doubletake

Jump to Comments

so many things tell me this is a dream.
there’s the orderly with the very, very long hair, pushing
a cart.  the valets joking in the parking lot, kicking the slush,
but most of all it’s the man in the waiting room
running around behind tables and chairs and couches
stacked with faux-italian leather purses.

there are neon green ones with a fake iguana print,
and pink ones with rhinestones
(because, well, that’s how they roll in venice, of course).

and the man who is hawking them in the waiting room
of the hospital has what i’m sure
is a european accent as fake as the things he’s selling.

it’d be easy for me to say:  what are YOU doing here?

but instead i ask:  what are WE doing here?

——

the truth is that leanne has been sick
since the day we got back from mexico.
10 days of fevers that just won’t go away.

she had a petscan last week, just the regular one,
that was perfectly clean, so it’s not a cancer thing…
in that it’s not that she has cancer.
but it may be a cancer thing in that she has something
that just won’t go away…that her immune system simply
is shot.

it’s impossible for me not to think of the woman
i wrote about a few posts ago, who made it through chemo,
only to die from some weird side effect of the chemo.
and it’s impossible for me not to hate having to be back
with leanne in the hospital again, having her being stuck
with needle after needle, having to tell lydia again that mommy
is sick and won’t be home tonight, having to park the car outside
the hospital and walk the same walk through the snow i did
a year ago.

i hate every step, every elevator, every thermometer beep.

——

i couldn’t take leanne into the hospital this morning.
i had a meeting…for work.
the meeting was for kaiser.

of course.

they were interested in health applications of digital storytelling.

of course.

and so before i came home to take leanne to the hospital,
i stood in front of a room full of health care employees,
trying to tell them how important stories are.

and, to illustrate the point, i brought up this blog on the screen.
i showed the post i wrote about leanne’s oncologist,
and i read what he wrote on the blog in response.

and in the back of the room, in the last row actually,
sat a woman from oncology who worked with us when leanne was sick.
she worked with the nurses and the doctors and the people
who got leanne into the clinical trial.

she was there for everything, all the stories.
and there she was again, at the back of the room.

——

i want to play jeopardy where what is going on now
is the answer.

and i want somebody to give me the question,
the question to which all of this is the answer.

is it
what is coincidence?
or
what have we done?
or
can you love?

——

i’m back from the hospital now.
finally, after 10 days, there is an answer:

e. coli

“there is no treatment,” says the doctor. “most people recover.”

most people recover, i say to myself.

and then i almost start laughing
at the whole thing - how we’re back in here
almost exactly one year later, leanne crying in a hospital bed,
me writing on my computer, sometimes holding her hand,
sometimes not.

the walk through the hospital with it’s faux purses,
across the slushy parking lot alone,
driving to pick up lydia
and explain why mommy won’t be home tonight,
and who knows when.
how i assuage her with the notion of a strawberry milkshake
and how right now we watch a movie together
to distract ourselves from what is happening,
from what is not happening -
leanne picking at a salad,
playing candyland on the rug,
sneezing in threes or fours or fives.

20 Comments

Filed under old haunts