Gray Christmas

    There is no way my coworkers can forget about my appointment again today, but I remind them anyways, and they say yes we know, we won’t forget you, and then they forget me and I speed through the pounding rain and make it to the bus stop with two minutes to spare.

    It’s been dusk all day, and the bus windows are fogged over, making the world outside look like a Whistler painting. I carry that gray fog with me into the hospital, up to the fourth floor. I tell them I’m here and Bridget comes out the moment I sit down. I don’t feel able to pay attention, it feels that my mind isn’t there at all. I’m not really preoccupied with anything. It’s like I’m not there at all. 

    Room two. Curtain. Bridget’s crimson hair. “First things first, birth date?” I tell her. “Why, that’s next week!” Moderate drainage. Wound is no larger but no smaller. Of course I had secretly hoped it had healed up again. It looks exactly the same. Progress is an illusion, a beautiful dream. In reality I remain frozen in place as the world bustles around me. The office full of voices. Shelley, Karen, Bree. I hear Jenny ask, “Isn’t Gil coming in?” Gil had started hyperbaric treatment shortly after I did, nearly two years ago. I’m not the only poor slob stuck here in limbo. 

    Bridget keeps saying how busy they’ve been all day. She looks exhausted. She asks what I’m doing for Christmas and I tell her I’m not doing anything, which is not completely true, but I don’t feel up for small talk. She tells me what her and her boyfriend are up to, which is also nothing. “Two of my daughters are nurses so they’ll be working that day.” 

    I was going to make a Christmas card for the office, but I kept putting it off. I figure I’ll make it this weekend and bring it in next week. I’ve written the whole thing out, I just need to draw the damn thing.

        On the first day of wound care, my doctor gave to me

        A partial amputee. 

I usually hate Christmas music, but this year I’ve been listening to it nonstop. 

Bridget takes my blood pressure and measurements and pictures. “Despite the drainage it actually looks pretty good,” she says. “You probably think I’m just blowing smoke, but it does.” She asks if I want to see and I say not really.

She leaves but returns almost immediately, followed by Vicki, Dr. Thompson, and a new nurse they’re showing around. 

“I’m one of their problem cases,” I warn the new nurse. 

“Don’t listen to him,” says Dr. Thompson. “I think I’ll take a number two this time.” I snicker as Bridget hands her the knife. 

        On the second day of wound care, my doctor gave to me

        Two nitrile gloves

        and a partial amputee.

    It’s crowded in here. The doctor slices, the new nurse asks questions, Vicki types and Bridget stands by looking lost. I’m in that gray place, neither happy nor unhappy, just existing. 

    “So you were approved for the hard cast but we’re still waiting on the skin graft. Next week’s the holiday, why don’t we wait until the following week for the hard cast?” I say that will be fine. “If I put a football on you for now, will you be able to change it yourself after a week?” I say I did it before, and in fact when I did, it healed up. “Are you casting doubts on our abilities here?” the doctor asks. I tell her I wouldn’t dream of it, especially since she’s still holding that number two scalpel. 

        On the fifth day of wound care, my doctor gave to me

        Five! Rolls of! Gauze

    They all leave but Vicki, who shows me a sheet of paper with all their available appointments written on it, and Bridget, who puts a sheet of Optilock on my wound and binds it in the football. Since I won’t see them next week, I won’t have a chance to give them my Christmas card. But it’ll be nice to have a week off. 

On the twelfth day of wound care, my doctor gave to me

Twelve nurses striking

Eleven wheelchairs rolling

Ten scalpels slicing

        Nine wound vacs slurping

And so on. It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t that clever anyways. And I’m not really up to drawing all those wheelchairs. 

The whole appointment only takes a half hour. I call my ride to say I’m done early, and go downstairs to wait in the lobby. “Code gray in the ER,” screeches the radio of one of the guards. “Code gray in the ER.”A couple of little girls run through the metal detector over and over until their mother tells them to stop. I sit and stare into space. The changing lights of the tree don’t penetrate the fog. 

Jackdaws

I’m lying in bed, naked beneath a thin sheet in a small room with a yellow curtain pulled across the doorway. The curtain gets pushed aside and Dr. Taggert enters, lithe and pretty in a white slip. “Let me tell you what I’m angry about,” she says, and I am instantly filled with anxiety, even though I feel like I’ve been taking good care of my foot. She leans in close and whispers, “I don’t have a decent stock percentage here,” then kisses me, slipping her small, soft tongue into my mouth. I kiss her back enthusiastically then bolt awake. 

I immediate try to claw my way back but I need to get up and get ready for my morning appointment with the endocrinologist. It’s hard to believe five months have passed since that first visit. 

I catch my first bus with no problem and as I wait for my transfer, the streetcar glides by with its distinctive locust whine. An enormous ad for the hospital is plastered across its side. Why should a hospital need to advertise? And in a way that obstructs the view of the riders inside, no less? Why have we all decided that health is a luxury, rather than a human right? Why is the outrage so limited, so muted?

I get on the bus and a few stops later a well-dressed woman with wavy blond hair gets on. It’s the same woman with the warm smile from the hospital bus stop, only here she is, nearly thirty blocks away from where she always gets off. I try to make eye contact but she never looks up, and when we both get off at the hospital, she walks ahead of me, disappearing into the employee entrance. She carries herself with a kind of charming gawkiness.

The endocrinology office is decorated with paper snowflakes and snowman heads dangling from a garland of white pom poms. The previously empty display case now holds three candy-colored houses and a blue and white chain made from construction paper. 

An assistant comes for me almost immediately. She has me step on the scale and I’m dismayed to find that I’m almost ten pounds heavier than last time, which can’t be right. I don’t look or feel any bigger, and I’ve been eating pretty responsibly. How heavy is my coat? How heavy is that damn football? 

The assistant leads me to a tiny room and takes my vitals. I complement her shoes, which are metallic navy blue, and she beams and launches into a long, not very interesting story about them. 

She leaves and Dr. Miller appears. He says my blood glucose level is much better, though he’s concerned about the lows I’m experiencing in my attempt to compensate for the spikes. He tweaks my dosing formulas and tells me to come back in four months, though I will probably have to see the other doctor because he’s booked solid for the foreseeable future. I’m glad things are going ok but I also feel like beside the blood test, I could have done this over the phone. It’s especially annoying because I have to come back here tomorrow for wound care. 

The following afternoon, my coworkers once again forget that I’m leaving early, and once again I remind them. Once again I balance beside the time clock on my scooter, waiting for someone to finally relieve me. But at least it’s not raining, and the bus isn’t canceled, and the driver sounds like she sincerely wants everyone to have a nice day. 

An old man in a wheelchair sits with his wife in the waiting area. He tells me this is his second round, that the first time they had him in the hyperbaric chamber. I ask him what he thought of it. He looks confused by my questions. “What was it like? Did you like it?” 

“He watched a lot of TV,” his wife says.

“I watched a lot of TV,” he says. 

“Sorry but we’re running late,” Vicki says, poking her head out then quickly withdrawing it. I try to chat more with the couple but they’ve lost whatever slight interest they had in chatting with me. Karen wheels out an old woman I recognize from some months ago, then a woman in a hot pink jumpsuit and a cast on her left foot comes out and makes a beeline for the bathroom. Her hair looks like she just got out of the h beauty salon Esther than the hyperbaric chamber. When she comes out I point to her cast and ask how her foot is doing. She sighs and says she’s been in hyperbaric for 120 days, though not all at once. “This been goin on for fourteen months,” she says. I ask how she’s doing. “I’m tired, honey,” she sighs. “I’m so damn tired.”

They finally call me in and Karen unwraps my football. The look on her face tells me it’s not good even before I see the pink splotch on the gauze.

“Oh come on,” I say.

“Yeah it’s definitely… bigger,” she says. 

“A lot bigger?” I ask. She doesn’t answer. Last week it was just a slit. “What the fuck. I didn’t do anything different.” This isn’t strictly true. I did hobble to and from the car a few times when I was out with friends, but it shouldn’t have been enough to cause whatever is happening down there. I don’t ask to see and she doesn’t offer to show me. 

“I think it’s from all this callus,” she says. “Once she gets rid of that it’ll look a lot better.” She calls Shelley in for a second opinion. 

“Well that’s no good,” Shelley says. 

“That’s not what I want to hear,” I say. 

“I want to give you good news more than anything! But only if it’s true.”

“Fuck that. The holidays are all about lying,” I say. “We tell our families we love them. We tell our kids Santa exists. We tell ourselves we believe in peace on Earth and that people aren’t horrible trolls.”

She leaves without laughing and Karen takes my blood pressure a second time –the first time was high- and exclaims, “Well that’s even worse!”

“I wonder why,” I snarl. All week I have been so patient, so even-keeled, so positive –for me, anyways. Now I want to scream. It really is a never-ending loop. I’m stuck on a combination roller coaster/carousel, endlessly plunging and rising and plunging and rising around and around and around on the back of this burning horse. 

It would be so easy to wheel out onto the busy freeway. 

“I really thought it was going to look better today,” I say. 

“I know what will cheer you up,” says Karen, and shows me photos of Dolly in her new Christmas sweater. “Isn’t she cute?” She’s very pale for a Dachshund, and her beady black eyes seem more creepy than cute to me. 

We talk about the weather for a while, how much milder the winter is here in Portland than in Omaha, or South Dakota, where her sister lives. Then she leaves, and is gone for a long while. 

After twenty minutes she pokes her head and apologizes that they’re running so late. 

Ten minutes after that, Vicki pokes her head in and also tells me they’re running late. “I hope you weren’t in a hurry to get out of here,” she says. For some reason this comment infuriates me. When she leaves I close my eyes. It feels good. I want to sink completely into the bright darkness behind my eyelids.

I try to listen to the voices talking behind the curtain, but they’re too quiet for me to make out anything other than banal snippets. 

“How did you like the yoga CD?”

“I mean, if you’re going to be the one making my drink…”

“Well for my birthday in February, I’m going to…”

“Do you shave your legs every day, Seann?”

I can’t be sure if I heard that last one properly, but I don’t answer, and no one follows it with anything. 

Karen comes back in and says, “Boy, you could use some lotion for that foot.”

“Well I can’t put anything on it with the cast on,” I say. She starts brushing the dry skin off. Obviously enjoying herself, she starts to rub furiously. The tiny flakes fly all over the place.

“It’s snowing!” she cries. 

Finally Dr. Thompson comes in. I say hello as cheerily as I can, but she isn’t fooled. She asks Karen what knife she should use, as if she’s talking to a caddy. “I think a number three,” Karen says. 

“I didn’t do anything different,” I whine to the doctor. 

“I know,” she says. “It’s frustrating. I’ll put in for approval for skin substitute and a TCC.” I don’t say anything. None of it will work in the long run. “But for now, you up for another football?” I tell her I don’t care. She says we’ll see how it looks next Thursday. The Thursday after that is Christmas, and the one after that is New Year’s Day, so I’ll have to change my schedule to Wednesdays, which means I’ll probably get Dr. Taggert. I suddenly remember my dream. I close my eyes again. 

Bridget comes in and asks Karen if she needs any help. “Sure, you can chart for me,” she says, and rattles off everything we’ve done so far. 

“Whoa slow down there missy, I’m an old lady.” Karen repeats herself slowly, then re-measures the wound.

“Remember it has to be a centimeter to qualify for insurance for the skin substitute,” Dr. Thompson says, looking over her shoulder. 

“Okay well I’ve got… point eight. Make that point nine,” says Karen. 

“Hmm. It looks like a full centimeter to me,” says the doctor. 

“Well, it’s awfully close,” says Karen.

“Kind of hard to see for sure,” says the doctor.

“It’s probably a centimeter,” says Karen. 

There is a commotion on the other side of the curtain and everyone starts clapping. The doctor goes to join the celebration. A moment later the office is filled with the clanging of the cowbell. 

“Hey, she’s supposed to ring it herself!” Shelley says. 

“Her hands were full,” someone says.

“I want to ring that fucking bell,” I mutter. 

“You will,” says Karen. 

“Sure. In 2027.”

“None of that now.”

She wraps my foot and congratulates herself on a beautiful job. When she’s finished, she straps on my surgical shoe. 

“It doesn’t look quite so beautiful with that shoe on,” says the doctor. Sometimes I wish they’d all just shut the hell up. 

 I leave with five minutes to catch the bus, and I let my annoyance propel me up the hill, making it with time to spare. The driver greets me cheerily but I just grunt at her. My face feels locked in a tight scowl. 

A large woman in a wheelchair sits by a young girl with purple and black striped stockings. The woman looks around like a queen on a throne, and babbles imperiously to the girl. “Looks like we’ll make it home just before the murder of crows descends,” she says. “You know why they call it a murder. Those sounds they make are truly appalling. And the flapping of their wings sounds like paper. It gives me the willies. They used to say crows carry off souls. Or maybe that’s ravens. All the same family, in any case. Crows, rooks, ravens.. um...”

“Jackdaws,” says the little girl. 

“What did you say?” the woman asks sharply. 

“Jackdaws,” the little girl repeats. 

“I’m not sure that’s, I mean, I don’t know that…” The woman paws at her phone. 

“No, she’s right,” I say, pulling the wire for the only bell I’m permitted to ring. “Jackdaws are a thing.”

“They’re very small,” the little girl says, “compared to the other Corvids.” 

I transfer buses and as we pass the river, I see that on the far bank, the trees and the air above them are filled with crows, countless thousands of them, flapping and wheeling and screaming that murderous cry. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Turning the darkening sky even darker.

This Year

 Once again I find myself inside Revolution Hall, the high school-turned-concert-venue where I saw Henry Winkler talk exactly two years ago. This time I’m here to see beloved indie-rock legends The Mountain Goats perform. John Darnielle, the band leader, lived in Portland for a brief but potent time. Decades later his albums are still filled with references to the city.

It’s been pouring rain all day, and all the gutters between the bus stop and the concert venue are overflowing. I considered not using the scooter, but decided not to risk it. Not when I’m so close. 

So I cautiously wheel through the black puddles, moving slowly along the uneven sidewalks. Traffic is heavy and people are blasting through red lights and ignoring pedestrians, and by the time I get to the venue I’m soaked and exhausted and frazzled. 

I take the elevator upstairs and find that the woman at the door is someone I met years ago on a dating site. At least I think it’s her. I haven’t seen her in nearly twenty years, but she has a very distinctive body type –she has what I assume is a form of dwarfism- so I think it must be her. She doesn’t show any sign of recognition, and when she scans my ticket I tell her I have a seat reserved. She asks if I got an email confirmation and I say yes. She calls a man over and i give him my name and he leads me to a seat with my name on a sticker on its back. He says that tonight he’s seen the most special seating requests they’ve ever had. 

The accessible seats line both sides of the hall. I’m near the back, but it’s raised above the crowd, so I don’t have any trouble seeing. A rotund woman hobbles past me on a cane and takes the next seat over, unfolding a strange combination back brace/seat cushion to sit on. All through the show she waves and twists her manicured hands in front of her chest. Her shoulders are enormous, and covered with tattoos of stalks of grain.

The show is great - they play a bunch of songs off the new album, which I haven’t heard yet. It’s a concept album about three men shipwrecked on a desert island. Darnielle is as joyous as ever, playing as if he is exactly where he wants to be, doing exactly what he wants to be doing. The last time I saw him perform was six years ago, right after Jasmine died. I had sobbed uncontrollably when they launched into their trademark song. 

I am going to make it through this year

If it kills me

I don’t cry this time. Instead I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for being able to experience live music despite my limited mobility. A string quartet accompanies them -only at their Portland shows, he tells us- which provides extra vibrancy to the desperately defiant lyrics. 

I am going to make it

through this year

if it kills me

This time last year, I was getting patches of umbilical cord pasted onto my foot. The year before that, Henry Winkler was assuring me that I could do anything I put my mind to. I’d like to give him a piece of my mind. 

When it’s over I squeeze into the elevator with a family of fat, blissful fans, every one of them wearing Crocs and clutching an LP of All Hail West Texas. I cautiously make my way back to the bus atop, skirting ruts and bumping over uneven pavement slabs, skirting the deeper puddles, and nearly getting hit by careless drivers speeding recklessly through the night, thinking only of themselves and their own destinations, never considering the devastation they might leave in their wake. 

Raccoon

 It was one year ago today that Luigi Mangione shot and killed the millionaire CEO of insurance giant UnitedHealthcare. Luigi was arrested a week later, and is crrently awaiting trial. There have been no further killings of industry bigwigs yet, though insurance premiums are set to double next year as the malicious creeps in the White House work to destroy the entire health care system.

My co-workers once again forget that I need to leave at two, so I’m stressed by the time I finally escape work. I needn’t have worried; the digital readout on the shelter informs me that the 2:14 bus has been canceled and that the next one will arrive in a half hour. Just this week, Tri-met made the first round of what it warns will be a series of increasingly drastic cuts in service. It’s a wet, miserable afternoon and I don’t want to wait for a half hour in this poor excuse for a shelter, so I decide to take a chance and hop on the 12, which is due any minute, then transfer to the 20, which will get me six blocks from the hospital. 

I get off the 12 in a corridor of Neo-Brutalist high-rises that I can’t imagine anyone wanting to live in. I only have to wait a minute for the 20 to arrive. The driver asks me where I’m going, and he says he’ll lower the ramp for me when we get there. I tell him not to bother but he insists. “Oh and by the way,” he says, “You’re wearing two different shoes.” 

“What? Oh, no!” I cry.  

Over the weekend, my surgical shoe dropped off somewhere along my travels. I called around to a half dozen pharmacies but no one sells them, so I took one of my old shoe inserts and taped it to the bottom of my football so I would have something a little sturdier to walk in. I covered it with a black sleeve I cut from a sweatshirt to make it look slightly less shitty when I was at work. I felt like an idiot but no one commented on it. Now I’ve put a plastic bag on top of that. It does not look good, but a pretty woman sitting next to me smiles and says she likes my hat.

The six blocks to the hospital is up a very steep hill. I speed along as fast as I dare, splashing through puddles and keeping a close eye on the bumps and cracks of the unfamiliar terrain. At least this is breaking the monotony of my usual routine. I hit a stick and nearly go flying. Monotony does has its good side.

I decide to take a chance on the side entrance, even though it isn’t supposed to be open to the public any longer; going through the main doors will involve me going two blocks out of my way. Luckily a man in scrubs is leaving just as I approach the sliding doors, so I roll right in. 

Once upstairs, I go into the restroom and strip off my makeshift cast cover; I don’t want them to laugh at me. As I sit in the waiting area, an old woman in a wheelchair takes out a white comb and starts carefully running it through her enormous mass of curls, which I’m pretty sure is a wig. 

“I’m ready for you!” calls Shelley, flinging open the door. 

“Oh you think you are,” I say. 

“Uh oh, do you have something nefarious planned?” she asks. 

“No plan, I’m just going to wing it.” 

I wheel into the big room and make myself comfortable. My blood pressure is, unsurprisingly, high. As she cuts off my football, I ask Shelley how her Thanksgiving was. She says it was just her and her husband and the kids, who are at the age when they refuse to eat anything but mac and cheese. She asks how mine was and I say my cat caught a hummingbird.  

“Ew, gross. That’s… oh my goodness, this looks fabulous. Looks like you’ve been doing your homework.” I tell her I’m trying to be good. “I can see that. There’s barely anything here, just a slit. There’s a little bit of drainage but it’s dry. I’m not actually sure there’s a wound here at all but I’ll let the doctor determine that.” 

She doesn't comment on the fact that I obviously did not change my dressing myself two days ago lke I was instructed to. She’s positively ebullient, and even though I’ve been through this many times before, and I know how easily progress can be undone, even though I know that contentment is fleeting and any sort of stability in this world is delicate at best, I find myself laughing along with her. 

She leaves and I hear her call Dr. Thompson to tell her I’m ready. I wait for a long time; every once in a while Shelley pokes her head in to say she doesn’t know what’s taking so long. I stare at the words stitched forwards and backwards on the beige curtain. Peace. Speak your truth. Be gentle. And something I can’t quite make out… Something something spirit. I just can’t decipher what the other words are. The phrase is repeated a number of times, but always right in one of the ripples of the curtain, and always backwards. How can something be so close and yet remain unintelligible? I feel obsessed, that it is somehow vital that I figure out what that that no-doubt insipid phrase reads. ALong with the words, the curtain is also covered with prints of a fern, a flower, and a snail shell. I take it one letter at a time and finally I see it. Nurture something spirit. 

Dr. Thompson rushes in, wearing her Yoda cap. She takes one look at my foot and says, “Wow.” She scrapes a bit with the tiny blade. “You know, I’m not sure there’s even a wound here.”

“He’s been doing his homework,” says Shelley. 

“I can see that. Okay, I see now, there’s still a slight opening here. But it’s very close.” She scrapes some more. “Next week.”

“So another football?” asks Shelley.

“I don’t see any need for a hard cast at this point,” the doctor says. “How was your Thanksgiving, by the way?” I tell her it was quiet, and ask about hers.

“It was nice. Just friends. No family in sight.” She hurries away before I can ask if she read this morning’s Guardian article about hyperbaric therapy. It was an interesting piece about how the practice needs to be regulated to prevent more tragedies, such as a young boy who was incinerated when his blanket slipped off, causing a spark. The treatments are being prescribed more and more to treat all kinds of things, from ADHD to anxiety. Some people even claim they slow down the aging process and erase wrinkles. The malicious creeps in the White House are of course excited by this. I think we should encourage every one of them to take advantage of these wonderful devices, and not to worry too much about all that talk of needing a grounding wire. 

I finally see it. Nurture strength of spirit is what the curtain says.

Karen slips in as Shelley prepares the gauze for the football. “Just stealing some supplies,” she says, rifling through the drawers. 

“You’re like a raccoon,” I say. Actually she's more like a bunny.

“My littlest is obsessed with raccoons,” says Shelley. “She wants Santa to bring one for Christmas. I’ve got some bad news for her.”

“I hear things are looking good!” says Karen.

“He’s been doing his homework,” Shelley says yet again, wrapping and wrapping and wrapping my foot. 

“I’m not going to be able to get my shoe on that thing,” I laugh. “Oh and that reminds me; I need a new shoe.”

“Just one more roll,” she says, and chatters on happily about the holidays and demoing her kitchen.

When she’s done encasing my foot in the biggest football I’ve ever seen, I have four minutes to make the bus. Though I know I might be able to make it, I don’t feel like rushing, so I slowly make my way down to the lobby. They’ve put up the Christmas decorations since I was here last week. The tree towers over the metal detector. They should really put lights on the metal detector itself. On top of the tree is a gift box lit from within, topped by a ridiculously large red bow. 

It’s quiet and peaceful here, like waiting in an airport terminal at night. I am filled with what feels like an endless reservoir of patience. It’s a strange feeling. I take out my phone to look at the news but immediately think better of it and put it away.

Eventually I push my way up the hill in the near dark. A milky blue ribbon of oil floats on the surface of the water that runs along the gutter, skirting clumps of sodden leaves. 

Aside from the sound of the engine, it’s quiet on the bus. Everyone is lost in thought, reading magazines, staring at their screens. A strong, healthy-looking young man in an ocher jumpsuit unfolds a sheet of cardboard and starts to carefully print on it with a white paint marker. He concentrates hard to make sure every line of every letter is neat and straight. 

PLZ     HELP     I’M

He pulls the cord and folds the cardboard and gets off, thanking the driver. The doors close and the bus drives off, seeming to float as if carried along by a gentle current, keeping us cozy and warm as the storm rages all around us, scratching the windows with its claws.