Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [39]
We thanked the surgeon and, with a sense of relief, headed back to the intensive care unit. Well, there was no “unit” or ward at this hospital. They had a small ICU area with two rooms. That was fine, just fine. She was OK!
When we went into our mother’s room, she was hooked up to all the standard monitors and IV tubes, but she was awake and alert and very happy to see us.
“Here I am,” she said, stating the obvious. I liked hearing that: first person, present tense.
“Well, the doctor says you made it through with flying colors!” I said to her, as I pulled up a chair beside the bed. My sister and wife and father were equally upbeat in their assessments of her condition.
“You’re gonna be OK, Mom,” Veronica said, giving her a kiss on her forehead. “In fact, you look pretty chipper there!”
Our only concern until this point had been the effects of putting such an elderly person under sedation. We had known of friends with not-good stories of what happened to their parents when knocked out with anesthesia. Sometimes all their memory didn’t return, at least not right away. I decided to give her a pop quiz.
“Hey Mom—you know what day this is?”
“Sure,” she said, “it’s Sunday.”
“Where did you and Dad go on your honeymoon?”
“New York. Boston. Albany.” (I know. Albany. Don’t ask.)
And now for the Final Jeopardy question. This was a family that loved to go to the movies.
“Where did you first see High Noon?”
“Cheboygan, Michigan. Nineteen fifty-two!” she responded without missing a beat. Wow. Crisis averted, roll credits!
Everyone pulled up a chair, and we spent the next few hours talking about the good times and growing up and Dr. Wall and the time he was “blocked” just before her wedding and how he too had to go to the hospital and almost didn’t make it. Never had discussions about enemas been so heartening.
The doctor and nurses on call would occasionally come in to check on her, change the IV bags, inspect the area where the surgery took place. She would doze off now and then, her body wanting to restore itself after the shock of surgery.
By 9:00 p.m. it was decided that we would take shifts and stay with her for as long as she was going to be in the hospital. I offered to take the first shift until the morning. Veronica and my wife took Dad and the kids back to the house. I got comfortable with a book and my ever-present legal pad, sketching out the final fixes I wanted to make to my film before its release in the fall.
Every now and then my mother would wake up and we would talk.
“I’m very lucky to have the family I have,” she said.
“We’re very lucky to have you,” I told her, patting a lukewarm washcloth on her face like she would do for us, so many years ago.
“I’m thirsty,” she said. She was not allowed to have any food or liquids, not even water, during these first twenty-four hours. All we could do was to let her suck on a little Q-tip that had a tiny moist sponge on its head. I held one up to her lips, and she sucked on it with some desperation.
“I’m parched.” I smiled. No one said “parched” in this century or the last.
“Lemme do this,” I said, as I took another one and rubbed it around her lips. Like an infant looking for its mother’s nipple, she grabbed at the little stick with her mouth, her tongue, her teeth, wanting more, more.
“Thirsty.”
“I think that’s all we can do for now, Mom. I’ll just sit here with you and we’ll do it again in a little bit.”
I sat in the chair next to her bed and got comfortable.
“Here,” she said, as she lifted her head off her pillows and tried to reach for one of them. “Take one of my pillows.”
I could not believe, in the state she was in, that she was worrying about me not having a pillow. And that even in her worst suffering, her instincts were still to be a mother, to look out for her son, to make sure he was OK, to allow him to fall