There were two TV shows I couldn’t stop watching—shows that for different reasons were the worst possible programs a person living in a hospital could watch. The first worst was The Big C, with a premise that revolved around the main character secretly having cancer—but it was funny! As a result, many nights before I fell asleep, I would make a mental note to discuss my latest ailments with Dr. Zimcik, since I was pretty sure I also had cancer. Sometimes I thought it was ovarian, other times bowel, often kidney.
And then there was Friday Night Lights—a show I should have stopped watching after the first episode, when the star quarterback of the series, after one brutal hit in his first football game of the season, ends up paralyzed from the waist down. In the hospital scenes, I noticed that the set was dressed with, among other things, the exact same tray table that I used every day. I became fascinated with the quarterback’s journey. I watched, pressing my hand tightly to my chest, as he moved through the five stages of grief and I cried when he arrived at the same sets of challenges that I had: the blisters on my hands from pushing the wheels of my chair, the switch to batting gloves, the frustration of transferring from the wheelchair to anywhere else. I had never been so invested in a TV character—including the ones that I had played. I searched for false notes in his performance but couldn’t find them. I watched, with my fingers over my eyes, as he attempted to have sex with his girlfriend, still unsure what exactly he was working with. And when he miraculously made another girlfriend pregnant, I wept happy tears for both of them, but also sad tears for myself, for the lost narrative in my life that would have catapulted my story into movie magic. What if I had become pregnant after Rich and I had sex in the hospital? What would that have looked like for someone in the midst of relearning how to walk, let alone in her late forties? But what I was also experiencing was a lost sense of self. Although I wasn’t feeling like much of a wife or a mother, I knew those parts of my life would eventually bounce back, but my career? I wasn’t so sure.
One night, after finishing an episode of The Big C and then having a Big Cry, I decided to check my IMDb page, where an actor’s complete résumé is listed along with her headshots. I found my page easily but my accompanying photo had mysteriously disappeared. In its place was a generic gray and white silhouette. Was this a sign? Was the universe sending me a message? Were my acting days over?
It made me think of a lecture Rich and I had attended. The speaker, a rabbi, had just found out his wife was pregnant when he learned he had cancer. Lying in his hospital bed next to another patient, he was asked why he never prayed to God to spare him, and the rabbi said: Why should God take the time to spare me over someone else? What makes me so special? Remembering this brought me back to earth; this wasn’t a sign, it was a glitch, and who cared that my picture was gone? It wasn’t as if I was acting anymore, anyway.
But how long had my picture been down? Did Jennifer’s assistant, in an attempt to divest her of the dead weight on her roster, make the unilateral decision to take it down? Did Jennifer know something I didn’t? Did somebody somewhere know something I didn’t?
I wrote an email to my agent.
Hi Jenn!
I noticed that my headshot is no longer on my IMDb page and it made me very sad because, well, it makes me feel as if I’m disappearing.
So although this could hardly be considered a priority at this stage, can you please ask your assistant to call IMDb headquarters and kindly ask them to put my fucking picture back up?
Thank you so much!
Ruth
I remembered an argument my father and I had had many years earlier, right after I graduated from university. I was getting ready to move out and he wanted to know how I planned on making a living. That part was easy: I would temp and wait tables while looking for a talent agent to represent me.
My father was dubious. “You want to be an actress,” he said. I didn’t like his tone and looked to my mother for support. Wisely, she let my father and I have it out without running interference (a skill I never quite learned).
“I can’t believe I have the kind of father who would stop me from following my dreams!” I shouted.
“I’m not stopping you. I just think your talents would be better served elsewhere.”
I snorted. “Doing what? I have a degree in English Lit. I am qualified to do approximately nothing.”
“I happen to think you’d be a very good writer.”
I was thrown. He had never mentioned this before—this was even more bonkers than wanting to be an actress. “You really think I’d make more money as a writer?”
Despite his reservations, my father didn’t stand in my way—in fact, once I made it clear that I was going to do exactly what I set out to do, he became my champion. At forty-seven, with a healthy acting career behind me, I felt for the first time as if I might have wrung out as much from my career as I could. Maybe it was time to try something new. The one thing that I had been doing every single day—besides crying, taking pills, and talking about sex—was writing. I had been keeping meticulous notes for months, ever since my feet began tingling. It had become a habit.
I took out my notebooks then, curious to revisit the past. I flipped to a random page—sometime in April, six months earlier. At that point the doctors were baffled by my symptoms. My eyes scanned the page and landed on one sentence.
“I think I have a tumor.”
I didn’t tell Rich or the doctors, not my friends or my family. In fact, I had no memory of writing that line. Such was the power of my denial and fear that when I was finally diagnosed, I was as shocked as everyone else.
I turned out my lights. I wasn’t preoccupied with my IMDb page or my acting career or my notebooks anymore. All I could think was: What would my life look like now if I had just said something then?
•
Sometime around mid-October, three things happened.
First, while I was on my nightly walk around the halls of unit 2B, I stopped Rumy to ask her what she thought of my fancy footwork.
“Don’t you think I look good?” I asked, walking and then coming to an unsteady halt like a slightly drunk army sergeant.
“I can tell that you can’t feel your feet.”
This was like being told by a director, in front of the entire cast and crew, that she knew I was faking it.
“Anyway,” I said, and I hobbled away.
I completed my rounds of the unit, slapping the ground with my seal flipper feet. I didn’t know then that Rumy’s honesty, as much as it stung, would turn out to be the best thing she could have said.
The second event happened when my agent told me that Degrassi wanted to book me for an upcoming episode. They were aware of my situation and had been understanding and patient. Now they wanted me back. But how? I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t walk—not well, anyhow. Working was impossible. I waited as long as I could and then said no.
It was the third event, however, that stirred up the most drama: A movie star sent me flowers.
At the beginning of my Lyndhurst stay, the movie star and his famous director wife sent me a stunning bouquet of pink roses. All the nurses clamored around to sniff them, chirping when they saw the signed names on the card. Rich was proud to know that such a famous client of his had been so thoughtful, and I agreed, even though my past feelings about this client and his famous director wife differed somewhat. Rich enjoyed this couple on a pure “they’re so talented and so nice” level, while I enjoyed them on more of an anthropological level. I watched him like I might watch the chimpanzees at the zoo. I liked the way his hands moved and the way his eyes darted over to his wife after she said something cute and how the famous director’s eyes darted back at him and they both laughed, right on cue. They seemed to not need anybody else to make them happy, which was both lovely and off-putting and why sometimes I drank a little too much when I was with them.
The last dinner we had had together, I wore a short black dress and my favorite gray heels. After dinner, Rich put his hand on my back and helped guide me out of the restaurant. My feet wouldn’t stop wobbling. It was August, soon after our trip to Peru but before I knew I had a tumor. Wearing heels (and downing a vodka martini with a red wine chaser) was my way of saying there was nothing wrong with me.
Once I was at Lyndhurst, I felt so open to the world and its multiple kindnesses. Rich was right: The movie star and his director wife were among the nicest famous people I had ever met, and his roses were beautiful. I sent the movie star a heartfelt thank-you note. A few weeks later, the second bouquet arrived.
“What’s this?” I asked the nurse who delivered them.
The flowers were red. I hate red flowers.
“Do you want me to take the wrapping off?”
“No, thank you,” I said. “Can I see the card, please?”
I was lying in bed, before dinner, something I swore I would never do. It had been a bad day. I was a miserable, vibrating, buzzing, burning, static-electric lady of leisure—a sad, lonely woman who spent huge swaths of her day in bed trying to fart.
The nurse passed me the card.
Wishing you a speedy recovery. Love, Movie Star and Famous Director.
Anger suddenly propelled me out of bed. I transferred into my wheelchair and put the fat box of horrible red flowers onto my lap and wheeled over to the nurse’s station.
“Take them, just take them,” I said to the nurse there.
“But they’re so pretty! Why don’t you want to keep them?”
I wheeled back to my room before she could say anything else. I leaned my elbows on my stupid buzzing legs and pushed my palms into my stupid graying hair. Did the movie star completely forget that he’d already sent me flowers with the exact same card and the exact same words? Did he think I just sat in my room all day waiting for moments like this to feel grateful for his kindnesses? Did he think I didn’t have any friends, for fuck’s sake? I finished an entire bag of jujubes while my heart thumped restlessly.
I always believed that a heavy dose of charm and confidence would take me wherever I wanted to go, no matter the situation. But stripped of the ability to stride in and out of a room, to make decisions on my feet, to take corners without hesitation, I was lost. It seemed that all the emotional and psychological strength I had built up over the years had somehow pooled in my legs, and without them, I was making false moves, inexplicable moves, wrong moves. I was all over the place and yet moving nowhere at all. In the absence of knowing for sure, I made up what others thought of me, and the stories I told myself weren’t particularly nice. I had decided that the movie star saw me as a sad, incapable, pathetic woman in need of gifts. And that’s when I realized: Oh, for fuck’s sake. They’re JUST FLOWERS.
I took a deep breath, opened my computer, and tapped out a thank-you note. It didn’t say much, but it was one of the most heartfelt I have ever sent.
Really, I wrote. Thank you.
•
It felt like overnight the intensity of my care dropped from a Code Blue to a Code She Can Wait. The dynamic with those around me, mostly my nurses, changed. Because I was more open to their preoccupations, my room became a kind of confessional. I loved my nurses with their finely tuned observational skills and tactfulness. My more relaxed body language must have spoken to them and the words they heard were: Tell me everything.
One night nurse was funny and scattered and loved a good laugh. She would stop by my room for last call to drop off my pills, then hang around, fussing over things that didn’t need fussing. We mostly talked about our kids and our plans for their futures. Her partner’s name came up occasionally, mostly in terms of his being a good father. But one night, she told me that she didn’t love him—had never loved him. I nodded sympathetically as she spoke.
“I met someone else, though. Someone from my twins’ school.” She looked behind her, then lowered her voice. “Someone married.”
“Oh?” I said.
“Yes. I love this man so much. One day, I saw his wife eating at McDonald’s.” She plumped up my pillow and readjusted my call button. “If I had a knife, I would have stabbed her.”
I stayed very still.
“I mean it. I really wanted to stab her.”
“But you, but you wouldn’t, right?”
“You know, I’ve been thinking about you a lot,” she said. “I think you can really benefit from acupuncture.”
This sounded like an interesting idea, although coming from possibly a crazy person, I decided not to pursue it.
The following morning, Sonja came in with my pills. She was Russian, just a couple years older than me.
“You look so young,” she told me in her Russian accent that seemed to be swiped from Joey’s small but hilarious Slavic repertoire. “I not only look older than you, I look like I can be your grandmother!”
Sonja had beautiful blue eyes with heavy bags underneath. Her hair was short, bright red and slicked back behind her ears. She also liked to come to my room and tell me stories about her existentialist children. It was Sonja who took my pulse and told me I wasn’t pregnant when I thought that maybe (hoped that maybe, feared that maybe) I was. She held my wrist between her fingers and she said, “My first husband was oh, OH, a great kisser, but not much else good. My second husband—nyet. But this one, my third, every department good.”
“Lucky lady.” I said.
“About you,” she said, and paused.
Uh-oh. Was it my turn to share?
“I hear you no longer need touches.”
Oh. That.
“This is very good news,” she said.
“I probably should still have them, but I stopped it.”
“I understand.”
“I’ve got to start figuring that shit out on my own—pun fully intended—don’t you think?” I really did want to know what she thought. I talked tough, but I was afraid. What if I was never able to generate a bowel movement again without the use of pills?
“I think it’s important that you direct your care. Didn’t Rumy tell you that?”
I nodded my head. “Rumy knows everything.”
“She is very smart lady.”
“She sure is.”
Rumy was no longer a primary part of my day, even though she was still considered my primary nurse. I saw her most mornings, but our time together was significantly reduced. By Lyndhurst standards, I had been deemed “independent.” I no longer needed someone to turn on the tub for me or wheel me in my commode. I no longer needed touches or help getting dressed or transferring to my bed or washing my back or reaching for my hair dryer. I was moving around so much, it had been days since a nurse had stabbed me in the stomach with the blood thinner Heparin so I wouldn’t get a blood clot from insufficient movement. I didn’t need someone to give me ICs and, at the end of dinner, I no longer needed a nurse to take my tray to the kitchenette for me. All I seemed to need now was friendly banter and someone to make my bed.
But I missed Rumy, even though I still saw her and we still traded information and stories. She kept me up to date on her son’s studies and new cashier job. But my days were filling up in different ways now, ways that didn’t include her. I was only a couple of weeks away from my discharge date of November 8. We didn’t talk about it, just in case it got pushed for some unforeseen reason, but together we were working toward the same goal—to see me leave. There would be other nurses, but no one like Rumy, my primary sweetheart.