For the next ten days starting today I will be
publishing on this blog a novella I have written. It has ten chapters, and I will be posting one
chapter a day for each of the ten days. The writing concerns a crisis
experience undergone by Cara Hutchins, a middle-aged woman, during her stay in
the hospital facing a risky operation.
But as it turns out, her surgery is not the challenge by which she is
ultimately tested, rather a confrontation involving another patient for which
there is no forewarning and one that calls upon internal resources from which
she has never before had to draw – physical, psychological or spiritual. She survives a frightening trial by fire to
discover a new dimension of herself. I
trust that the story will capture your interest enough to stay with it all the
way to its dramatic and cathartic outcome.
The entire work is related from her point of view; it is an internal
drama.
All of you who complete the reading of it, however
long it takes you, are requested to respond, just so that I can keep track of
how many people I have reached. This is
something of an experiment, and I will be eager to find out how well the
experiment works. Thank you for your participation!
Chapter Titles:
Chapter 1 The
Somewhat Deadly Greeting
Chapter 2 Plotting
to Escape the Jinx
Chapter 3 An
Unlikely Rescuer
Chapter 4 Testing
the Firmness of the Ice Beneath Her Feet
Chapter 5 Refusing
Unsolicited Counsel
Chapter 6 A
Rude Awakening and a Cruel Demon
Chapter 7 Groping
for the Hand of Deliverance
Chapter 8 A
Frantic Search for Answers
Chapter 9 A
Strange Leap of Faith
Chapter 10 “Oh Death, Where Is Thy Sting?”
Chapter 1 The Somewhat Deadly Greeting
Cara, two days after admission and awaiting the
completion of blood thinning in preparation for neck surgery, finds herself
saddled with a new roommate, a woman whose lively and outgoing and rather
bizarre personality has a strangely unsettling and depressing effect upon her.
It
was shortly before 8:00 am. Cara had had
a clear sight line to the window in her hospital room, ever since she had
awakened an hour before. Her eyes had
bathed in the brightness of the translucent sunlight. But her new roommate had just arrived and was
about to occupy the bed on the far side nearest that window. Cara’s view was now partially obstructed, the
woman becoming an unwanted and unavoidable distraction.
Looking
around was the only option Cara considered open to her. Her eyes were tired from reading ominous news
in the daily papers and the few glossy magazines her brother had brought
her. The television set she had just
turned off, when her channel hopping had not been productive of anything she
considered worth her time. And she felt
no urge to engage in conversation and tell yet another individual why she was
in a hospital bed hooked up to a blood thinner, when she was undergoing no pain
and taking no medication.
She
felt ridiculous complaining about the boredom that had been thrust upon
her. So with no inclination to sleep,
all she could do was watch the woman’s methodical transformation from casually
dressed stranger to bona fide surgical patient.
Cara only hoped that the stranger was not telepathic, or else she would
be reading Cara’s anxious mind.
It
had been a little over two weeks since she had gone to her primary care
physician for what she thought was to be a routine medical check-over and he
thought it wise to send her for an MRI, since she had never in her life had one
and because the pulsations in her neck seemed to him at best “ambiguous.” Ten days later, when the MRI was performed,
she learned that her left carotid artery was over 90% clogged.
Her
physician had explained to her over the phone, upon the receipt of the MRI
findings, that it had to be treated without delay. If that waste material floated up to the
brain, she most surely would have a stroke, or at best it could partially blind
her. Perhaps both! He suggested that she waste no time and go to
the Emergency Room at once. He would
call the ER staff and let them know she was coming at his request.
During
her time there, she had felt like an impostor.
She was in no pain, her appetite at lunch had been robust, and her
energy level was high enough that she knew she could put in a substantial day’s
work. But there she was, alongside
people with cuts and bruises and severed limbs, people in wheelchairs fighting
for the next breath – broken bodies and broken spirits. After more than an hour’s wait, a
neurological expert determined from examining her motor coordination that no
stroke was in the offing.
That
had been a relief after three or four hours of intense worry. He explained that she was what is known as
an asymptomatic case. Without the x-rays
no one could tell anything was amiss with her body. But he told her she would have to be checked
into the hospital for further observation and probable surgery. The artery would have to be cut open and cleaned
out.
Before
being admitted to a bed, she had then been subjected to something called a
Doppler Test. A flat surfaced device,
one that in her perspective resembled an electric shaver, had been rubbed over
both sides of her neck for the space of approximately a half hour, while an
attached machine made bizarre sounds that put her in mind of some prehistoric
animal repeatedly opening and closing its big, cavernous mouth. She was told that the device was taking more
detailed pictures of her neck. A noisy
and gross way to do it!
Over
the two subsequent days she had been visited by the surgeon who was to perform
the operation, and he had disclosed to her the high risk factor involved. The surgery, it seems, could cause the very
stroke she had thus far averted. But
before they would operate, her blood had to be thinned to reduce the risk of
further clogging.
Every
one of her instincts told her to forget the surgery for now and go home, but
she knew she would take a humongous chance with her fifty-four-year-old body by
letting it drag on. The pending decision
on her part weighed on her, adding a droplet of dread to her almost
insufferable boredom.
The
image of poking and cutting and slicing so close to her face and throat kept
popping into her mind. She not only
feared death and/or helplessness but walking into it alone and unarmed. How much harder it was to face such a thing
without a family of any size to stand by her.
All she had standing by her bedside at the moment was the blood thinner,
to which veins in her arm were connected.
Because
it could not be moved while in operation, she had been subjected to the
indignity of having to make use of a bedpan.
The toilet facility, only feet and inches away, was for the moment off
limits to her. But she was thankful that
nowhere during her ordeal had she succumbed to the migraine headache that was
periodically visited upon her. She had
had a headache or two, but never the headache. She well knew the difference.
She
had been alone most of her life. There
were two marriages, and both her husbands had died on her, the first one killed
in Vietnam within the space of a year and a half after the wedding. The second one, almost twenty years her
senior and sickly when she married him, gave up the ghost within five months
after the nuptials. Neither left her any
children.
Her
father’s desertion of the family when she had just reached the age of six
necessitated her mother going to work as a waitress, and over the long years
the mother worked herself into poor health.
A brother named Vernon, three years younger than Cara, was the only
surviving relative she had.
Her
head was full of ghosts. Beside the
husbands were her overworked mother, who breathed her last breath cradled in
Cara’s arms, and an overprotective and spooky grandmother, who was still
spooking her after all the many years.
She was free of responsibility to anyone but herself but not free from
care or the torment of solitude and alienation and bad dreams.
And
now she faced the possibility of facial and vocal paralysis. She imagined herself mutilated and
broken. How would she manage any kind of
cordiality with anyone who witnessed her broken-ness?
She
had been hoping that she would have the hospital room all to herself for the
balance of her time, free of pesky visitors and free of wounded and weary
sufferers, but now her privacy had been invaded once more. The stranger began to take off her street
clothes with meticulous care, preparing to slide into the hospital garments,
and it became immediately apparent to Cara that she was in no hurry to do
so.
Her
attention seemed to be more on her body than on her change of dress. The woman looked to be well past sixty, her
hair a dull gray. Cara watched her as
she rubbed her arms gently, after which she placed her fingers tenderly against
her face and stroked her cheeks.
Obviously
she was going through the same mental and emotional process that Cara had gone
through off and on the past two days – wondering if she was doing the right
thing by entrusting her flesh and blood and bones to a physician who had no
personal investment in her. Would that
flesh ever be the same again? Is this
undressing marking a day and an hour that will serve as a milestone in her slow
disintegration into dust?
Then
the woman did something that caused Cara a surge of embarrassment. She let the strap on her slip fall down her
arm, did the same with the strap on her brassiere, and bared her left breast. To Cara’s slight horror, she took her naked
breast in her hands and regarded it with what seemed to Cara as an almost
religious devotion. Cara quickly looked
away before the woman had time to notice if she had been watching.
The
thought of being enrolled as a witness to this unseemly act was most unsettling
to Cara. It was tantamount for her to
undressing in public. But Cara’s
discreet evasion of eye contact did not stop her roommate from breaking the
silence.
“When
this thing is gone, I just wonder, will one side of my chest be heavier than
the other?”
What
an astounding and unheard of way to begin a conversation with someone you have
never met, thought Cara! No hello! No self- introduction! No word of greeting whatsoever! A question about female anatomy! What kind of shady lady do we have here, she
wondered. Something maybe worse than a
psychic!
“I’m
sorry! What did you say?” Cara drawled
out in reply, hoping she was giving the impression of someone too fogged out to
have seen or heard anything. For once in
her life she regretted being so sober.
She wished she were anesthetized.
“Will
I feel lopsided after they remove this thing?”
The truth hit Cara like a claw hammer.
This indecent, shameless lady was a cancer victim and was about to
undergo the removal of her left breast.
“It
doesn’t weigh that much,” remarked Cara in an air of dismissal that she hoped
the woman would notice. But the newly
arrived surgical patient was not about to be dismissed.
“Doesn’t
weigh that much! How much do you suppose
one of these things weighs? And how
would anyone ever weigh it, until it comes off? You can’t put one of them on a
scale, if it’s attached to the rest of the body. Can’t you just see the doctor holding an
amputated breast in his hand right after an operation? Does he ever walk over right then, put it on
a scale and weigh it?”
The
woman then became in Cara’s eyes even more brazen, as she got up from sitting
on her bed and walked over to Cara, still holding her breast and now
flourishing the thing in Cara’s direction for Cara to observe up close. Mere annoyance now transposed itself into
utter distaste. She wanted to shoo this
roommate away, tell her to keep to her side of the room, but she hated and
feared confrontation.
What
was this weird woman thinking? Did she
wish for Cara to examine it, to take a clinical interest in its shape and size
– or weight?
The
roommate allowed the breast to drop but kept her eyes directed to it, letting
it protrude and hang above Cara’s head.
Cara did not know when she had ever experienced such embarrassment. She figured the woman wanted her to look and
comment or some such thing, but Cara stubbornly kept her eyes averted. She had no interest in that spongy mound of
flesh. She had enough of her own worry
to occupy her.
The
woman’s patter resumed.
“My
educated husband- and now my dead
husband, may he rest in peace- he used
to wonder how a woman could stand so straight and poised with these big protr- trusions pulling her forward. That’s what he always called them – pro-trusions. I can barely pronounce the word! I don’t think I ever heard him once use the
word breast or boob. Of course, when he
was with his men friends he probably called them knockers. Where men get that word for them I’m sure I
don’t know. I’ve never known one to
knock anything down.”
Cara
loathed being anyone’s captive audience; she began to contemplate how to
extricate herself from this unwelcome assault upon her sensibilities. The air in the room began to feel stifling to
her, even though the air conditioner was pumping full blast. Apparently unaware of Cara’s unease, the
woman continued her reminiscence.
“He
had a beer belly. A big
beer belly! Now that was
a pro-tusion! That was an
obstacle to standing up. Much more so
than any bulging boob! He could really
knock something down with that, if he set his mind to it. Whether he’d still be standing after he did
the knocking down, I’m not so sure. Why
can’t we call a beer belly a knocker?”
Realizing
that she had been hopelessly pulled into a conversation she did not want, Cara
decided that at the very least she could redirect it. So she asked, with the exposed breast
waggling above her face, “When is the surgery?”
“Today
– in just a little while! I had a false
alarm last time.” The woman finally
turned back toward her own side of the room and resumed the process of changing
into the hospital garments and in a few seconds had covered the breast, talking
all the way through the process.
“This is the third time I’ve been in the hospital
in the past eight months. They checked
me in for the surgery twice before, but both times they had to cancel it. Complications! By the way, my name’s Dagne Denison. And you are-
?”
“Cara
Hutchins.”
“Well, Cara, I hope I’m not the last person on
this earth to introduce myself to you.”
“What?”
responded Cara. The last on this
earth! Was she speaking of someone’s
death – her own maybe, from the mastectomy?
If so, why was she sounding so nonchalant about it? “What’d you say?”
“I
said I hope I’m not the last person on this earth that you ever meet.
You
see, I introduced myself to the two roommates I had on those first two visits
to the hospital, and they died on me.”
If
someone had pricked Cara’s skin with a knife, she could not have felt more
suddenly lacerated or under siege.
“Died? Did you say died?”
“Yep!”
Cara
got it: She was being warned that she, Cara, might die. Her shock was swift, and it cut deep. Dagne then enlarged upon what she had said,
now sounding to Cara almost jovial, or at the very least bleakly humorous.
“They
both kicked the bucket before I was checked out. I was the last person on this earth to make each
of their acquaintances. Makes you feel
like a jinx. Good thing I’m not
superstitious. But that is amazing. I can see it happening once in my lifetime,
but twice? And so close together?”
Cara
wanted to be told that this was a joke.
“Two roommates- ?”
“On
two different visits to the hospital!
Couldn’t stand being away from me, pined themselves to death.” Then Dagne smiled a teasing smile that
offered some succor to Cara but nowhere near enough. “Just kidding, of course, about being a jinx. I never found out why they croaked.”
Cara
started to hyperventilate, but she was determined not to let this Dagne know
it. The woman was actually raising the
specter of her death, Cara’s, her possible death at
least. And she was doing it by the use
of ‘croak’. The hated word suggested to
Cara not a peaceful departure from the earth but a very loud and clamorous one,
a very ugly scene. After all, it rhymes
with ‘choke.’ Her spirit felt bruised,
and she heard herself gasp. She hoped
Dagne had not heard the gasp.
A
young fellow in hospital uniform entered the room and walked directly over to
Dagne, who was now sitting on her bed.
He was a clean-cut fellow, with a slight goatee, broad-shouldered but
about medium height. He possessed the
kind of eyes that looked as if they took in everything they viewed and then
some. The neat goatee made him seem a
little priestly. A look of excited
recognition spilled over Dagne’s face and a welcoming smile was stretched
across his.
“Well,
hi there, Chuck! Pleasure meeting up
with you again!”
“I’m
not hard to find,” he replied. “I won’t
say I’m glad to see you back.”
“Just
say you’re glad to see me – period,” suggested Dagne with a snicker and a
handshake.
Cara
welcomed this distraction; she believed it would stop the flow of the harrowing
conversation she and Dagne had been having.
She would be able to take a breath now, get herself calmed down and sort
through her thoughts about Dagne’s terrifying disclosure. She would have been pleased to be left out of
the banter that was about to occur, but Dagne had other ideas.
“Chuck,
have you met Cara Hutchins?”
“Can’t
say I have.” He greeted Cara without
moving any closer to her. “How do you
do!”
Cara
nodded him a greeting and said nothing.
The last thing she wanted was someone else invading her space,
especially someone among Dagne’s garrulous friends. But Dagne seemed determined to pull Cara into
the conversation.
“Chuck
and I got real acquainted the last time I was here. He knows politics, has this elaborate plan
all worked out for the government to follow, guaranteed to wipe out all our
country’s problems. I told him he ought
to run for office. After he’s elected,
he’d put everything in order. Wouldn’t
you, Chuck? After all, they don’t call
you an orderly for nothing.”
“Except
I’m not an orderly; I’m a nurse,” he corrected.
“Men
nurses! What’s this world coming
to? Why aren’t you a doctor?”
“First
you want me to be President of the United States, now you want me to be a
doctor,” he remarked with a sly grin.
“One is a far cry from the other.”
“You
look like someone in authority might look, so I guess President would suit you
better.”
“I’d
make you my press secretary,” he commented.
“With your way with words, those news people couldn’t keep up with
you. You’d talk ’em down.”
So
this verbosity on Dagne’s part was nothing unusual for her, Cara discerned.
“I’d
talk ’em down, all right! They’d get
writers’ cramp trying to take notes. Why
not make me Secretary of the Treasury instead?”
“The
way you handle your money?”
“Did
I tell you that much about myself?”
“You
were about to declare bankruptcy, weren’t you, the last time you were here?”
“The
story of my life! I’m always giving away
my secrets.”
“I
didn’t ask you to.”
“Lots
of people go bankrupt these days. It’s
fashionable.”
One
of the hospital kitchen crew, a Hispanic woman looking to be in her thirties,
arrived at that moment with Cara’s breakfast.
She wheeled the serving stand into position over the bed and placed the
tray on it. She then left without
uttering a word. Dagne saw the food that
had been placed in front of Cara and made a colorful comment about it.
“Ah,
it’s so wonderful being waited on like that.
Having breakfast in bed is comfy enough, but all three meals?! This is the closest to royalty I’ll ever
get. I wonder if queens ever have
mastectomies.” Dagne then walked over
and surveyed the food tray in front of Cara.
“It looks harmless enough. To be
sure they wouldn’t admit me to the hospital to poison me. If they wanted me dead, they’d just wait for
that little malignancy to do its job.”
Cara
was by now so annoyed and rattled that she could not commence eating. She just let the tray sit in front of her,
waiting for her roommate to back off and return to her own bed, which after a
few lingering seconds she finally did, incited by Chuck’s next question.
“They’re
going to do it this time, huh?”
“Yep,
I’m a condemned woman,” declared Dagne.
“I’ll be minus an appendage. It’s
an amputation, any way you slice it.
Oops, that was an unintended pun!
Sorry for the slip!”
Dagne
snickered, then in a mere few seconds her self-consciousness seemed to
vanish. “On second thought, why be
sorry? If you have to look the devil in
the eye, why not smirk a little!” She looked down at her breast but evidenced
no sign of grief or sorrow. “Yeah, old
lefty here and me just spent our last night together on this earth. Today we say goodbye forever.”
“You’ll
just weigh a little less, that’s all,” Chuck ribbed. “It won’t stop you from running your
mouth. You’ll even have another secret
to give away. That should make you
happy.”
A
woman without discretion too, noted Cara, and on all occasions!
“How
could a missing breast be a secret?” Dagne asked in jest. “It’s practically in your face.”
“I
don’t think I’d care to have it in mine.
My wife wouldn’t be too happy about that either.”
Dagne
laughed uproariously before she offered her clarification. “I guess I meant that it’ll be in my
face.”
“If
you’re anything like the women I know, you’ll want to keep it secret, or at
least drop it as a subject of conversation.”
“But
where will I ever find anyone to take an interest in my secret life the way you
do?”
“Well,
I have to get back to work,” said Chuck.
“Just wanted to stop by and welcome you once more.”
“Do
you have to go so soon?” pleaded Dagne.
“You’re good for me; you keep me on my toes.”
“Then
I had better go,” chided Chuck.
“On your toes is the last place for you to be right now.”
“But
you’re so entertaining,” Dagne declared.
“No,
I’m just interesting and friendly,” maintained Chuck. “You’re the entertainer.”
“Then
stay and watch the show.”
“I’ve
got to return to my duties.”
“If
you’re a nurse, why can’t you come and nurse us?”
“Because
I’m assigned to another floor. But I’ll
stop by again while you’re here. Stay
cool.”
Chuck
proceeded out the door. Cara watched him
go with a bit of dread. As long as he
was in the room, he served as a kind of buffer between her and Dagne. With him gone she felt once again
vulnerable.
This
Dagne, to whom she had just been introduced, was a person she knew next to
nothing about, a total stranger, and within a matter of minutes she had
involved Cara in a shadow game involving jinxes and curses and the nimbus of
daunting death. Though she spoke in an
amiable and fun-loving manner, she had brought storm clouds into Cara’s mind,
not the sunshine of pleasant companionship.
She
was obviously a social animal, who made friends easily and without effort,
seeing as how Chuck had gone out of his way to visit Dagne, if only for a few
moments. Sociable! Friendly!
So why was this sociable and friendly woman such a threat to her, Cara?
Cara
finally began to eat, though she tasted nothing. But the food did give her something to focus
on, a means of staving off the encroaching anxiety and fear that Dagne had
unleashed inside her already disquieted mind.
If this new roommate tried now to invade her privacy, she could use the
function of eating as an excuse to put her off.
Her
hands were shaking, as she sought to tear open the pack of sugar on her
tray. The tearing resulted in a little
spillage. Instinctively she squeezed a
few granules of what was spilled between the tips of her right thumb and index
finger and flicked them over her shoulder before dumping the rest onto her
cereal. She was startled to learn that
Dagne had been watching her from the other side of the room.
“What
did you do that for?”
“Do
what?” she responded.
“You
just threw something over your shoulder.”
Cara
saw no point in running a dumb act.
“Just an old habit of mine! Sugar
grains,” she answered, hoping once again to be dismissive of an unwelcome issue
and hoping Dagne would take the hint.
But again the aggressive Dagne probed on.
“Old
habit! How did you pick up that habit?”
“My
grandmother did it.”
“Your
grandmother did it? Every time she ate?”
“Just
when she spilled some.”
“To
what point?”
“It’s
supposed to keep the devils away.”
“Keep
the devils away? Why would a devil care
if you spilled sugar?”
Cara
decided not to answer. How could she
make a crass wit like Dagne understand the life she, Cara, had had to
live. She knew that she was being rude
to cut Dagne off, but she knew she risked much more to open up the subject any
further. She did not even look in
Dagne’s direction, just kept her eyes buried in her plate.
Cara
did not want to see the possible hurt or the possible bemusement or
disparagement in Dagne’s face – or, even worse, a cold indifference that would
make Cara shudder. It was that sudden
and irrevocable disconnection that she feared she might have to relive, one
that she had brought upon herself repeatedly throughout her life.
Cara
regretted bringing her grandmother into the conversation with Dagne. She was somewhat grieved to see that that old
woman by whom she was practically reared (while her mother slaved in the
restaurant) was still casting a spell.
She thought she had shed all that superstitious stuff a long time ago,
but she now saw that at the least power of suggestion she could still be
disquieted by even the most casual allusion to hexes and evil spirits.
She
had heard from her grandmother about demons using human beings even when they
were completely unaware of it. She had
often tried as a child to imagine some invisible spook alighting upon an
individual’s shoulder, using that shoulder as a sniper point to propel pain and
calamity out into the surrounding world.
She feared that if she looked too long or too hard at Dagne, she might hallucinate
and actually see a spook on the woman’s shoulder, whether there was really one
there or not.
She
told herself again that such a fear was groundless and foolish; nothing like
that had ever been seen by her before.
But the sudden aura of untimely death, hers in particular, had been
released into the room, and her breathing had grown more labored. She feared that maybe this is the way Dagne
had inadvertently killed those first two roommates – not by having some demon
rake or bite their flesh or drink their blood, not by any physical assault, but
by subverting their minds and imaginations, unnerving them and disarming them
from within.
That,
she understood by this point, was how her maternal grandmother had subverted
her. The old woman had thought of
herself as devout but in Cara’s hindsight now appeared more superstitious. Hers was a God of judgment, whose universe
was bestrewn with all kinds of booby-traps.
She
would never allow a cat in the house as a pet, because cats were sinister creatures
who brought misfortune. Cara was taught never to
touch a cadaver or else evil spirits would enter into her. That is why undertakers were such weird
people. They were full of evil spirits. And the grandmother was a strong believer in
curses. She was always obsessed over the
story of Jesus cursing the fig tree and regarded the slow death of any tree or
shrub or flower to be the fruit of somebody’s infamy.
Cara
had often wondered what superstitious meaning the woman would have attached to
migraines, a recurring malady that Cara had not acquired until adulthood, long
after the grandmother was gone. She
would probably have considered it a symptom of some kind of demon possession. Cara knew that they sometimes felt like demon
possessions.
Cara
had become skeptical about much of the grandmother’s world view by the time she
reached adolescence, but what really hooked her was the old woman’s warning
that whenever she used a four-letter word or thought an evil thought or did a
sneaky thing, God would subtract time from her life – a day, perhaps a
month. Cara’s tender child’s mind had
reasoned that twelve such infractions could shorten her life by a whole
year.
When
she had found herself in the hospital those two days before and facing surgery,
her grandmother’s warning had come home to her.
She was only in her early fifties, so maybe for all her perpetrations
God was finally foreclosing on her. Her
better judgment rejected such a notion, but the little child in her still
trembled at the thought.
It
was clear to Cara that Dagne had invoked the shade of her grandmother, and Cara
felt too inhibited to shoo the shade away.
But she felt some relief, when Dagne’s daughter, a rather attractive and
sleekly dressed woman Cara perceived to be about forty, arrived to stay with
her until the surgery. When Dagne
introduced her to Cara, Cara feared that once again she might get pulled into a
three-way conversation, but this time Dagne let her be and engaged with the daughter
by herself, much to Cara’s relief.
No comments:
Post a Comment