Everyone has gone to sleep. But sleep in a hospital isn’t really sleeping. People come in to poke and prod throughout the night. I roll over when the night nurse arrives. I give her my arm and she straps the Velcro blood pressure cuff around it. It squeezes tight then loosens as it lets out a breath to deflate.
Earlier, when I sweated through my gown and my sheets, Nurse Cathy knew how to change my bed without my getting out of it. Like those magicians who can pull tablecloths away yet leave all the dishes and knives and forks and glasses in place.
When she covered me up again, she left the sheets loose at my feet. Squeezed my toes to let me know she remembered.
Right now, the night nurse tries to tuck them in again.
I kick them free. “No.”
“Okay,” she says with a hint of sarcasm. Okaaaaaay. She sounds like Mila.
I take a cup of water and two pills from her. Nod. Do whatever she needs so I can go back to sleep. And wake up strong.
I’m already shutting my eyes again, letting my head hit the pillow, when a beeping sound jolts us both. It blasts through the ICU and between the crack of my sliding glass doors. Is it me? Is it my monitors? Am I okay?
The nurse leaves the cup in my hand. Ditches the blood pressure cuff by my bed. She rushes from my room and scrambles through the workstation to the room across from mine. There are too many doctors and nurses in there. I don’t see the woman with the yellow shirt as bright as the sun. Her chair is empty.
Someone hovers above the bed. Holds two paddles from a defibrillator. Calls out, “Clear.” The body bounces on the bed.
The beeping doesn’t stop.
They do it again.
I remember Charlie telling me about his friend at the frat party and the defibrillator that came too late.
Did he watch them do this? Did he see?
The woman in the yellow shirt comes rushing in from the hallway. She cuts through the workstation to get to the room faster.
She screams, “No!” and drops the cup she’s holding onto the floor. Splat.
She presses her hand to the sliding glass door and screams some more. She pounds on the glass.
She tries to shove her way into the room but a nurse pushes her back.
“Let them work,” the nurse says.
“I was only gone for a minute.”
That’s how fast it happens.
One minute. Everything changes. Like Charlie. Like my dad.
Seconds tick by. On and on they go, while everyone tries to save whoever is in that room. I wish Charlie had gotten that chance. I hope this person can be saved since Charlie wasn’t.
But then quiet settles in like fog. The beeping stops. The light flicks off. The darkness takes over. The doctors and nurses walk away. The woman in the yellow shirt crumbles into the arms of a nurse. She says no over and over and over again. I watch the nurse try to collect the pieces of the woman that are spilling out all over the floor.
I shut my eyes and instantly picture my mom in a random bed in a random room in a random hospital.
A midnight rush to save her life.
And then I picture her not there but somewhere worse. Someplace unknown.
I picture myself crumbling.
I push the thought away. I can’t let it in.
I have to find her.
She has to find me.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper to the woman in the yellow shirt outside the door of the room across from mine. It’s not a prayer. It’s an offering. To let her know I see her pain. I understand her pain. Even if I don’t know her, I know her loss.
And the way she’s breaking.