Axolotl

Over the weekend, my stepmother calls to tell me that my father is back in the hospital again. A few days after I saw him last October, he fell and fractured a few vertebrae in his neck. They sent him home in a neck brace and last week he fell again. When he got to the hospital they found that there was a wound on his heel that had gotten infected. 

None of this is surprising; it doesn’t sound like he takes any sort of meaningful care of his diabetes, constantly snacking and sometimes going days without taking his insulin. Aside from the occasional medical appointment, he never leaves the apartment. It seems like he’s slowly committing suicide.

“Room three. Back in the corner,” commands Shelley. She follows me back, chattering happily the whole time.

“You’re in a good mood,” I say. She just shrugs.

It has been exactly one year since the nurses’ strike ended, one year since my last ulcer finally closed up. 

I sit in the chair and she raises it up and says, “Oh my god, I can see your heel.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I can see your heel. There’s a giant hole in your cast.”

She saws off the cast and shows me the bottom half. It looks like a large hole the shape of a crescent moon has been cleanly cut out of the heel. 

“What the hell,” I laugh. 

“Did something happen?”

“Obviously. But I don’t know what. I did notice that it felt it was pinching a bit, but I can’t really see down there.”

 She sets the cast on the biohazard bin to show the doctor, then unwraps the dressings. “Not much seeping through... oh wow! I can’t believe how good this looks!" It's good news but she sounds positively ecstatic. "Another week and this will be closed over and then two more weeks of the cast and you'll be free of us. And the heel doesn't look too... oh, wait.” 

There is a blood blister on my heel, the exact size of the hole. 

“It’s always something with me, isn’t it?” I say. I’m not overly upset, just kind of irritated, and embarrassed that I didn’t notice such a huge gash. But it's true, with my cast on I really can't see down there without a mirror.

 “Well it's intact, so that's good. And I seriously can’t get over how great the wound looks,” she says. I grab my foot and twist it up so I can see. It actually does look really good, just a shallow indentation with the tiniest of slits in the middle. 

The doctor comes in, followed by a woman I’ve never seen before. She’s short and blonde and wearing an enormous diamond ring. Dr. Thompson doesn’t introduce her, just plucks the piece of gauze off my wound and says, “Looks like I’m going to have to find someone else to torture pretty soon.” The blonde woman takes a sealed scalpel and peels back the plastic, then remembers that she’s not wearing gloves and just holds it there. The doctor takes it and says, “Unfortunately there’s not much for me to show you here. No undermining. A little spongy. I’ll just…” She makes a single slice. “There, it really doesn’t need anything else. This is wonderful.” 

“Take a look at this,” says Shelley, showing her the cast. She looks baffled.

“I have never seen that happen before.” She looks at me. I shrug. Shelley points to the blood blister. “Oh that’s not bad at all.” She presses it gently with her palm. “Very shallow. Three millimeters, maybe two. Just put a lot of extra padding on that and we’ll keep an eye on it.” 

Vicki slips in to get a peek while the wound is still exposed, then I’m alone with Shelley again. She wraps my foot back up and fills me in on all the news from home. The youngest is in trouble at preschool because she refuses to help clean up. (Shelley thinks she's fallen under the influence of one of the boys, a litlte troublemaker named Finn. "Like Huckleberry," she sys.) The car is still in the shop after six weeks and two days. The bill comes to over ten thousand dollars. Insurance is covering it. She has expanded her microwaved noodle repertoire to include ramen and mac and cheese. 

She stops talking for a while because she’s being drowned out by the loud voice of the patient in the next room, who put his blue post-op shoe on the kitchen floor next to the garbage, and of course it got carried out to the curb and now it's gone. He laughs heartily at his own story, which is long and involved and without much of a payoff. The nurse laughs politely and says it's time to take his vitals.

"But you just took them," the man says. 

"We have to take them twice now, once at the beginning and once at the end. It's a new policy."

“Oh and my oldest doesn’t like raccoons anymore,” Shelley suddenly says. “I’m actually kind of sad about it.”

“Has she moved on to a new obsession?” I ask. 

“Yeah now she wants an axolotl.” 

"You should get her one, they're cool." She makes a face.

She wraps a lot of extra padding around my heel, after covering it with a large foam bandage. “I’m not entering it as a wound because it’s not open. I’ll just make a note in your chart. The doctor didn’t seem too concerned.” 

Dr. Thompson and her charge return. She wraps the cast and starts talking about the fancy new teapot she bought. “It’s not as fancy as yours,” she says to Shelley. 

“Oh, what brand did you get?” Shelley asks, excitedly. Apparently she is a tea enthusiast.

“Chef something. If you look up chef something teapot it’ll come up.” Shelley turns the monitor so she can see, and does a search. The doctor keeps her eyes on the screen but doesn’t stop wrapping the cast. “Chefman, that’s the one. It wasn’t three hundred dollars like yours. But then again, I don’t make as much as you do. I need another roll.” 

"Mine has it so you can set it up the night before and have it waiting for..."

“I said I need another roll,” Thompson says.

“Oh sorry,” Shelley says, and unwraps another roll of casting. Shelley pulls up her teapot on the computer to show off some of the many featrues. The doctor keeps her eye on the monitor the whole time, then again says, “ I need another roll.” Shelley is wrapped up in her search so once again she repeats it and once again Shelley apologizes. She puts an extra roll on to make sure I don’t have another mishap. “That was probably my fault,” she says. The assistant helps her smooth out the cast, her hands mostly getting in the way. 

“That’s really wet, better let it sit awhile,” she finally says. She looks me in the eye. “With that blister, take it easy this weekend.” 

Shelley empties the bucket and wipes the water from the floor and Jenny and Vicki come to chat while the cast is drying. I ask Jenny what’s new. “Nothing. My life is boring.” I ask if she got Springsteen tickets and she says no. “We got online the instant they went on sale but there were literally 45,000 people ahead of us so we waited a couple of hours then gave up.”

Shelley says she needs to take my fitals again, and I ask her why the policy changed. "The cast is considered a procedure and after every procedure we need to check your blood pressure to to make sure we're not torturing you," she says. I laugh but she says, "No, that's actually what it's for. If it's too high at the end, we can be accused of torture." 

    "I assume this is in reaction to some some big lawsuit?" It can't be a coincidence that she is the second person to use the word torture today. She wraps the cuff around my arm without answering. The machine beeps.

    "That is way too high. Probably because I've been torturing you with my woes. How about we sit for a wee bit," she suggests. I close my eyes and breathe deeply for a few minutes and my blood pressue drops forty points.

I go downstairs to wait for my ride; the Widder is coming to drive me home and drop off some groceries. It’s nice not having to catch the bus, and my usual hour-long journey is cut down to twenty minutes. 

At home, the elevator doesn’t respond. This is the third time this has happened this week; every time has been because someone hasn’t closed the grate all the way. Leaving my scooter in the lobby, laden with grocery sacks, I slowly clomp up the stairs, stopping on each floor to see if the car there. The new cast is extremely bulky, and I'm sure this doesn't count as "taking it easy." I find the elevator on the top floor and ride it down to collect my trusty steed. 

Once I’m in the apartment I lie down and think of the blister. It's wild that I would get one so soon after my father did, and in the same exact place. Is it a sympathy blister? Is this some supernatural bond between father and son as one struggles to live a better life while the other embraces death? 

I go to bed early, and in the midle of the night I bolt awake in panic at my own fragility. I lie in bed and stare out the window at the lights scattered like stars across the dark hills. My heart is still pumping blood and my air is still being sucked into my lungs, while down below the blister waits quietly, swaddled in layers of foam and batting and Fiberglas; a quivering yolk, a bubble of skin swollen with blood and pus. I try to quiet my firing neurons but I can't seem to stop thinking about how maddening this is to have this happen now that I’m so close to being healed. Is this my treasonous body’s attempt at sabotage, now that I’m doing so much better, now that I’m taking care of my health and watching my sugars? Of course, I didn’t even notice that I had a huge chunk torn from my cast, so I shouldn't get too self-congratulatory. No; rather than enacting revenge, perhaps this is my body's way of reminding me that I’m still not paying close enough attention to it. It’s easy to be frustrated with how poorly my father is managing his disease, but to be honest, I’m only doing marginally better with my own. I drink too much and cheat on my diet and hobble around at work instead of using a wheelchair. Maybe this blister is a manifestation of my hypocrisy, a throbbing organ eager to burst and get infected and start this wretched cycle all over again, spin that wheel of samsara in the hope that this time around I start acting responsibly, that after all these years of slowly killing myself I finally decide to live.