Clown Girl - Monica Drake [8]
The nurse said, “Long distance?” Like she expected instead a whole family nearby, maybe packed into a tiny Studebaker idling in the hospital parking lot.
“He’s the only family I’ve got,” I said.
The second photo, my parents? That was ancient, ancient history.
A doctor listened to my chest. Only then did they hook me to an EKG. The EKG spit out a code of dancing lights. On the electrocardiogram, I watched my heart like a muted mouth open wide; it screamed one silent word repeatedly. The emergency room doctor read my heart’s code, and made the translation: Ni-tro, Ni-tro, Ni-tro.
That was the word, my heart’s demand, the blood pump’s room service order.
Abnormal Sinus Rhythm, the doctor said. Too little blood pressure in the chambers. “We’ll set you up with a cardiologist,” he said. “Get a second opinion.”
They gave me nitroglycerin. They gave me potassium. Eensy weensy pills to do a big, big job. I would’ve liked nitroglycerin first thing—that tiny tab of a pill under my tongue was better than breathing, better than food. In seconds it brought my arms into circulation, put my head on my spine, made my spine calm again down my back, my chest at ease.
Somebody said what I had was a Heart Attack. Cardiac arrest.
I lay covered with a thin hospital blanket, shivering under the cooling water of the IV drip. In ICU, instead of heart attack, they said Wait for the cardiologist. Wait for his diagnosis. Then my condition became a heart problem, an episode, a bad spell. Anxiety.
The staff said it was a flutter, palpitations, a murmur. That bird against the window. With each passing minute the need for potassium and nitroglycerin drifted into the faded corners of collective memory, off to intermission, a perpetual smoke break in the cafeteria of the False Alarm Wing.
It happened, but nobody believed it.
Don’t tell doctors your dreams, ever. Don’t tell them your menstrual cycle. Don’t say you felt anything in your head, or that you might’ve known. If they ask about street drugs, which they will, say no, no matter what. If you say, I feel anxious all the time, you’ll get Valium. Otherwise, you’ll get what they call “mood equalizers,” daily doses of who knows what, a gambler’s crapshoot in tinctures of chemicals.
As a clown on the street, I had to keep my wits. I couldn’t take their chemicals.
Don’t tell doctors anything.
A woman came to my room and asked, “Are you a certified latex-free clown? I run activities in the children’s wing, and we’re always looking. So many kids have allergies these days—”
I reached for my bag and pulled out a handful of balloons. She jumped back, like I’d released biological warfare, and left just as fast.
The intake nurse found me in ICU. She dropped my torn slip of paper on the nightstand. “Mr. Galore is unavailable. We’ve tried a dozen times.”
Worst of all—and what I did—don’t cry even when they don’t help you, even when they only want a urine sample to charge you for a drug test you don’t need, even when the third or fourth doctor asks you politely, again, about the cocaine you already told them all you don’t use.
Clowns and coke, clowns as junkies and drunks—doctors can’t see it any other way, but I was an artist. The junkie drunk clown thing wasn’t in my bag of tricks.
THE NEXT MORNING, THE HOSPITAL CURTAIN WAS PULLED back from around my bed with a sharp scrape of metal rings on a metal bar. “Breakfast,” a man sang. He put a tray on a tiny table across my waist and powered up the bed until I was sitting. “Wake up. Let’s get some lights on.”
I said, “I like it dim.” The room was a quiet cave, a hiding place, time immaterial.
He snapped on a light as though he hadn’t heard me, then said, “Or maybe this one, over here,” and flicked on another beaming fluorescent.