Ruth came to in the lackluster light of the recovery room, her consciousness little more than a dull throbbing, her thoughts, all but incomprehensible, running thick as sap. She was not in pain, not in the way she was used to experiencing pain, anyway. From some unseen corner beyond her psychic fog came a relentless electronic bleep, flat and measured in its cadence, as though eight-year-old Maddie were somewhere in the room playing Pong on the old Atari console. Only faintly was Ruth aware of her mummified face or the feeding tube forced rudely up her nose and snaking clear to the back of her throat, a violation that made swallowing exceedingly difficult. If this was anywhere near the new normal, Ruth wanted nothing to do with it. Thus, she opened her eyes only long enough to gather her bearings before she let the fog envelop her once more.
How long she remained in this state, whether thirty seconds or hours, was impossible to tell. But when next she opened her eyes, Dr. McGonagle was standing over her in blue scrubs and a face mask.
“Good morning, welcome back,” he said. “How do you feel?”
He couldn’t possibly expect her to answer, could he? It was difficult enough to reason, but communicating with her jaw completely immobilized was obviously out of the question.
McGonagle promptly offered her a pad and pencil to convey her thoughts, but sapped of all her strength, Ruth demurred with a feeble shake of her head.
“You did great, but it’s no wonder you’re out of sorts,” he said. “Once we got in there, things were considerably more complex than we expected. You were in surgery for nearly seven hours. Not a record, but close. The infection had begun to attack the surrounding soft tissue, particularly the tongue and the cheek. Of course, we had to remove the…”
At that point, Ruth lost all focus, or rather relinquished it, as the rest of the explanation washed over her like so much indecipherable droning. By the time McGonagle arrived at “but the good news is…,” Ruth, half a tongue, a considerable shaving from her left tibia, seven teeth, a lymph node, and the entire bottom right portion of her mandible lighter, had no interest in the good news, or any news at all. Instead, she closed her eyes once more and sought refuge in the slow drip of oblivion.
The snow had turned to slush by morning, when Abe left the hotel having skipped both his breakfast and his carvedilol, proceeding directly but carefully over the sloppy sidewalk and across the street to Swedish. When he checked in on the eighth floor, he was informed at the desk that Ruth was still in recovery and likely sleeping, though he was welcome to sit with her.
An orderly soon arrived, escorting Abe through the vestibule and down the corridor. God, but he deplored hospitals for their tidy, antiseptic aspect, their glaring fluorescence, their lifeless air, their vinyl-composite neutrality, and their eerie hum that never failed to set Abe on edge.
Ruth lay motionless on her back in the darkened room, heavily sedated, her sunken eyes closed, her resting countenance a cadaverous veil of imperturbability. The rise and fall of her chest were barely perceptible beneath a thin white blanket. Wrapped in gauze, her face was badly swollen and discolored on the right side, a tube crammed up her left nostril and taped to her upper lip.
Everything about the spectacle was grim and unnatural. To see her that way, wasted and inanimate, shook Abe to the core. She looked comatose lying there. He wondered if it was the machines keeping her alive, for it was difficult to tell where the life support started and Ruth ended. What if she never regained consciousness?
By the time Abe lowered himself into the bedside chair, he was already on the verge of tears. For two and a half hours, Abe slumped in the chair at Ruth’s side, hypnotized by the electric blip of the heart monitor, steady as a dripping sink, with no book or magazine to occupy his thoughts as Ruth remained perfectly still, stupefied, and lifeless in the dreary confines of her hospital bed.
At the three-hour point, by which time Abe was lightheaded from hunger, his blood pressure no doubt on the rise, Ruth finally opened her eyes, and Abe lifted himself out of the chair, at once apprehensive and relieved by her emergence.
“There she is,” he said, forcing a smile.
The muscles of Ruth’s face flexed ever so slightly as she attempted to manufacture her own smile, a feeble attempt yielding only a slight twitch at the left-hand corner of her mouth.
“It’s over,” said Abe. “You did it.”
Abe gathered her bony hand in his own and squeezed it softly.
“You’re a tough old broad,” he said. “You know that?”
Ruth’s eyes projected but a dull glimmer in response.
“You’ll be back home in no time,” Abe assured her.
A lame consolation, to be sure, and likely an empty promise. Ruth was so underwhelmed by the prospect that she closed her eyes again and slid back into a state of insensibility. Still, Abe stood clutching her hand for five minutes longer, fighting back the lump of grief that had lodged itself in his throat like a briquette.
Lightheaded and a little unsteady, Abe left the recovery room and made his way past the desk to the elevator. On the second floor, he bought a bran muffin and an apple juice in the cafeteria, taking this repast in the solitude of a corner table. It was then he remembered his carvedilol and briefly debated returning to the hotel to fetch it.
Instead, he resumed his post at Ruth’s bedside, where he spent the next four hours sitting vigil with nothing to occupy his worries, as nurses came and went; levels were checked, and general appraisals were made, Ruth enduring these ministrations with all the awareness of a human pot roast. Meanwhile, her condition remained unchanged. If she opened her eyes at all, such an occurrence had escaped Abe’s notice as he marked the hours to the metronomic beat of the pulmonary monitor.
Around four thirty p.m., McGonagle made an appearance.
“I heard you were here,” he said, extending a hand. “Has she been responsive?”
“Barely,” said Abe, shaking his hand.
“She’ll come around,” he said. “Her vitals are on track. She’s a strong woman.”
“Don’t I know it,” said Abe.
“We were very aggressive once we got in there,” he said. “I’m confident we got it all.”
And what if they didn’t? Surely, Ruth wouldn’t survive a second surgery. What if this whole torturous affair was just prolonging the inevitable? What if the cancer was running rampant somewhere else in her body? What if things got so bad that Abe was forced to make a decision? For as much as both of them had prepared for the inevitability of death, and the mutinous possibilities of failing health, it still seemed impossible that any of this was happening. One day a loose tooth, then, bingo bango, you’re looking mortality square in the face.
“How did this happen, Doc?” Abe said. “Why did it happen?”
McGonagle set a sympathetic hand on Abe’s shoulder. “Just bad luck,” he said. “Simple as that. One thing we know about cancer is that it’s not very discerning.”
Slumped in his chair, Abe ran his hands over his face. So, there it was, the definitive medical explanation: bad luck. It didn’t matter what you did to ward off disaster, what precautions you took to avoid it, never mind all the life choices, the kale, and prune juice, and avocados, the lean white meat, the sunscreen, the fish oil, the natural toothpaste, the vitamins, supplements, and medications aimed at protecting the body from grim possibilities; in the end you still had to account for bad luck.
“You look like you could use some rest,” said McGonagle. “Give her another night, let’s see how things look in the morning. She’s only twenty-four hours removed from the surgery, and it was a doozy. Things are liable to look rosier tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. The day we all took for granted as we plotted and planned our futures.
“Okay, Doc,” said Abe. “You know best.”
Abe felt a million years old as he inched his way down the hallway with a full bladder toward the elevator. By the time he reached the bathroom in the first-floor lobby, his teeth were swimming. Abe wasn’t sure he’d make it, and it was a close call, to be sure, but when he finally answered it, elbow propped against the tile wall above the urinal, a shiver of pleasure scurried up his spine. It was the first time in weeks that anything had seemed right in the world.