Spaghetti in the Microwave

     The bus is running late. When it pulls up, I notice that the glass of one of its front doors is a starburst of cracks. The door opens normally but it looks like it could explode at any moment into a shower of shards.

     “Looks like I missed the party,” I say to the driver. 

    She laughs. “Yeah a passenger ran on and said this guy was chasing her so I shut the door and he threw himself at it over and over until it smashed.”

    “Wow. You ok?”

       

“Oh I’m fine. We might have to change buses though… in fact here’s Gary. Everybody we’re going to get off and get on the bus behind us.” 

    I feel antsy and bored the entire ride, tired of looking at the same buildings and trees twice a week. Everyone on the bus is on their phones and I’m tempted to take out mine but I don’t want to get sucked into the vortex of depressing news. 

    Upstairs they say it’ll be a while, that they’re running late, but when I come out of the restroom Shelley fetches me immediately. “Back in the corner,” she orders. 

    “Nobody puts baby in the corner,” I say.

    “Are you saying you’re a baby?”

    “I think you know me well enough to know the answer to that.”

 Jenny is back there and compliments my shirt. We talk about shirts until Shelley fires up the saw. When it’s cut she has to use the crackers to pry the halves apart. 

    “The crackers are my favorite part,” Jenny says.

    “Me too,” Shelley says.

    I laugh. They say this every time. 

    “This looks really good,” says Shelley. “Not a lot of drainage. We can probably go down to once a week.” 

    “Oh hell yes,” I say.

    “It’s measuring smaller as well. I think the doctor is going to be very pleased.” 

    She says the doctor is running really late, but i only wait a minute or two before dr Thompson arrives.

    “You know for years I’ve been trying to get them to put doors on these rooms.” She says, “but they don’t see patient privacy as a priority.” She complains to Shelley that there won’t be new episodes of Outlander until March. “This looks really good,” she says as she carves and slices.

    

    Despite her griping, she’s in a jovial mood. Her surgical cap is covered in hearts. When she leaves I ask Shelley, “so no assistant today?” She says no, that she thinks her training is done and that she’s back at the st Vincent wound care center, which is where she’ll be working. “That place is huge, and everything’s new. They even have doors on the rooms.”

“So you’re telling me I should start going there?” I mean, maybe I should. It’s about the same distance in the other direction. That really would be a chance for a new beginning, a whole new chapter with a whole new cast of characters. New scenery to stare at through the bus windows.

    As she prepares for the cast, I ask Shelley if her car’s been fixed yet, and she sighs and says no and proceeds to regale me with the latest complications with her kitchen. “I just want to use my stove again. I’ve figured out how to make spaghetti in the microwave but it gets a little funky.”  

Our deeply fascination  conversation distracts her enough that she runs the water too cold. She pours some out and adds some hot but when Thompson reaches into the bucket she says, “this is cold. What are you trying to do to me?”

    “I know I’m sorry, I tried to fix it.”

    “Well it’s not too bad. Hopefully it’ll set okay.”

    “Just to be clear, I’m not coming in Monday, right?,” I ask Shelley as she brings my ride.

    “Right. We’ll see you next Thursday.” She says. 

    As I leave, Karen runs up to me to ask how I’m doing. How can I think of abandoning these kind people for those spoiled primadonnas at st Vincent’s? 

    I make it to the bus stop in time but the bus doesn’t come, mysteriously vanishing from the schedule. The mild day has been swept away by a bitter wind, and I think about going inside to wait but I don’t want to struggle with the hill. 

    When the next bus finally arrives, the crowd at the bus stop is joined by that attractive older woman I see occasionally. For a moment I don’t recognize her; She looks haggard, like she’s aged greatly since I last saw her. I wonder how much older I look since I’ve started coming here. It’s hard to believe, but Valentine’s Day will mark two years since my first session in the hyperbaric chamber.  

    When we get to her stop I watch her cross the street. Her hair is unkempt and she walks with a pronounced stoop. If she wasn’t so nicely dressed, she could be mistaken for a homeless person. In my current condition - greasy, rumpled, unshaven- I could as well. 

 

 

Groundhog Day

    Punxatawny Phil once again sees his shadow, as he nearly always does. When I roll out the door and down the ramp after work, I see my shadow as well, dark and crisp against the new sidewalk. I’m distracted by it, and instantly topple over, landing right on my knee. A filthy man with a bag of cans asks if I need any help. 

    I cautiously make my way down the hill with plenty of time to spare. The bus comes and after a few stops a coworker gets on; he lives not far from the hospital. We talk about a fellow employee who used to say he wanted to work in security at the hospital. I imagine him skulking the corridors in silence with his dead stare, waiting for someone else to respond to calls for help with the code grays. 

    Earlier in the day, another coworker, who I don’t know well, asked me about my cast. I told him I lost some of my toes due to diabetes and he said he had his foot torn off by an IED in Iraq. Even though it was completely blown off,  they were able to reattach it and he can walk almost normally. 

    They take me right in to wound care when I press the blue button. The nurse whose name I can never remember tells me to take the big room. Her name tag says Dierdre. Dierdre, I repeat to myself. Dierdre, Dierdre, Dierdre. She looks a lot like an older version of Original Karen. Whatever happened to her, anyways? Maybe she got a new job, or is just busy on the hyperbaric side, or died. 

    Vicki sits at the computer while Dierdre Dierdre Dierdre takes my vitals. I pull up my pants leg and they exhibit an appropriate amount of horror at my fresh wound, which is brilliant red but doesn’t look too deep. 

    “Seann are you showing any signs of sickness?” a woman from the counter asks. “Or have you been around anyone showing any signs of sickness?” I do a double take; she looks exactly like Shelley. But I’ve never seen this woman before, and never had anyone ask these questions aside from the receptionists downstairs. Is everyone in the office slowly turning into Shelley?

    Dierdre picks up the saw and turns it on. Nothing happens. “Do I need to plug this in?” she asks Vicki. 

    “Well, yeah,” says Vicki.

    “Is it working better? It was acting up last week,” I say. 

    “The guy came to fix it and it's been fine,” Dierdre says, and proves it by slicing off my cast with no trouble. 

    “Drainage?” asks Vicki. Dierdre gingerly reaches into the garbage for my dressing which she has discarded without looking at it. 

    “I’d say small,” she says. “You got this put on on a week ago?”

    “Four days ago,” I say. 

    She looks at it again. “Definitely small.”

    While she's cleaning up the wound, I tell Dierdre I haven’t seen her in a while. She says they haven’t had much work for her lately. “It’ll pick up in spring, summer. That’s our busy season.” I feel like chatting but I’m failing to remember a single detail about her life. To be fair, the ignorance seems to be mutual, because she asks me where I work. When I tell herm=, she says, “I should take the kids there, I’ve never been.” She says she has two preteens at home and three adults and I'm surprised, then remember how surprised I was the last time she told me as well. I assume we’ll have this same conversation six months from now, during the busy season.

Since there’s no bereavement on Mondays, Dierdre prepares the precast immediately. I’m the only patient left so she keeps the curtain open, and I catch glimpses of Jenny and Kaitlin restocking supplies and cleaning up for the day. KC sits at the counter with her mask off, slowly spinning in her chair with a dour look on her face. 

A few minutes later Dr. Taggert comes strutting in, paper gown flapping.

“Where’s the water?” she asks. 

“Knew I was forgetting something,” says Nicole. 

Taggert asks how the cast was and I say it was a little rough. She looks upset and I say, “Oh, not yours. Yours was fine. Not fine. Amazing. I meant Thursday’s was a little sloppy. Judy did it.”

“Oh. I don’t know what kind of experience she has. I haven't even met her yet,” she says.

 “It was kind of a weird visit,” I say. “Dr. Thompson barely said a word.”

“Well she’d just gotten back that day. Though she didn’t actually go to Sri Lanka after all, I guess?” says Taggert. 

“She seemed pretty miserable.” 

    “Yeah I don’t know what happened. Maybe she got sick and couldn’t go? She was talking about it for a while. She really does go some crazy places.” She turns to Nicole. “Remember she got to ride elephants? Where was that? Thailand? I don't get to go anywhere.”

    “Do you want another roll?” Nicole asks.

    “Who am I, Doctor Thompson? Though now that I look at it it’s maybe not quite enough in the back.” She runs her hand across my calf. “I guess it’s okay. See the back is what holds all the weight.” But I’m not supposed to be putting any weight on it, I think, so why does it matter? “I remember when they put them on us, you could really feel them strain in the back.”

    “You had to wear a cast?”

    “Yeah, they did whole department,  so we could see what it's like, back when we started doing these three, four years ago…”

    “Wait, so these are that recent? What did you use before?”

    “We still used total contact casts, but they weren’t hard like these. They were sort of sock type things. The patient had to lie on his stomach with his leg bent back, it was really a pain. They were impregnated with plaster and we had to rub them for exactly four minutes so they would cure. They drove me nuts -you know me, I have trouble standing still for more than five seconds. Patients would bring in songs to time us by. This one guy brought in Highway to Hell and we all started singing and dancing to it. One of the other patients started filming it and we had to tell her to stop. I mean, what if that had found its way online?”

    She’s told me part of this story before. How many times do I have to live through this day before I get it right, before I can move on with my life?

    "Now keep that knee covered," Taggert says. "You say you fell? Were you going too fast? Promise me you'll be careful."

    "Yes, Mom."

    "Look, the only thing I'm good for is mothering people," she says. "That's why I'm here." I think I detect a note of melancholy, a whiff of self pity. 

    "I already have a mother," I say. "Not including the eight more I have in this very office."

    My knee hurts as I roll up the hill to the bus stop. I’ll do it all again in three days, then again in four, then in three days again. But if my drainage continues to be minimal, I’ll be able to cut back to once a week. Maybe I should let Judy pray for me.

    When I get home I see that there are thousands of internet clips of nurses dancing in their wards, most of them from China during the pandemic. I don’t see any footage of the fine medical professionals of Providence Wound Care Clinic shaking their asses to AC DC. Which is probably for the best.