Day 10

this is not a spa

First, the good news: Sophie is out of the ICU and coming along nicely in a “step-down” room. We’ve had lovely nurses and the few doctors I’ve seen — the very, very few — have been nice enough. Despite instilling terror in my English students to never ever ever use the word nice, I’m going to use it here because — well — I’m a nice girl. It’s all about the nurses and the respiratory therapists, the women and men who come into the room with brooms and who leave with the dirty linens and massive plastic waste, isn’t it? And the antibiotics. I’m giving a nod to antibiotics. Sophie is recovering from bacterial pneumonia and will be on antibiotics for a couple more days. There is talk about her going home soon and that both thrills and terrifies me. I’ve been going to work, leaving my sister, who flew in this weekend, to keep vigil by turns with Henry and Oliver. I talk on the phone to the Nice Doctors Whose Names Come and Go From My Tiny Little Mother Mind™. Sophie’s father spends most overnights, several friends have visited or cooked food and dropped it off at the house. A neighbor drove me to the hospital yesterday evening when I called and asked him to. I can’t take the drive home alone, to tell you the truth — the walk out of the labyrinth, the thoughts crashing in, the worry, the surreality, just all of it gets out of hand but is lessened by company, by open weeping. Carl is my resident saint whose gentleness and care for all of us is unparalleled.

I think I have symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder or something because damn, Reader, I’m on edge. I sat on a windowsill in a tiny hospital room when Sophie crashed a week ago. Is this going to be it? Is this going to be it? Is this going to be it? However nice, however good the care, however well Sophie responds to the antibiotics or the respiratory therapy, I hate this place. I dissociate from the horror by imagining it as a kind of dystopia. While I’ve always disliked the genre, my knowledge of it in a literary sense comes in handy when I walk in the grand lobby and listen to the grand piano, when I pass the gift shop, closed for the night and walk down the hallway, past the Ellsworth Kelly, past the Jasper Johns, past the Roy Lichtenstein, past the endless plaques and enscripted marble of donors, so many donors. Follow the signs for Saperstein, the lovely people in the lobby said, yet over and over I get lost in the labyrinth, forget to go to plaza level, wander and whimper, wander and whimper. Then round the corner and past the Joni Mitchell, her arms outstretched, reaching, her mouth a shout? a grimace? dog eat dog, or is it joy and rhapsody? I emerge, then, into a brief outside, look up, the cold lines of steel in a blue sky, the big shitty stretching its arms down there, its boulevards and billboards and lights with a backdrop of snow-covered mountains, past the children’s hospital and say a prayer in my head for those inside, the sick and the parents and finally step into the Saperstein, the house for the step-down and the ICU, nod at the guard (so many guards so much security), up the elevator to Sophie’s floor, Sophie’s room. The Saperstein so deep within the labyrinth. Dr. Saperstein is the doctor in “Rosemary’s Baby!” my friend reminded me when I went on and on in my post-traumatic babble about the dystopian. Of course it’s named that I thought as I laughed, as I laughed, as only the chronic-traumatic stress parents laugh, balancing the gratitude with the hate and the healing with the horror.