Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [40]
“That’s OK, Mom,” I said with a smile, trying to contain a laugh. “I don’t need a pillow. You keep it.” I arranged the pillow back in place, and her head now nestled in it comfortably.
“I love my kids. I have good children,” she said with a sweet, faint smile.
I put my hand on her face and gently combed her hair back with my fingers.
“We love you, too, Mom.” I felt lucky to have her as my mother.
A moment later the night nurse came in with an aide and said that she needed to give my mother some potassium in her medicine bag and change the top sheet of the bed. For my mother’s modesty and privacy, she suggested that maybe I could “just step out for a few minutes.” The nurse had hair fashioned into a long braid that extended down her back, the kind I guess you might see in a religious community. Her glasses were like something from the late seventies, and they framed a face that seemed frozen in time.
I left the room and went out in the hallway to wait. It wasn’t long before I heard sheer human panic.
“No—move her over. There! Stop! We’ve got a problem!”
I rushed back into the room to see my mother in what I later learned was a cardiac arrest. The nurse was panicked and confused and I suggested we get the doctor down here NOW.
“Yes, right.” She picked up the intercom phone and paged the lone doctor in the ER.
My mother was struggling to breathe—gasping, gasping, gasping, her eyes locked on to mine as if to say, Please help me!
“Everything’s going to be OK, Mom, hang in there!”
I turned to the nurse and demanded action. “We need the doctor in here now! Do I have to go get him?”
The doctor walked in and immediately saw what the problem was. “She needs to breathe! Where is the respirator?”
The little ICU at this small-town hospital did not have a respirator machine in the unit at that moment.
“Grab the portable!” the doctor shouted. The nurse went and got a small plastic device that she tore out of a plastic bag, then tried to insert it in my mother’s mouth. She had it upside down.
“Here, give it to me!” the doctor demanded. He took it from her, inserted it into my mother’s mouth, placing the tube squarely down her throat. “Here, pump it like this!”
Jesus, oh Jesus, what the fuck was going on? He was having to show a nurse how to bring air into a patient’s lungs? This was madness. I wanted to jump in, help, do something, do CPR, something, ANYTHING, please God this isn’t happening!
While the nurse pumped, the doctor told the aide to go down to the ER and get the hospital’s lone ventilator. He worked on my mother, gave her a shot of something, massaged something, and the only good news in this moment was that the heart monitor never went dead, never flatlined. The heart was still beating, there was oxygen getting into the blood.
I picked up my phone and called the house. My sister answered.
“I think you guys better get here now,” I said, trying to disguise my panic. “Something’s happened. Don’t kill yourself getting here. She’s alive. But struggling bad. Come now!”
The ventilator arrived with another nurse, and the doctor wasted no time jamming the hose straight down my mother’s throat. Her eyes were no longer on mine. They were open, frozen, looking straight up and seemingly unaware of what was happening to her. At that moment a bolt of lightning struck the hospital and it lit up the room. I had not noticed that for the past fifteen minutes a thunderstorm had rolled in and was now in full fury. Deafeningly close thunder exploded, and the lightning continued to flash into the unit. I looked at the clock: 12:45 a.m. For some reason, with all that was going on, it occurred to me that I was born at 12:45 (but in the p.m.). How did I know this? For every year of my adult life, no matter where I was, at exactly 12:45 p.m., my mother would call me to tell me this was the moment she gave birth to me. Now, here I was, crumbling inside, helpless and lost, feeble and useless and impotent in this most critical moment where I was responsible for giving her life,