View from a Ring-side Seat

It feels appropriate that this little piece of writing, drafted close to 2 years ago, should be the first posting here. The intervening time hasn't made the theme any less true: I'm still tempted to let the aches and pains and emotional strain of the cancer turn me into a selfish so-and-so. But I heartily withhold my consent to such a response.

View from a Ring-side Seat
by Maureen Morley

The heart catheterization ward connects two hallways, apparently, as a steady stream of hospital personnel cross from one to the other, like actors moving stage-left to stage-right. My bed is front row center.

I chuckle as a disheveled orderly walks by for the third time. First, she marched across the stage, as if late for an appointment, her lip jutting out almost as far as her belly. Next time, she came from the same direction: same gait, same belly, same expressionless face, arms laden with files. And here she is again, ridiculous in rubber gloves and a plastic surgery – but it looks like a shower – cap. How did she get back to stage left so fast? I imagine a director hiding in the wings, with a knack for comic timing, having just given a little push with a whisper, “There’s your cue!”

What a wild place this is.

A white-haired, pot-bellied paramedic swaggers onto the ward, stops. He glances around. Perhaps because, of the several patients here, I’m the only one with eyes open, he stops in front of me.

“We picking you up?” he asks, inclining his head and raising his eyebrows in mock flirtation.

“No, I’m afraid not,” I say, hitching my thumb toward the elderly man in the stall to my right.

A second paramedic, also white-haired, but wiry, walks in and joins his partner. “She the one?” he parrots. Paramedic one shakes his head sadly.

“Naw, here’s our guy,” he says, emphasizing his last word.

Both turn their attention toward their charge and reach for the next joke. Alice[1], one of two nurses frenetically working the ward, sets them up: “Make sure you bring his bag of clothes.”

“Rats,” says Paramedic one, looking at me and jabbing his partner in the ribs, “women’s underwear sells for more.”

Alice and I grin obligingly at their practiced comic routine.

I am grateful for the distraction. One more thing to break up the waiting. I can’t avoid fixating on the wall clock to the left: one o’clock, two hours since I changed into this backless gown, settled into the bed in stall number 5, and began taking in the show. And that was after arriving at this massive general hospital at ten o’clock, only to be told the doctors were backed up, to go away and return at eleven. The time has passed remarkably quickly.

As opposed to the near-serenity of the cancer center where I usually go for testing and treatment, this place hops. It is also short-staffed, with two nurses attending the six beds plus unseen duties that periodically draw them behind the scene, to the right or the left. Jack, the charge nurse, pretends to be exasperated at the pace but, I suspect, actually enjoys the adrenaline pump. Alice works on another ward, but is here to help Jack. They’re snow-board buddies, she told me, when she sloppily started my IV. I bled all over the white sheet. “Oops,” she said, “I’m making a mess.” She mopped at my hand with a damp cloth, but it’s still stained a grainy dark red.

I barely care. That was the last digging needle for a while, maybe forever. Once they finally wheel me into the operating room, the doctor will install a “porta-cath” in my chest, to provide easy access to my veins. The reasons for the installation are two-fold: my veins are getting tired and thin from the last twenty months of treatment and the next chemo drug I’m about to start is vicious, it burns out little veins. Once the device is in, a quick jab to the center of it does the trick. No more nurses frustrated by my rolling veins. No more silent prayers: please, let her get it in the first time. A particularly kind-hearted nurse at the cancer hospital – who cringes every time she has to start an IV – yesterday blurted out, “Oh, thank God!” when I told her I was getting a porta-cath. Then her face flushed and she apologized. “That’s okay,” I said, glad for the momentary break in professionalism that divides practitioner from patient. “I know it’s not your favorite part of the job.”

Jack hurries past again, glancing back at me, hollers, “I’ll get you that information pamphlet to read in a minute.” He said the same an hour ago.

“Okay.”

But what I really want is another blanket. Good grief, it’s cold in here. I guess they don’t want blood flowing too easily through all these newly implanted devices. But I’ve decided to wait for a lull before asking Jack or Alice for another blanket.

I do stop Alice, however, to point out that the gentleman in the bed opposite me has begun tugging at the tube running around his face and into his nose. He appears only semi-conscious, and his leg twitches violently. Alice walks over, checks, and motions to me that he’s okay, doesn’t need the oxygen any longer. And I guess leg spasms are common when one has just had a tube run from thigh to heart. Yikes. He opens his eyes at a question from Alice, and I close mine to give him some privacy.

From the nearby lounge, I hear Jack trying to reason with a lady who’s irate at having been kept waiting so long. She sounds very angry, pouring out blame on the only one she can. What is blame, I wonder? Why do we want someone to blame when things go wrong? Does it make anything better? Can we then prevail upon the guilty party for positive change? Sometimes. But oftentimes a thing’s just done and there’s no changing it. But we don’t want to let it go. I hear the nasty edge in the woman’s voice in the waiting room. Can blame just mask our desire to hate?

I shudder. I’ve been that lady, puffing myself up with my rights, vehemently denouncing – or quietly turning an icy back to – those that did me wrong. Could easily be her now, if I gave in to the temptation to grab at what I imagine I deserve. But no, not today. There’s nowhere I have to be. There’s nothing for me to do in this particular moment. My task is to wait – and not be a jerk.
It’s interesting how each new hardship tempts me to hatred. It is as if there’s this part of me that wants to say “Okay, this is the last straw. Screw it. Now I know I’m being treated unfairly. I suspected it all along.” Then, I’d get to be nasty to other people – pissed off with impunity. Because after all I feel so daggone achy and tired, and no one will dare tell me I’m not justified. And my friends do forgive me easily when I’m short with them. But I try not to be. However understandable it is, it’s wrong – a temptation, common to everyone. Who doesn’t suffer in this world? Suffering is no excuse for being a jerk.

Still, my self seeks this perverse victory. So periodically I confess, spill my guts to God, meanness and all. And it helps.

Can’t be much longer now. My eyes move back to the clock; another half hour gone by. Finally, the doctor walks up, introduces himself and apologizes for the delay. The last procedure – a heart cath, not the simple porta-cath that I’ll be getting – had complications.

“But I warn you,” he says, “it’s really cold in the operating room.”

Okay, director, cue the next scene.

[1] All names in this piece of writing have been changed.