascending the hierarchy of patients’ family members that mill about on the oncology floor. And fundamentally, that’s what I miss. Feeling useful. Understanding what to do. Knowing where I should be. In some ways, my mom’s illness was more difficult than my mom’s death, but this is grief’s true trump card: you cannot do anything or be helpful now. There’s no blanket to fold. So I miss the hospital sometimes. 

When my mom first had surgery for ovarian cancer, I was surprised to find out I’d be the person staying with her overnight. After all, I was only 32 years old. Even Jesus was 33 before he got into the real heavy lifting for his family. I realized everyone would leave and I’d be alone there with my mom, left to do the hospital overnight things. I had no idea what that would mean and was embarrassed to ask. She was in tremendous pain. Being around your mother while she writhes in pain is, well, obviously not it. I didn’t want her to be in pain and, selfishly, I didn’t want to see it. Accepting my mom is human was one of the hardest parts of accepting that she was mortal and thus would die. This is all one continuum that’s unsavory from top to bottom. 

 I quickly learned that when you are a caregiver at the hospital, one of your jobs is to watch the clock and start calling the nurses for more pain meds at the appointed time. This does not happen without your constant intervention and, in fact, nothing does. At this point, I didn’t understand that you ultimately must start storming the halls demanding action. I was naive. That first night the nurses woke me up to tell me that they had accidentally given my mom both Percocet and morphine, which could be deadly. My mother was still in so much pain on what was apparently an unprescribed, potentially fatal combination of drugs, so what was going to happen when they took her off? They were going to explain all of this to her, I said, not me. What was I in for here?

I’m by no means a healthcare professional. A lot of my duties as a caregiver were something akin to being a production assistant around the hospital room: untangling her earbuds (how she got them into basically a perfect sphere every day, I’ll never know), going to buy iced tea and Diet Cokes, cleaning the lunch detritus, texting people how she was doing, ranking the nurses with my mom, and overall just existing on standby. The most important task was making sure the good iPad was charged and the backup iPad was at least within reach. I wonder what Steve Jobs would think about what happened to the iPad. It revolutionized hostess stands and helps toddlers and Baby Boomers watch videos, but it hasn’t really found its third niche yet. Alas, what it does, it does well. In the morning, my dad would relieve me and I’d go home and shower, stare into space, steel myself for another night. 

I understand that nothing I’ve described even sounds particularly exhausting. The difficulty of every task was compounded by a layer of anxiety that permeated all these experiences. The anxiety stemmed not just from the fact that my mom had cancer, but that I had no idea what was happening with her health moment-to-moment. Often the acute reason for my mom being in the hospital was pain or a bad reaction to chemo. So what did that mean? Was she dying of cancer? Or was this when she’s going to get better? I had no idea what we should be expecting or working toward during any of these hospital visits. But again I was just a PA. You sign the NDA and keep your head down. Maybe this is secretly a Beyoncé visual album?! It wasn’t.

I was also severely sleep deprived. You’re never deeply sleeping in the hospital because of the beeps. The beeps keep you up. When my mom had to go to the bathroom I had to unhook her from her various machines. When the machines are unhooked, there’s beeping. I wasn’t aware of how to hook them back up, nor was I allowed to. There’s a whole flowchart of who can hook and unhook things at the hospital. Waiting for someone to hook up the machines can take an hour or more. And that's just in our room. Never mind that even when my mom got hooked back up, the guy next door would have to go to the bathroom. We can hear his beeps too.

When my mom would sleep I would watch Grey’s Anatomy on my laptop. Perhaps you think watching a medical drama while living a medical drama is an odd choice, but that’s actually when Grey’s is at its most perfect escapist television. The drama on Grey’s feels far from the drama of the real hospital. When Grey’s does drama, a plane lands on Lexie Grey. When real life does drama, you’re crying on the phone with the cafeteria because they forgot to bring your mom lunch. One is a little more cinematic. Also, on Grey’s, four or five doctors might be in the same room trying to help you. In real life, the names of the nurses on the white board are probably two people who quit before Y2K. Even the tragedy on the show is easier to accept: everyone notices, everyone mourns. No one just goes on with their day. Grey’s is a better version of life at the hospital, not only because all the doctors are also models. I’ll admit it can be confusing when you’re watching Grey’s Anatomy while in a hospital room and you hear one of those beeps. Hard to say if the sound is coming from the show or the room. Pro tip: get up and move around to check. Err on the side of caution when it comes to medical beeps. 

I still feel bad about some failures from that time. My mom wanted to watch Crazy Rich Asians, which had just come out in theaters. Presently, in Covid times, movies are often released simultaneously in theaters and on streaming, but remember this was an unreasonable request as recently as six years ago. I told her she can’t watch it on her iPad. She didn’t fully believe me, but let it go. I could have looked for a torrent or an illegal stream -- hey, Michelle Yeoh can lose a few cents for a dying woman -- but I didn’t. I could have tried harder, but I didn’t. She never saw the movie.

I have to admit sometimes I was self-focused. I’d just stare out the window across the parking lot to the Hooters across the street. A Hooters in plain view of the oncology wing where many women are being treated for breast and ovarian cancer is, let’s face it: pretty funny. I found it comforting to think just about 100 yards away people were watching football, eating wings, wearing short shorts with pantyhose. There was life over there and probably Coors Lite buckets.

Other times I’d “take a walk” which meant a 45-second tour of the triangle layout of the oncology floor. I’d pass young patients who were there by themselves. Who was reminding the nurses about their pain medication and fetching them Diet Cokes? No one. Some rooms had big groups of visitors -- never a good sign. Sometimes my mom and I would sit in the room and we could hear the wailing of such groups nearby. We never acknowledged it. There’s nothing to say. They say there’s no atheists in a foxhole. I can say with authority that there’s no one that doesn’t believe in a magical combination of denial and distraction in an oncology wing. We can’t face what happened next door because then it could happen here.

The early years of visits to the hospital were mostly a string of similar experiences, feeling abandoned and forgotten by the staff, looking insane while trying to find anyone to fulfill a basic task like taking out the trash, staring wistfully at one of America's 430 Hooters locations. The problem with these bleak early memories is they were the salad days. Be careful when you’re in the hospital wishing you’d get more attention. Because you will.

As my mother’s death approached, the anxieties of the early visits actually fell away. There was a point where we knew she would never be released from the hospital. The purpose of the hospital stay was clear now: to shepard her to her death. She asked the nurse practitioner point blank how long she had to live. She seemed so forthright, but being attuned to my mother’s mannerisms, I knew this had been the result of her own courageous self-encouragement. Maybe she was hoping I’d ask, but her conclusion was right: I wasn’t going to. The NP swallowed and I looked down at her shoes, fixated. Three weeks. The shoes were those Rothy’s you see advertised on Instagram. I told her I liked her shoes even though I didn’t particularly like them. My mom asked if they were comfortable. Not really, she said. I hate those shoes. 

My mom had a habit of talking to me when I was on the phone with someone else, making it impossible for me to hear the other person, aggravating every phone call, and prolonging it by half. If I was on the phone with a family member, telemarketer, or field hockey coach, the experience would be half trying to hear the other end of the phone and half listening to my mom who would always be talking while they were talking. It drove me crazy. When hospice services called the hospital room, I attempted to talk to this hospice woman, but my mom kept peppering me with questions so I couldn’t hear her. I was amazed. She was really never going to reform that habit, huh. Like, wow, you’re doing this on the last possible phone call you can. I guess this ritual was important to her and essential to her sense of self. 

The hospice woman’s name was Carrie I think? That’s the kind of detail I would think I’d never forget, but then I very much did because her name, really, in my mind, is Hospice Woman. Anyway, she came by the room to talk about -- what did we talk about? Adventures in dying I guess. This was a meeting my mom and I took like we were meeting with wedding vendors or college admissions counselors. Gotta listen to the info and look at the pamphlets. Keep up with the trends, find out what other people are doing. Do you have anything about, oh, say not dying? No, no, no. Stupid question. Sorry. 

These are the end of life chores you perform. They aren’t even interesting really. The whole interaction was not as cathartic as when Laurie Metcalf gives her daughter instructions for how to go on without her when she dies of cancer in season two of Grey’s Anatomy. Now that was a dying scene. In real life devices have to be charged and straw wrappers are everywhere; it’s getting cold at night. 

The purpose got clearer, but the work got harder. My mom needed more help and was more violently ill. Her lucidity faded, having apparently spent her last mental energy on her true passion: being annoying during phone calls. In the last days, she was on Percocet and morphine, this time on purpose. I thought that was like illegal, but it turned out she just hadn’t been nearly sick enough that first night. Nurses were much quicker by our side. I realized where they’d been all those other times I’d cursed their absence. They had trusted me to take care of my mother because they cannot care for everyone equally. They don’t have the bandwidth. When you are in the back of the queue, be thankful. When they trust you to take care of a patient, be proud.

Five days before my mom died she underwent a Hail Mary round of chemo, that even in success was maybe only going to extend her life another few weeks. It was quickly apparent it wasn’t going to work. Even worse, it was going to make her last days even rougher. That’s okay. That was her decision. I don’t know if it was the right decision or the wrong decision or the decision I would make, but I know her well enough to say she would make this decision 100 times over. She would show us she would do anything to get out of the hospital, to live with us on the outside even for a little while. She would talk while the cancer was talking. She was going to be heard. 

My mom died when my dad was there at the hospital in the afternoon. I came back to the hospital, where my brother, uncle and aunt had already arrived. As I came off the elevator, I saw a family that was obviously new to the oncology wing. You could just tell by their posture and the type of meeting they seemed to be having with the surgeon. They looked new here. I don’t envy them, I thought. It had been a long four years. I didn’t want to be there anymore.

Now I don’t know. Now I miss it. I think about going up to that floor one day, taking a walk, hearing the beeps, feeling useful. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that there’s no use missing the hospital. You’ll be back.