Unintelligible Prayers

 When I wake up Monday morning, for some reason I feel nervous about making my bus connection, so I decide to take the earlier one.

I get dressed and grab my lunch and scoot down the hall to the elevator. I press the button and nothing happens. I press it again, then put my ear to the door. I don’t hear anything. See, I think to myself, this is why I wanted to be early. 

I slowly make my way down the stairs with my scooter. The elevator is on the first floor, and out of curiosity I get in and press the button for five. It lurches to life like it’s supposed to. Did I just not press the button hard enough? Cursing my stupidity, I wheel out the door, just in time to see my bus speed past. So much for being early.  

The check-in woman is perky, and reads off the questions without waiting for an answer. “No COVID symptoms no changes to insurance no travel outside the country oKAY you’re checked in have a nice day.” 

In the waiting area I find the same man as last Monday, Michael. He doesn’t have his wheelchair or any of his possessions. He groans loudly and I ask if he’s okay. “I’m in so much pain!” he moans. “My foot got wet over the weekend and the bandages got all wet and now it hurts so fucking much.” He’s wearing a pair of New Balance sneakers, so if his foot is bandaged, it must be really crammed in there.

When eight o’clock arrives, I hear the morning prayer, or inspirational reading or whatever it is. It’s a different woman this time but she is equally impossible to understand over the background noise of the hospital. 

A minute later Vicki opens the door and calls my name. KC is standing just inside, smiling, as if welcoming me home. She is wearing deep blue scrubs with a long sleeve chartreuse shirt underneath. The contrast is striking. 

I’m even more anxious about catching my bus back than I was getting over here. I tell myself I have plenty of time, and that even if I’m late, it’s not the end of the world, but I can’t shake the anxiety. Despite this, my blood pressure is good. 

Vicki cuts off my cast effortlessly, then leaves. KC runs in and stands close to me to tell me about the show she’s watching about the Gunpowder Plot. “There’s lots of torture,” she says, making a face. Before I can make a joke about how much she secretly likes seeing people in pain, there’s a scream from room one; the man from the waiting area. He screams for a while then is suddenly silent.

KC shows me a photo of Catherine; I forgot that she’s a tuxedo just like my Olivia. “She’s a little porker,” she says. “14 pounds. When she sits on my lap too long I can’t feel my legs.” I ask how her weekend was and she says she spent it with a friend who’s breaking up with her loser boyfriend. She looks lovely. My fondness for her melts my anxiety a little. And then she’s gone, saying she’ll be back. 

I hear a clamor of voices. “Oh he’s here for Seann,” Shelley says, and a minute later a man with salt and pepper hair says, “Knock knock,” and pulls aside the curtain. He introduces himself and asks if I’ve had diabetic shoes before, pressing a catalog into my hand. 

“Is that Evergreen? I want to talk to them!” screeches Dr. Taggert, and she comes tearing in, followed by a bearded young man who I gather is another doctor she’s showing around. She and the man from Evergreen start talking about shoes. “I preach the gospel of the diabetic shoes to all my patients!” cries Taggert. “This is my religion!” I want to say that I’ve had diabetic shoes for years and they haven’t done me much good, but I’m back to being worried about getting out on time and can’t seem to focus on anything else. 

“He wants to be able to walk,” Taggert keeps telling the man, and she sounds like the very idea is some crazy whim and that she’s just humoring me until I come to my senses. I hate her tone of voice when she gets on this kick. I hate all of this. I want KC to flounce in here and rescue me. My dreams have become so diminished. I once longed to fall in love with a creative soulmate. Now I just want a pretty nurse to hold my hand.

They discuss options for various types of shoes, and then he presses both of my feet into pink foam molds. “If this doesn’t work, we may end up having to make custom shoes for you. They’re not stylish, but it might be our best option if you want to keep walking.”

Eventually he leaves and she debrides my wound, saying that that Dr. Thompson will be doing so during my Thursday visits from now on, to save me time in the morning. Vicki prepares my cast, then Taggert wraps me back up. I ask what happened to her young doctor and she says she doesn’t know, that he wandered off somewhere. She talks about shoes the entire time but I’m not really listening. “He really wants to walk.” I feel her words sink deeper and deeper into the murky dishwater of my soul. 

On the bus there’s a guy in a hot pink wheelchair, with fading green hair, multiple piercings and tattoos everywhere, including a pentagram and a bat-winged skull on his cheek. His clothes look like designer versions of a punk costume, all leather and black denim with Danzig and Subhumans patches attached with a calculatedly slapdash array of safety pins. I think about the basement punk shows we used to go to; definitely not wheelchair accessible. Do kids still put on shows like that? Do his fellow punks carry this guy down the stairs, toss his body around like a rag doll in the mosh pit? 

As the bus crosses the bridge, and I see that I will only be a few minutes late for work, I start to shift from jittery to morose. I wish I felt grateful for what mobility I still possess, but all I can see is how trapped I am by my limitations. I used to want to travel the world. Now, I just want to be able to walk to the convenience store without wheels, without crutches, without a cast. It’s a modest wish mumbled to myself, muttered under my breath. It doesn’t seem like too much to ask. But. of course, it is. 

Aretha

 When the relief at knowing I’m finally taking care of my health wears off, I console myself with the prospect of continuing to document the saga. I enjoy writing about my experience, and relish the idea of getting a book out of the process. 

But as the weeks drag on, the routine starts grinding me down, and I start to wonder if I’m up to the challenge of transforming such dull material into something worth reading. Maybe I need to take a break from writing.

Fortunately, I have a break from nearly everything coming up. After much agonizing, I’ve decided to fly back East for two weeks. I haven’t been there –or anywhere, aside from an occasional overnight at the beach- since my sister’s wedding two years ago. It will be a nuisance having to travel with Harvest Lightning again, but I’ve done it twice before so I know I can manage it. If nothing else, it will be good to have a respite from this pitiless routine. 

But I don’t leave for three weeks, so in the meantime, the pitiless routine continues. 

Something different does happen when I check in at the counter on Thursday. I get a desk clerk I’ve never seen before, an old woman with uncannily smooth, pale skin and white hair. I wonder if she’s an albino, but her eyes are nearly black. She takes my information then tells me I owe a copay. I’ve never had a copay for any of these appointments, and it rattles me. She says I can have it billed but I take out my card and pay it and head upstairs, nearly getting run over by the old man driving the people mover, which is festooned with autumn leaves cut from construction paper. 

The office is unnaturally quiet. “You’re the only one here!” cries Shelley, ushering me into the big room. The seat feels harder than usual, and when I comment on this, she asks, “Do you like it? We just got new ones. Well, not new, they’re from another office that closed up.”

“What, since Monday?” I ask, and realize that despite all the times I’ve sat on these chairs, I’ve never paid any attention to them. She says yes and that everyone else seems to like them. 

“Yes but you know what a sensitive princess I am,” I say.

“I do know,” she says. “Oof, I don’t like that blood pressure. Let’s try again in a few minutes.”

She cuts off the cast and says the drainage isn’t too bad. “It’s definitely getting smaller,” she says. I don’t say anything. I’m weary of the whole process, and don’t feel up for pretending otherwise. 

Dr. Thompson comes in before I’m fully prepared for the cast. She looks at the stopwatch on the glove dispenser and tells Shelley, “I know you can do better than that.” Are they timing everything they do now? 

While she applies the cast, the doctor and Shelley talk about some Netflix show I’ve never heard of called Blood of my Blood, a prequel to another show I’ve never heard of called Outlander. “It’s kind of a chick flick,” says the doctor, and my mind drifts as they heatedly discuss some intrigue between three of the characters, who are possibly nurses, or time travellers, or maybe time travelling nurses. 

As I’m leaving, the doctor looks at the piece of foam I’ve taken to placing on the seat of the scooter. “Is that helping?” she asks. 

“Oh yeah, it’s making a huge difference,” I say. It really is.

“When I hurt my leg I found this lambskin knee pad that worked really well. I got it on the internet, I’ll send you the link if I can find it.” I tell her thanks, though I couldn’t care less. I don’t care about anything right now. I don’t even care that the bus is a half hour late, or that a woman at the stop asks everyone angrily if they have a cigarette, and when they say no, screams “You’re what’s wrong with the world!” She keeps wandering out in front of cars to ask people on the other side of the street for a smoke.

“She not even looking. She gone get hit,” a woman in a hospital gown says. The other woman wanders back onto the safety of the sidewalk.

“Got a cigarette?” she screams.

“Do you even know who I am?” the woman in the gown asks. “I’m Aretha Franklin.” 

“You’re not fucking Aretha Franklin,” she cigarette-less woman snarls. 

“I am too Aretha Franklin, and just for that I ain’t giving you no damn cigarette,” she says, and shuffles off in her paper slippers. I put my arms on my handlebars and bury my face in them and close my eyes and pray that when I open them again I’ll be back at home, and four days away from having to do this all over again. 

Rebel Yell

 It's the first day of autumn and the man sitting across from me in the waiting area asks me what the date is. I tell him and he goes back to eating a moist pastry with a knife from a carton. He finishes that and opens another carton full of what look like apple slices, and finishes his meal with a cup of chocolate pudding, which he also eats with the knife. Before him sits a wheelchair laden with bags and plastic milk crates. 

Over the loudspeaker comes the morning prayer. I've only heard this once before, and couldn't make out what was being said. I can barely understand it this time as well; though the woman's voice is loud, it's not clear. "Our biggest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure," I think she says, though I can confidently state that this is not, in fact, my biggest fear. "We were born to manifest the glory of God within us." 

The nurse whose name I can never remember comes out, and tells the man with the wheelchair they're ready for him. "Do you have a paper shirt I can wear?" he asks.

"A paper shirt?" she asks.

"Yeah like something disposable. This one is all wet with sweat. I mean with water. Sweat. Water. Not water." He continues to mumble and the nurse says she doesn't have any shirts.  He follows her into the office, pushing his wheelchair. I can tell by the way his sneaker bends upwards that, like me, he has no toes on his left foot. 

A few minutes later Kaitlin comes for me. I haven't seen her in a while. She was one of the first people who treated me here. After two years all I know about her is that she loves horror movies, 80s pop music, and fantasy novels. Oh, and she possesses an impressive wardrobe of seasonally-themed scrubs, which today showcase woodland creatures romping in an autumnal forest. She saws the cast in one go, and much faster than Thompson did, straight and clean. then takes my measurements and enters them in th computer without any assistance. She is probably the most capable nurse here.

I ask how her weekend was and she says she saw Billy Idol and Joan Jett at the fair. I suddenly remember that I saw Joan Jett years ago, in the late eighties, playing at some other fair. That woman's been playing fairs for a long time. 

Taggert enters, followed by a spectacled young man she introduces as Dr. Stevens, whose parents were probably children when White Wedding was on the charts. I tell Taggert that the shoe place called and said they will visit during my appointment next week. She's ecstatic. "They took my referral! They really took it! I can't believe it!"

She does a quick debriding then leaves so Kaitlin can prepare for the cast. 

“Things will be better once you get the new shoes,” she says. 

“Yeah but I've been through this before,” I say.

“Well if it gets bad again we'll just patch you back up like we always do.” She starts singing that old Pearl Harbor song, We Did it Before (and we can do it again). 

I laugh. “How do you even know that song?” Unlike me, she’s not into weird old-timey stuff. It occurs to me that this old patriotic song was forty years old when Billy Idol’s smash hit Eyes Without a Face came came out…forty years ago. I feel a little dizzy. 

“You know that's going to be in my head all day,” I say. 

She immediately starts to sing a song I don't recognize. "He’s still got it," she says, and I gather it’s a Billy Idol song. I don’t tell her that I find Billy Idol obnoxious. 

I hear a man with a booming voice announce, 

I’m here!"

"Hello Robert, we're all full up, why don't you wait in the lobby," says Shelley.

"Tell them to hurry up!" he bellows. “I haven’t got all day!”

Doctor Taggert returns with her young charge, "We approved you for a skin graft," she says. "The only catch is, you haven't met your deductible yet so you'll have to pay for it."

I sigh. “Any idea how much…”

"192 dollars per application," says Kaitlin. 

"And how many applications do I…?" 

“We do an assessment after four,” says Taggert, “And if it’s helping, we continue until you’re healed up.” She sees the look on my face. “You can change your mind at any time.” She starts wrapping the cast as the young doctor watches quietly over her shoulder. 

I get out just in time to make it to work by ten, like I had hoped. On the bus I see that my boss has called me asking me where I am, and if I’m okay. I text him saying I was at a doctor appointment and should be there shortly. I’m certain I asked for the morning off but now I’m nervous. I’m so paranoid about pissing them off, asking for too many favors. 

"Why is it so goddamn hot in here!" the person across the aisle screams, then leaps up and opens all the windows. "This is how people got COVID!" I close my eyes and try to relax but that stupid song keeps ricocheting around in my head. Not the Billy Idol one, thank God, but the other one, written the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which the songwriters laced with anti-fascist sentiment, which we could sure use more of now. 

And even though it may take a year, 

or two or five or ten, 

we did it before, and we’ll do it again.

God I really hope it doesn’t take that long. 

Dave

After my talking to the other day, I take the crutches to my appointment. I still haven’t been using them at work but I’m using them everywhere else. As I’m sitting in the waiting area, I hear the dull thunk of a bell being run again and again. The door glides open on its own and a large man in shorts hobbles out on his cane. I tell him congratulations and he tells me it’ll be my turn soon, huffing as he labors toward the elevator. 

My little subterfuge works, and Shelley praises me for finally following instructions. Both her and New Karen agree that the wound doesn’t look bad, though as I point out to them it’s only my been two days since I was here last. 

Shelley is an especially cheery mood, and tells me about all the money she made at Comic-Con a few weeks ago, where she and her husband sell cosplay props he makes using a 3-D printer. I assume she means swords and shit, but I don’t ask, just incase cosplay props are something more intimate. 

Karen is also in good spirits, and though it’s only been a few days she seems confident as she draws the cutting line on my cast. But as she readies the saw, Dr. Thompson swoops in. 

“I’ll do it,” she says. 

Both her and Shelley are taken aback, and scurry out of her way, even as Vicki and Bridget poke their heads in to watch what is apparently an unusual occurrence. 

“I’ll time you,” Shelley says eagerly, grabbing the digital timer clipped to the globe dispenser. Thompson takes the saw, nudges everyone out of her way, adjusts my leg, readjusts my leg, and turns it on.  “You want it on high?” Shelley asks, gingerly reaches in and presses the correct button. The loud buzzing turns into a roar. 

Richmond cuts while everyone watches like spectators at a sporting event. I ask if they’ve got some kind of contest going but no one answers me over the noise. Fiberglas crumbs fly everywhere. Her cutting is smoother and more even than Karen’s was, but even so, when she’s done she has to go back and redo a few spots, which I can tell irritates her. She wields the cast cracker like Excalibur.

“Oh I love the cracker,” Shelley says.

“Me too,” says Vicki. 

“The cracker’s my favorite part!” yells Jenny from somewhere behind the curtain. 

“Shoot I forgot to time you,” says Shelley.

“I need to remember my earplugs next time,” the doctor says.

The cast comes right off this time. Karen washes my leg, which feels heavenly, then wraps my foot again, with a minimum of input from Shelley, who keeps proudly saying, “Look how good I taught you.”

She does such a good job that Dr. Thompson compliments her profusely. Both she and Shelley are floored. Karen has also prepared the chair and water just the way the doctor likes them. Her surgeon’s cap this week is covered in Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Just as Karen is about to drop the first roll into the water, Vicki calls to the doctor that the ER is on the phone asking for her. “Well that was lucky timing,” Thompson mutters, and leaves to talk to them. She’s gone a while, but try as I might I can’t hear what she’s saying. Someone over the loudspeaker keeps saying, “Testing one, two. Testing one, two, three.”

The doctor returns and pulls on a fresh pair of gloves and Karen drops the roll with a splash. As my foot is being wrapped, Jenny comes in to chat. It’s good to see her; I was too anxious to really catch up with her last one I saw her. I tell her they were pretty rough on me last week. 

“We’re only rough on you because we love you,” she says. 

“All this love is killing me,” I mutter.

As always I ask how the kitties are doing. 

“Oh, good,” she says. “Well, not Poppy. Poppy’s going through a very naughty stage. But Dave is as chill as ever.”

I laugh. “I love that you named your cat Dave. I love cats with non-cat names.”

“Me too,” she says. “Dave is like that guy at the bar you don’t really know but would have a beer with.”

 Karen laughs as well, a pleasant flyover state laugh. 

“I just have a dog,” says Dr. Thompson a bit forlornly. The others gush about how much they love her dog and she perks up a bit. 

Then it’s over, and I’m set free. Though it’s a nuisance, and I don’t think work is happy about it, I’ve resigned to coming back Monday morning, and then Thursday, and then Monday, and then…

It takes me a long time to get up the hill on my crutches. At the bus stop an odd young woman comes and sits next to me.

“Hello,” she says pleasantly.

“Hi,” I say. Her body is oddly put together, like all the parts have been assembled slightly askew.

“How are you?” she asks.

“I’m fine,” I say. “How are you?” She has a pleasant, if sort of lopsided, smile. 

“I’m good,” she says. A few moments pass. “Do you have a cigarette?”

 On the bus sits a huge woman with a soft cat carrier. The cat pokes its head up through a flap, a majestic mane of brown and silver fur.  I profess my admiration an she proceeds to babble on about cats and haunted houses until at last we mercifully reach my stop. As I stand up to get off, I ask her what the cat’s name is and she says Hope.

“I did’t name it though,” she says. “I wanted the Hebrew word for faith but I couldn’t pronounce it. There’s a story of Jesus blessing a blind woman at the…”

I gingerly lower myself off the bus and make my transfer and go home to my own furry companion, my chatty little Olivia, the poor neglected creature wasting away with only half a dish of kibble left to sustain her.

Hagfish

 The next day when I get to work, I check the calendar of deliveries for the following week. I knew it was going to be busy, but Monday in particular seems like it’s going to be bedlam. I call the wound care clinic but no one answers –I remember them saying Bree was going to be off- so I leave a message canceling  Monday’s appointment.

A little while later Agnes calls back, but I’m in the middle of something so she leaves a curt message saying I need to call and reschedule, or else go in to the emergency room and have my cast cut off on Monday. “If this is going to be a problem, you need to rethink this whole thing,” she says. I feel my simmering anxiety start to bubble. I call her back immediately, but of course no one answers, so I just leave another message. She does not call back. 

All weekend I try to both relax and stay busy to distract myself, but I feel waves of panic rolling beneath everything like an underground sea that might burst through the crust at any moment. 

Monday morning is indeed crazy at work, but fortunately I’m in between shipments when Bree calls. She says it’s really important that I come in as soon as possible. I’ve already decided that if I need to, I’ll just call in sick, so I ask if she has any openings the following day. She says she has a 12:40 and I say fine and she says are you sure and I say I’ll be there. 

I’m exhausted when I get home that night, and after supper I collapse into sleep and don’t wake up until 5:30 in the morning. It’s gorgeous out, only slightly chilly, so, keenly aware that such opportunities are going to be in short supply in the approaching wet season, I wrap myself in my housecoat and have breakfast on the balcony. Even though I’m exposed out here, I always feel invisible. During the warmer months, I sat out here in my underwear. If anyone really wants a show that badly, they’re welcome to it.

Our manager told us long ago that we should call him if we aren’t coming in, but no one else seems to do this, so I just send him a text. He does not respond, but no one from work calls looking for me, and a few hours later I see that he has adjusted my schedule. II will get through this one stab of anxiety at a time. 

It’s nice to have a morning off, and despite my coffee I end up dozing off for a while, waking up with plenty of time to get ready and catch my first bus. The bus schedule works out so that I’ll either be very early or slightly late, so I opt for early, and when I arrive at the hospital I spend some time drawing on a bench in the shade. It’s warm but there’s a strangely refreshing breeze blowing, more like a wind. 

I check in and head up just as they’re finishing their lunch hour. Vicki comes out to get me and tells me to go to room two, where a young woman I’ve never seen before greets me. 

“I’m Karen. I don’t think we’ve met before,” she says.

 “Oh, you’re the other Karen. I’ve heard a lot about you,” I say. This is not true. All I know about her is that her name is Karen.

“Good things, I hope,” she says. She is young, as blank-faced as the other Karen, only brunette, and skinny. My attempts to engage her in conversation teach me only that she recently moved here from Omaha. 

Vicki stands by and watches closely as she saws the cast off, and answers the many questions she has. She seems kind and attentive but the whole process is very slow, and when she finally cuts the cast, it still won’t come off. Even Vicki is baffled why. “I’ve never seen this happen before,” she says. I tell her that’s not something a patient ever wants to hear their nurse say. She doesn’t laugh. Eventually by ripping out great handfuls of padding, they manage to yank the stubborn cast off. It hurts. 

As Karen takes measurements, I hear Taggert yelling on the other side of the curtain. 

“So do you want this half bag of mouse paper I have?” she asks. “It’s enormous, I hate to waste it.”

“Is it wood chips?” a man’s voice asks. 

“It’s paper,” she says. “Mouse paper.”

“Does it come with mice?”

“I hope not, though it’s been in the garage a while so who knows. We used it for guinea pigs.” She says something about snakes but I can’t make it out.

The wound on my foot is slightly smaller, and the one on my knee is completely gone. When Dr. Taggert arrives she seems relatively pleased with the progress. “You’re using the wheelchair, right?” she says. 

“No,” I say, confused. Agnes slips in through the other side of the curtain, her eyes narrowed over her mask.

“You’re not supposed to be walking on this,” she says. “It’ll never heal up. I had a patient in a cast for a full year and it wouldn’t heal because he kept walking on it.” 

“I guess I’m confused,” I say. “I thought I could walk on this. I thought that was the whole point.”

“We’ve had this exact conversation numerous times,” she says, visibly frustrated. Have we, though? 

“I guess I didn’t understand,” I say. “Maybe I didn’t want to?” I add, trying to placate her.

“So what are we doing here?” she asks. “Are we going forward with the cast?”

I say yes, and explain again that it’s just difficult for me to fit it with my work schedule. “I am trying so hard to balance this with my job,” I say. I’m not yelling but I’m not exactly whispering either. “I don’t want to have to go on leave again, it’s horrible. But I just don’t have any weekdays off, and you aren’t open nights or weekends. It’s incredibly stressful but I’m doing the best I can.”

When Taggert finishes debriding the wound, she asks me what shoe place I use. I tell her Evergreen, and she says, “Oh that’s great. They make visits here, you know, so you can get measurements made for new shoes while you’re here. I keep getting told I can’t write any shoe prescriptions because I’m not a GP, but you know what, that turned to be wrong with the home nurse thing, so what the hell, I’m going to try it with these shoe people. And if I’m here to coach them, maybe we can finally get you a pair of shoes that actually work.” I don’t allow myself to get my hopes up, and choose to assume she is not, in fact, implying that I will actually be able to walk in these shoes, just wear them. A pair of perfect shoes to stand and and pivot in.

She makes a quiet exit and New Karen is joined by Old Karen. “Doesn’t this get confusing?” I ask. They say yes in unison. 

New Karen prepares my cast, while Agnes coaches her, swinging wildly between bossy and supportive. It makes me a little seasick. She pokes the flesh below my kneecap.

“You’re all swollen,” she says, as if I’ve just kicked a puppy. “Why are you so swollen?”

“I’ve been walking on it, remember?” I say tartly. 

“Are you propping it up? You need to prop it up. Go home and prop it up for an hour.” I tell her I’m propping it up every day. 

“I told you my boyfriend and I split up, right?” she says. “Well I just moved into my new place and unpacked a box of letters from old patients and I found that drawing you made me, of all the hyperbaric merchandise you want to sell. It’s so good, I put it on my fridge.” 

As she puts on the cast, Taggert asks if I heard about the big crash on the 205 early this morning.  “A drunk driver hit a tractor trailer full of meat and seafood. You know me and protein, I felt like I should drive over there and scoop it all up and hand it out to all my patients.”

“Fill your trunk with it,” I suggest. “Drive around town, handing out meat to all the starving children of Portland.”

I ask if they remember the truck full of live hagfish that spilled its slimy load in the southern part of the state some years back. “Four tons of eels flopping all over the highway,” I said. New Karen looks like she’s going to be sick. 

At last they release me, not commenting on the fact that I am, in fact, walking out, just like I had walked in without them saying anything. I look at the glamor shots of all the nurses hanging in the vestibule. I look for KC’s portrait. It doesn’t look anything like her. I make note of her last name, then chide myself; what am I going to do, internet stalk her? What good would that do?

It’s still only the middle of the afternoon, and I do a few errands on my way home. I figure I will continue to hobble around at work –they wouldn’t let me anyways without a note- but I resolve to behave myself the rest of the time. Once my knee skin gets stronger, I will be able to use the scooter again; until then I’ll stick with the crutches or the dreaded wheelchair. 

Any why is the wheelchair so dreaded? Because every time I think of it, I think about the single time I used it to go across town. It took me all day, and my arms are so weak that I could barely get on the bus and was stymied by even the slightest incline. I know that with time I will get better at it, but I think back to that afternoon, when I found myself physically unable to pull myself up onto the curb in front of my building, despite the access ramp. I sat there, stuck in the gutter on the corner, just a few dozen yards from my front door, and cried. 

I end the day the way I began it, sitting on the balcony. It’s warmer than it was this morning, and the wind has died down. A few stars manage to elude the clouds. I pour myself a juice jar of wine, placing it on the little wooden end table I keep out there for my coffee. I read for a while, a delightful novel about old people in Florida. Not one of the characters in the book is wheelchair-bound; old as they are, they walk around town and mount the porch steps without thinking about it. They are all old but suspiciously healthy.

Eventually I put the book down and look out at the lights scattered across the dark hills. In some of the nearer apartments, I can see tiny people going about their business. Making supper, playing video games. I feel like James Stewart in Rear Window, sitting with his broken leg, watching the world go on without him. Watching and waiting for something terrible to happen. A slap in the face, a knife in the bag, or maybe just a slimy spill on the highway.

I suddenly think of Agnes, 27 going on 70 and tough as rope, cutting open carefully-taped, neatly-labeled boxes in her new apartment. I feel exhausted by her vacillating between soothing and scolding. Pushing my little table further away, I prop up my foot and resume my reading.

Ice Cream Truck

 

To show their appreciation for all our hard work, the museum hires an ice cream truck to serves us free ice cream. Everyone who walks past my desk asks if I’m having any, and I tell every one of them that I shouldn’t eat ice cream. It shouldn’t bother me –there are just not many things considered “treats” that are diabetic-friendly- but it does. 

My appointment is an hour earlier than usual, and on a Thursday rather than a Wednesday. It’s nice not to have to use the scooter on the bus. 

As I’m waiting to check in, three security officers suddenly start running like mad down the hall as one of them yells, “Clear a path! Clear a path!” I realize the woman at the desk has been trying to get my attention and I apologize for being distracted.

I head upstairs and have only sat for a few moments when the door opens and a woman I’ve never seen before calls my name. She’s older, with fried red hair and huge bangs. Her name is Bridget and she leads me to room three, which I’ve rarely been in. It’s tucked back in the corner and cramped. A sticker of a smiling octopus with the word SUCKER is slapped on the glove dispenser. “Code gray room 221, Code gray room 221,” a voice on the intercom says. 

Bridget is friendly and chatty. She’s only been here a few months but she’s worked in wound care for ten years. “I worked with KC at Vital,” she says. Vital is apparently a clinic that specializes in helping people get off respirators. “Everyone’s in pretty rough shape there,” she says. 

She draws a line along the cast then saws it in two, only it doesn’t come apart, so she goes back over the line again and again and eventually goes to get Shelley. Shelley immediately sees where the cast is so thick it needs extra cutting. It still takes a long time to cut it off. Bridget apologizes and says they didn’t do casting at Vital. 

She changes my bandages and says that the doctor only does debriding once a week. She gets the casting and water bucket ready and I can tell that she’s preparing for the finicky Dr. Thompson. 

True to form, when the doctor comes in she immediately adjusts my chair and complains about how tiny the room is. As she wraps the cast material I ask where she’s traveled to lately and she says Thailand. I try to get her to talk about it but she just asks, “Is that ninety degrees?” meaning my foot. I tell her it’s as close as I can get. 

She doesn’t splash as much as usual, and when Bridget drops a fifth roll into the water, she looks at it and says, “You know, I think this is big enough.” My foot does, indeed, look huge. Bridget apologizes for wasting the roll but the doctor tells her not to worry about it, then fishes it out and throws it into the trash bin. 

 Once the cast is dry I put on my shoe and hobble over to the reception desk to ask when my next appointment is. “8:00 Monday,” says Bree. I tell her that was this week, and she looks annoyed. “It’s every Monday and Thursday.” I tell her I thought this was only once a week, and really can only get out of work in the late afternoon. 

“It’s twice a week until your wound goes down,” says Shelley. “They should have told you that.”

“I’m going to have trouble making that,” I say, feeling a wave of anxiety rising up. It was hard enough to convince them to let me have this Monday morning off, now I have to go through this every week, for how many weeks? 

“If you can’t making it we’ll have to skip the cast,” says Agnes, passing by. 

I feel sick to my stomach when I leave. I’ve been trying so hard to balance things in a way that will make my life bearable, but I see now that I am failing. Whatever hope I had of being able to live even a moderately normal life has been shattered. I’m exhausted from trying to take care of myself. What’s the point when the only reward is extending the finish line a few extra hobbled steps? My life is miserable. I should have just said to hell with it and gotten in line with all my healthy, non-diabetic coworkers and ordered a big cone of lavender salted caramel. 

Grateful Patient Day

 Monday morning I take my crutches instead of the scooter to my appointment, which despite my efforts at padding it is still tearing up my knee. I can’t bring myself to deal with the wheelchair on the bus. 

     It feels strange to be here this early, and on a Monday. Check in is smooth and by the time I make my way upstairs I’m still fifteen minutes early. 

     At 8 Shelley comes out and says the doctor is in a meeting and won’t see me until 8:30. I tell her it’s fine; I should still get out in plenty of time to put in a half day at work. 

     As I wait, I get an email from the chief philanthropy officer for the hospital.

You just missed Grateful Patient Day, but it is never too late to honor our exceptional caregivers and the exceptional care they provide. 

We wanted to re-send yesterday’s email to make sure you know that you can still show your gratitude for excellent care and invest in the health of our community by making a tax-deductible gift today.

With gratitude,

Are these the same exceptional caregivers who had to go on strike because the hospital refused to pay them a decent wage? I guess I should be grateful it’s not another one of the past due notices they keep sending me. I wonder how Luigi is doing. 

A pretty but severe looking woman with green-tipped hair wheels an old man out of the elevator. She deposits him then sits down behind him so that they’re not facing each other. They don’t say a word as she types on her phone. Finally she asks, “When did you retire, dad? I’m filling out the long forms for tomorrow’s appointment.” He tells her and she goes back to typing sternly.

They get called in and then it’s my turn. Vicki leads me to the first room, where KC is waiting excitedly with the saw. “I haven’t done one of these in a while, I hope I remember how!” She cackles. I roll up my pant leg. “Where’s your cast?” She asks. 

“I’m getting my first one today.”  She looks crestfallen, and wheels the saw away.

She returns to take my vitals and measurements, which Vicki enters in the computer. She says that Sally in hyperbaric says hi. I ask KC what she did this weekend and she says she took out her yard debris bags. I tell her I didn’t know she had a yard and she says she doesn’t.

Her and Vicki watch a video of a doctor putting on a total compact cast. “This guy’s the cast guru,” KC says, clearly in awe. 

“He’s so fast,” Vicki whispers.

Hesitant to break the mood, I ask, “Are there wound care conventions?” 

“There’s a yearly one in Vegas, and another one that moves around,” says KC. “Oh and a local one at Skamania Lodge. I’ve never gone, it’s really expensive.”

“It’s free for me,” says Vicki. “I go every year. Well, not last year. And not when COVID was bad. But other than that.”

“Wound care nerds,” I say. They both smile proudly, then leave. I don’t feel as miserable as last time but I still feel haunted and hollow. I hear the sound of the saw start up in the next room over. Be gentle with yourself, the curtain reads. Nurture strength of spirit. Your balance is now ready to be viewed. Thank you for your donation. 

After a while the curtain is pushed open by Dr Baylor, the blandly perky substitute doctor, followed by Vicki and Shelley. I’m relieved to have a break from Taggert. She asks how much drainage there was and they say medium to large. 

“Maybe we should wait until next week to do this.” Baylor says. “I don’t want to risk the infection getting worse. If there is an infection. The x-rays showed no osteomyelitis at least.”

“He’s coming back Thursday.” Says Shelley. “He should be fine until then.” Vicki agrees, but the doctor seems apprehensive. Finally she gives in and leaves Vicki to prepare the cast. 

I haven’t had one since… when? January? It all comes back to me as she lays out the supplies. First she pulls on the stocking, then lays a flat sheet of padding along the front of my leg and two a disk of cotton on either side of my ankle. She wraps my leg in sheets of batting, which she tears from the roll with a soft, pleasing rip. Then my favorite part: the box. 

The box is actually just a thick sheet of gray foam filled with holes, sticky on one wide and covered with ribs of  foil on the other. She folds it across the front of my foot to make what looks more like a silvery taco than a box. She cuts off the excess on either side with an L-shaped scissors. I find this whole part of the process oddly satisfying. Perhaps I’m becoming a bit of a wound care nerd myself.

While she’s doing all this, I ask if the guys still work here. She says no, that “It’s just us women now, aside from Tim. Do you know Tim? He’s our fill in.” She says that Aaron left to do what she calls “more hospital type work.” She doesn’t mention Sjon and I don’t ask. 

We talk about the weather, which leads to her talking about her son’s recent wedding in Virginia, where it was so humid everyone was drenched with sweat for the pictures. This somehow leads to her saying she’s going to see Neil Young with her husband in sun river. I try to get her to talk some more about Neil Young but she isn’t interested. I hear the saw going again. 

Baylor returns in gloves and a gown, and Vicki unwraps the first foil packet of casting and drops it into a bucket of water that reads Essity on the side along with a list of products. Everything is advertising. 

The doctor unrolls the yellow Fiberglas around my foot, my ankle, my shin, following it by two more rolls. When it’s done she isn’t happy with how little coverage there is over the box, so she tears open a fourth roll. I hate when there’s a fourth roll, it makes the cast even bulkier. Sure enough, when she’s finished I can barely squeeze my pant leg over it. Vicki gives me a new shoe and I take my first step. I had forgotten just how fucking heavy these casts are. 

As I leave, I clomp past KC, who is standing right in my way on her phone. I ask if they’re not keeping her busy enough.

“Not today, it’s a little boring,” she admits. “I’m indulging in some Amazon therapy.” I tell her to get me something nice. 

My bus comes right away, I make my connection with no problems, and am at work by 10:30. I lean my crutches against the wall and collapse in my chair, suddenly exhausted by this first step of what is going to be many months of this same routine, every week making the dull, plodding journey across town. It all went pretty smoothly, but, ungrateful patient that I am, I’m sick of it already

To Basin and Fathom

    As I’m waiting at the bus shelter, or near it, rather, since its benches are being taken up by a gray-skinned man and his bags of cans, I see a bus line I’ve never noticed before. 40 SWANN ISLAND, its scrolling sign reads, TO BASIN & FATHOM.

     My bus, the less poetic 19 GLISAN, arrives shortly. After a few stops a short, squat woman haltingly steers her wheelchair on. She clutches a phone in her claw and haltingly pokes at the screen with one hooked finger. She says something but I can’t understand it. She says it again, more insistently, and her phone drops to the floor. I pick it up and try to hand it to her, but she can’t seem to grasp it. I’m surprised it’s not in a holder or on a lanyard or something. What would have happened if there had been no one around to pick it up for her? What is she doing out here on her own, anyways? I certainly understand wanting to be independent, but she seems barely able to function.

    I finally manage to tuck her phone behind her wrist. She doesn’t make any more sounds for the rest of the trip.

     When we cross the river, I see the 40 bus again, halfway on its journey to the docks and shipyards. Somehow we’ve caught up with it.

    I’m nervous that I’ll have to face the receptionist I was impatient with last week, but there’s only one woman working the counter and it’s someone I’ve never seen before. There’s only one patient ahead of me in line but I wait fifteen minutes before it’s my turn. The moment I roll away a second receptionist appears and calls, “Next!”

     Karen, with the wan, masklike face, calls me in. She measures the wound and says it’s both wider and deeper, which surprises me, because I hadn’t been on it as much. I show her the sore on my knee from the scooter as well, which has gone from being an angry red splotch to a furious wound.  

     Agnes steps in and says, “Oh that doesn’t look good. What the hell, Seann.” I don’t say anything. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t just barge in and give you dirty looks,” she says. I tell her if she didn’t I’d be worried, but I can tell my tone doesn’t sound as playful as I intend, and she doesn’t laugh. The pit is opening up again, that old familiar void, and i don’t have the strength to fight it so I let myself sink into it, pulling it shut behind me. The room is a blur. I hear KC’s voice from the next room but I don’t feel any sort of thrill. I can barely move. I feel like a bug immobilized by a shrew’s venom. 

Karen places numbing cream on my already-numb foot. I can’t bear to look directly at it.  I never do, really, even when I’m washing or inspecting it or bandaging it. I peep, I squint, I steal glances, but I can’t bear to actually gaze at the damn thing. Red, ugly, and misshapen, it is a symbol of everything I hate about myself, a product of my own neglect, avoidance, and weakness. 

When she leaves, the foot starts to grow until it fills the room, a fleshy blob consuming everything in its path, and since I can no longer avoid seeing it I squeeze my eyes tight as I feel it start to dissolve me. 

“Stop,” I whimper, not sure how the doctor is going to react to this latest development. 

Just then the curtain is thrown back and KC appears. She tactfully doesn’t mention anything about my gigantic foot, which is now taking up most of the room. I ask her what she’s been up to and she starts chattering on about a show called The Gilded Age, which she has just binge-watched. She pulls down her mask when she talks. She has a nice mouth, with straight teeth, and her hair looks especially red, but I don’t have any interest in small talk, and feel incapable of flirting, so I just listen. 

And then she flits away and Taggert is there. No dancing this time, she plunges right in. She does not like what she sees. What’s that redness? What’s that swelling? And the wound on the knee. “You know what this means,” she says. I do know what it means. “You can’t walk and you can’t use the scooter. You still have that wheelchair, right?”

    I’m not fully here, though. I suddenly realize that the pit of depression and the wound in my foot are both the same hole. That I am being sucked into myself, drowning in a sea of reeking discharge. My ears are clogged with it but I’m listening just enough to be able to respond to the doctor in a way that makes it seem like I am not, in fact, suffocating. 

    I’m so intent on doing this that it barely registers when Jenny comes in, followed by Sandy. I haven’t seen either of them since the strike, and while I feel a tiny pulse of warmth, I am too disconnected to be able to really talk coherently. I’m overwhelmed by all the forces swirling around me, Karen’s blank stare, Taggert’s babbling (“Everyone hates me because I always bring the bad news!” she barks), KC’s smile, the word LARGER scribbled next to my wound measurements on the whiteboard, and most of all that gigantic foot which still looms before me, emitting a harsh whistling shriek like a creature in a horror movie. 

    After begging me to come back to the hyperbaric chamber for another round of treatment, Jenny and Sandy leave and Taggert gets back on her wheelchair kick. 

    “I know it’s difficult to hear,” she says. “Your entire life will change. You might have to find an apartment that’s handicap accessible. I told you about my brother with MS right? We had to redo our entire house so he could get around. And then when we moved the house got snatched up right away by another family who needed something accessible. But you just can’t think of this foot as being for walking. I tell my patients I don’t even want them walking to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Get a bedpan, get a urinal. Everything will be different from now on.”

    I guess I should appreciate that she is willing to talk straight with me, that she doesn’t sugarcoat the truth. Other doctors offer tepid reassurances and canned inspirational pablum. In general, I prefer Taggert’s bluntness, but right now it’s just pounding me deeper into the ground.

    Of course sometimes I do wonder if she isn’t overreacting, if the situation might be less dire than she makes it out to be. But I’ve been coming here for two years now, and she has almost always been proven right.  

    And then, even though I don’t mean to, I find myself whining to her about  how lonely I feel, how I despair of ever finding a partner, of how my isolation is literally killing me. It all spills out, and I hate myself for being so pathetic. Poor lonely Seann will never be in love, will never experience intimacy again. An entire population of children is being purposely starved to death and I’m sad because I can’t get laid.

    “Maybe you need to expand your circles,” Taggert says. “Start trying to meet people with, you know, these kinds of issues.”

    “I should try dating other cripples like me, you mean?” She shoots me a look and I instantly feel awful. 

    She finishes debriding my foot and takes a step back and says, “I don’t like how red this looks. Where did you measure the depth?” Karen tells her and Taggert asks, “Was there bone?” Karen says she didn’t think so but she opens a fresh cotton swab and pokes it into the oozing hole. 

    “I can’t tell,” she says. Taggert takes the swab from her and does some more poking.

“    Okay,” she says. I can see her thinking. “Okay. Let’s get you on an antibiotic just to be safe. You don’t have any allergies, right? And I want you to get an x-ray, if you’re okay with that. They’re open until six. Your insurance approved you for a cast but we can’t do one if the bone’s infected.” She leaves to call in the referral. “It’s down in the basement,” she says.

    “Oh I know,” I say.  

    Ten minutes later I wheel past the reception booth for the x-ray department. There is a woman in the booth but there is also a sign that says to check in is at the next room over. The woman doesn’t look up so I obey the sign and go to the next room over and it suddenly comes back to me; this is the room I came to a year and a half ago, or was it longer? The most oppressive waiting room I’d ever been in, with very confusing signage as to how one signs in. There hadn’t been anyone here then and there isn’t anyone here now, although it is nowhere near six o’clock. The reception window is now covered with a metal drop-down gate.

    I wheel back out to the booth. The young woman has her hair in a big bun on top of her head, and a lot of what I think at first are birthmarks but turn out to be piercings. I give her my name and she looks me up and tells me to go back into the deserted room and use the phone there to tell them I’m here. I go back and sure enough there is a black phone mounted to the wall. I can’t remember the last time I saw or used a phone like this. It wasn’t here during my last visit, which means that within the last year they went to the trouble of installing what looks to be a thirty-year-old landline here.

    A poorly-worded sign next to it gives a number to call, and I press the light-up buttons and a woman picks up, sounding irritated. I tell her I’m there for an x-ray and she says I need to go to the plaza. I tell her the receptionist told me to call this number and she angrily says, “like I said. You need to go to the plaza. Tell her I told you that.” I hang up and go back to the woman with the bun. 

    “She said I need to go to the plaza,” I say. The plaza is the medical complex across the street. I’ve spent many, many hours and seen many doctors within its depressing corridors.

    “No, this is the right place. Go call her back and tell her I said so,” she young woman says. 

    “You call her. I’m not talking to that bitch again,” I snarl. She looks taken aback. “I’ll go to the fucking Plaza,” I say, and wheel away before I say anything else I’ll regret. This is now two idiot receptionists I’ve snapped at within a week. 

     I head outside and across the street to the Plaza and down the hall into the imaging center. By some act of great mercy, the woman at the counter is nice, the tech comes to fetch me immediately, and the x-rays themselves only take a few minutes. It’s too little too late though. I feel broken. The only thoughts that seem to be able to survive in the toxic soup swirling in my head are I’m so tired, I can’t do this anymore, I want to die. Weak, pathetic thoughts from a hateful narcissist drowning in self pity, who, despite what well-intentioned friends keep insisting, does, in fact, deserve everything that is coming to him.  

    The next morning I get a call from Agnes as I’m scooting along to work. Instead of dragging out the wheelchair I’ve just put extra padding on the scooter. What does any of it matter, anyways.

    “Sorry I know you probably don’t want to hear from me first thing in the morning,” she says. “But doc says your x-rays look normal so Briana is going to callyou later on to schedule your cast.”

“    Okay, thanks, that’s great,” I say. And it is; I had spent most of the night worrying about what another bone infection would mean. Another two months in the chamber, another round of sick leave, another battlewith the disability people. At this point it seems like it might be better to just chop it off.  

    As I roll up to the museum, I pass a guy I see at the bus stop nearly every day, hunched in his wheelchair, black raincoat draped across his shoulders. I say hello but he’s profoundly stoned, a leaf of scorched foil in his hand. I wonder how he thought his life would urn out, what he hoped for, what he dreamed of becoming. The foil slips from his fingers and flutters to the sidewalk and I swerve so I don’t crush it beneath my wheels, dragging my enormously swollen monster foot, now the size of an elephant, behind me. It will keep growing and growing until it is the size of a whale, and the gaping wound will open wide like a mouth and suck me in as once and for all I swallow myself whole.