The bus crosses the bridge and stops for a woman on a fancy, streamlined electric scooter. She looks compressed, like a cartoon character squashed by an anvil. I pull my own non-fancy, non-streamlined scooter closer but there’s plenty of room for both of us. A few stops later, the bus lowers and the ramp extends and an enormous woman sitting in what looks like a hydraulic lift thunders on. Her chair has six wheels, and she's not so much sitting as lying on it. I move out of her way as best I can, wedging myself into a corner. As she tries to settle in, she keeps knocking into my scooter. “Sorry,” she keeps mumbling. “Sorry.” I smile and tell her it’s fine. When we get to my stop it takes some tricky maneuvering to extricate myself.
Inside the hospital, the tree and decorations have been taken down and the lobby has returned to its depressingly bland state. As I’m speeding toward the elevators, I pass Bridget hurrying in the other direction. She says she's headed to the lobby to get a wheelchair for someone. They must be low on volunteers.
Upstairs, Karen fetches me from the waiting area. She's wearing glasses for a change, and they make her look remarkably like Shelley, who we pass as she leads me to the far room. Maybe their personalities are merging like in some Bergman movie. Jenny is already seated at the computer in bright burgundy scrubs. I’m happy to see her but I don’t have much to say, despite the fact that I haven’t been here in three weeks. Last year's calendar still hangs on the wall.
Karen unwraps my makeshift dressing. The wound has gotten bigger, but I already knew that. On New Year’s Day my foot had once again looked almost healed, but a few days later it had once again opened up, the blood soaking my bandages. That same day, the U.S. invaded Venezuela.
As we wait for the doctor, Jenny and Karen and I talk about how pleasant our holidays were. I usually struggle not to feel gloomy over Christmas, but this year I didn’t sink into my usual seasonal rut and actually enjoyed the lights and the music and the festivities. For once, I felt grateful and blessed.
“Of course, that all went out the window this week," I tell them, "What with my foot, and everything going on in the world." Jenny and Karen nod and we all look at each other in silence.
“I hate them so much,” Jenny snarls through clenched teeth.
To try to break the pall, Karen starts talking about her dog. She shows me some pictures in which the usually placid Dolly resembles a demon from hell, snaggle teeth pointing in every direction.
“Jesus, I’m going to have nightmares,” I say.
They leave and I hear a new patient in room two talking to Vicki about the sores on the backs of her legs that won’t heal. “They won't do my back surgery unless they heal up,” she says.
“We’ll get them healed up for you,” says Vicki. “What is your pain level, from one to ten?”
The woman emits a bitter bark from deep within her.
The substitute doctor, Dr. Bayliss, comes in and performs the debriding without much comment, aside from marveling at how extensive the calluses are. I’m too weary to joke about them at this point. “We have you approved for skin graft, but it’s a new year, so I’m not sure how much your deductible is…” I ask if I can hold off. She says of course. “You still want to do the contact cast though, right?” I say yes and she says someone will call me to schedule it.
“And we’re not doing another football, right?” she asks Karen.
“There was too much drainage,” she says.
“Okay, so in the meantime…what did he have on it when he came in?”
“Nothing. He was dressing it himself.”
“What were we using before that?”
“Optilock. But there’s more drainage now.”
“Hm. Let’s do Hydrofera, then.”
“That stuff slips all over the place. I was thinking Aquacel.”
Christ this is fucking tedious.
“Aquacel is is. Okay I’m done here.” Bayliss leaves, once again failing to reveal so much as a glimpse of personality.
Karen slaps a patch of Aquacel on the wound, covers it with a bandage, and says, “There you go.”
“That’s it?” I ask. I haven’t gone around with my foot this exposed since I don’t remember when. It doesn't seem right.
*
The enormous woman in the motorized recliner is already on the bus when I get on, but luckily there’s no third contraption to complicate matters. I wonder what happened to her to bring her to this state, what combination of bad luck and bad choices made her this person. I try to picture her as a young woman, a child, a baby. I wonder what it’s like to live inside that mound of flesh. How uncomfortable it must be, how awful to live without hope of ever living a normal life. I spend so much time complaining about my own limitations, but I feel humbled looking at her, just as I assume healthier people are when they look at me.
But as damaged as she is, at least she can still get around, can still roll down the street and get on the bus and ride across town. Maybe there’s someone she knows who is much worse off, bedbound, or dying of cancer, who she looks at and is grateful she’s not them. It’s like a chain of suffering, or perhaps a ladder, and it’s difficult to look at those clinging below without pity, almost as hard as it is to look at those on the rungs above without envy.
And in Minneapolis, an innocent woman was shot to death by an immigration agent as she sat in her car in the snow.
I hate them so much.
The woman in the chair presses the button for her stop. As she’s rolling out, she gets stuck going down the ramp. She revs the motor and tries to rotate the wheels but they’re wedged tight. The driver watches her for a minute then gets out of his chair, pulls on a pair of nitrile gloves, and patiently, carefully, starts to push.
