Coronado - Dennis Lehane [22]
He has been here for four hours. Doctors and nurses come and go but pay attention only to the families of their own patients. Strange faces, it is assumed, are the problems of other nurses, other doctors.
Daniel pulls a chair close to the one he’s sitting in. He does so carefully, quietly, so as not to wake the Brazilian woman whose name he has forgotten. She is here for her husband; he was in a car accident. Glass wedged in his throat, pieces of plastic from the underside of the dashboard infiltrated his stomach. His surgery has been going on for five hours. They have no children. He works two jobs, sends the money home to a brother. He and the brother hope to open a gas station in two years outside São Paulo. Then, she told Daniel, they will have children.
Daniel places his feet up on the chair. He places his coat over his chest. He feels the need for sleep as he hasn’t since he was a child. He feels that today he has developed a kinship with grief and trauma and nurses’ asses. He feels it in his bones: love—for the pudgy woman who’d come from a party, for Michael, for the Brazilian woman, her nose pepper-spangled with dark freckles. He feels flushed with it and exhausted by it. But it’s a good exhaustion, earned, he feels.
HE STAYS IN the hospital complex for a month.
At some point, they tow his car. But they don’t leave. He sees Troy ten days in, wandering the main street, eyes glancing up at the windows. He rotates to a different hospital every day, returning to the first every seventh. He wanders into ICUs, SICUs, CICUs, even NICUs, which have nothing to do with brain trauma and everything to do with babies, some of them the size of peanuts as they lie under egg-shaped glass, huff into masks, writhe their fists and feet into the air.
It is assumed he is a father, a husband, a brother, and while he has been all those things in his life, he has never felt those roles so proudly or direly as he does here.
He watches the war in waiting rooms with the loved ones of the injured, the impaired, the damaged and broken and internally soupy, the brain-dead, the cancer-stricken, sickle-cell-stricken, terminally anemic, HIV positive, jaundiced, tumor-ridden. He hears stories of rare diseases with odd names. He hears of sudden flicks-of-the-switch in the cerebral cortex, the aorta, the left and right ventricles, the kidneys and pancreas. (And of these, he learns that more than anything, you should pray for a healthy pancreas. Once it goes wrong down there, modern medicine pretty much skips the rest of the show.)
Take care of your colon too. Exercise, for God’s sakes. Stay away from the fried food, the cigarettes and liquor, asbestos.
But there’s more—don’t cross streets where the noon sun is sure to hit the windshields bearing down on you. Don’t swim drunk. Don’t swim at night. Don’t swim. Don’t work on the electrical yourself. Don’t anally pleasure yourself with a Coke bottle (a rumor, true, going around one of the surgical wards, but a good one; everyone gets a laugh). Don’t ski anywhere near trees. Don’t live alone. Don’t climb a stepladder while pregnant. Don’t laugh while eating. And whatever you do, don’t retire. Half the people in here are less than a year removed from retirement, and Daniel hears the same tragic-comic stories night after night. He’d taken up fishing, he tended to his garden, he’d been planning a trip, she loved lemonade, she went on long walks, she was knitting an afghan the size of your house, he bought into a time-share, they took up golf.
Daniel watches the war and feels cocooned here. Hospitals strip a lot from you—your independence, your confidence, sometimes your will to live. But pettiness too. Pettiness is the first casualty of the ICU waiting room. No one has the energy for it.
Would you like this magazine? I’m done with it.
Oh, let me remove my coat. Take the seat, take it.
I’m going to get a soda. Would you like one?
Is this okay, or should I keep flipping?
Even the employees in the gift shops and the cafeterias and the food court and