Thursday, January 25, 2018

My BIg Fat Hospital Room

My roommate's family is large, loud, and emotive. At any given point, six relatives are working the room, brandishing plastic bags of onions and fruit, or gathering around her bed. When her adoring adult children are not surrounding her--sometimes even when they are--she asks me where my leg hurts. Every time she asks, I answer, pointing to the area from which pain radiates. She knows how much my leg hurts because she, in fact, has almost exactly the same condition and is taking the same amount of morphine; she's in a room with me because it's convenient for the hospital to dump patients with cancer metastasized to the bone in the same room. But now she's in bed, surrounded by relatives with melodramatic faces:
Roommate, waving arms around, eyes wild: "I'm in paaaaiinnnn! Ohhhh, I'm in sooo much painnn!"
Chorus of grown children, ripping hair: "Ohhh, Mama's in paiiinnnn! Mammaaa's in paiiinnnn! Ohhhhh!"
Roommate: "Ahhhh! It's terrible!! Ahhhhh!"
Chorus: "It's terrible! Mammaaa! Terrible!"
Then they all sit down, divvy up huge hunks of cake and some concoction resembling ice cream, loudly consume both, scattering crumbs, guzzle fruit juice, offer me tangerines, smile indulgently when I say I like quiet and need to work. 
Refreshed, they're off to the races again.
"Do youuuu have paiinnnn too?" asks the roommate again, with her deep, burning eyes trained on my thigh, where, as well she knows, the pain has been morphined into quiescence. 
"Yes," I say. "You can get more pain pills, too." The nurse has been in and out, handing out pain pills like candy. My roommate's eyes are glassy with pain pills. 
"Ohhhhh!" she adds. "Are you in painnnnn?" She wants me to show her. Again. I do. Again.
When she and all her brethren are not relishing her pain, they're asking me if the doctors are crazy, and inquiring of the man who came in to hang window curtains whether nuclear medicine is any good. He shrugs. They'd already asked me, and I'd naïvely suggested that the doctors probably knew more than I did. The husband spent the night, sleeping head to toe with his wife; both groan a great deal and their groans are punctuated by their loudly ringing phones, which announce themselves at four in the morning and are answered--passionate diatribes about stress, catastrophe, doctors, and cancer tend to, so to speak, metastasize in this room. I've requested a move. Stay tuned.

1 comment:

  1. This is too funny! Girl, you have the gift of making people laugh when they feel like crying.

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