Looming

I think that, when something BIG happens, you kind of build your internal clock around it.

Sure, well, I guess that’s obvious in a way. Birthdays, anniversaries, those things.

But what about death? Do you sit there, every year, and say, “Today is the day they died”? Or does it fade over time? The day comes and goes, and you forget, and then, one day, you’re pouring your coffee and glance at the calendar, then think, “Oh. That was last week.”

I do that with my miscarriage. I’d forgotten the exact date. I just remembered that I was able to tell my husband I was pregnant before Mother’s Day, and by Father’s Day we didn’t have a baby any more. Then, it shows up in Facebook Memories because I was young and open. I’ve always said too much, talked too much, shared too much. We lost our baby on June 13th. Or maybe it was June 12th, and I didn’t post until the next day. I don’t know. I try not to think about it. Maybe that makes me a bad almost-mother. Maybe that makes me human. I don’t know.

That’s probably something my therapist wants to dive into. The last time we did a deep dive, I ended up sick in bed the next day, vomiting and on supplemental oxygen. Why? Because my body hates big feelings. It hates grief. Grief feels like a threat. We don’t have time to be sad.

But, now, the anniversaries I feel weighing on me are the Bad Days, the Hospital Days, the Vent Days. I don’t remember all the dates. I know my first time on the vent was May 5, 2024. I only remember that because the day before I was telling my mother-in-law to take my son to the May the Fourth Be With You event in the neighboring town. My son didn’t want to go because it was raining. They’d brought me a cheeseburger and fries from the hospital cafe. My son ate fries with me, sitting beside me on the plastic hospital bed. I felt tired and couldn’t stand or walk for long. I don’t remember if I was on oxygen or not. I’d had a bronchoscopy that morning, and they cleared out one of my lungs but found nothing wrong. My mother-in-law believes the scope is partially responsible for my hemorrhaging that night. I don’t know. Maybe she’s right–maybe my raging lupus freaked out at the invasion and ate my lungs alive. Or maybe my heart was just failing, and no one thought to look there because a year before, my valve was passable.

After they left, I started coughing. First, it was just wet, then it was blood. Over and over again. I asked for juice, something to soothe my aching, bleeding throat. I hate grape juice, now. It looks like blood. I know it doesn’t, but I can see it, there, in front of me, on that little hospital tray, beside my giant cup of bloody tissues. It looked like a strawberry slurpee. But it was blood-sodden tissues. I called the nurse and asked him for help, for something to stop the coughing. I know I had to be on oxygen then. It would have been stupid not to be. I would have been wheezing, gasping, as my lungs filled with blood, choked by my own fluid. But not enough to wipe me out, not enough to make my nurse do anything. He said he asked the doctor, but the doctor could only offer me an expectorant, “To try to get what’s bothering your lungs out.”

It came out. Over and over and over again, all night long. I barely slept. I couldn’t lay down because I felt like I was choking. The coughing kept me up. Bloody tissue after bloody tissue, stuffed in that oversized cup. The day nurse came in and found me unable to get off the toilet, gasping, still coughing up blood.

I have a video on my phone. I’d been updating my close friends on Instagram. And there’s a video of me showing the cup of bloody tissues, asking for prayer. I sound half-dead already. I watched the video once a long time ago. That was a mistake.

So that day nurse took one look at me, hacking as I was, clutching my cup of bloody tissues. I was just spitting into it, now. God, I probably apologized; I was always apologizing to the nurses. And she, sweet thing that she was, calmly got me into bed and called in another nurse to help. She saw what the night nurse had missed: this was not just a coughing fit. It was bad. Very bad. But she didn’t tell me that right them. She didn’t tell me what she saw, only told me that she was going to get help.

I asked her to tell my husband, and she said it would be easiest to call him from my phone. So I unlocked it, clicked his contact, and handed her the phone. “Sir? Yes, I’m the nurse with your wife. She’s not doing well. You should come.”

I think that’s what she said.

I don’t fully remember.

I was coughing, gasping, bleeding, just focused on not falling down.

The two nurses struggled to take off my pajamas and slipped me into a hospital gown while I sat on this high, rolling bed. They told me they were going to get me help. I told them I didn’t care about the gown, I didn’t care if anyone saw me naked, just help me. I couldn’t breathe. Help, please. I was too tired to sit up, but I couldn’t lie down. I just sat, hunched over like a broken doll, a marionette with her strings cut, clutching that cup. That stupid, stupid cup. They put an oxygen mask on my face, told me to take deep breaths. I couldn’t. I had to take it off after every breath to cough up blood, and it felt like drowning. I hated taking off that mask. I needed that mask. It had air. I needed air.

Mask.

Inhale.

Cough.

Spit.

Mask.

Inhale.

Cough.

Spit.

Repeat.

All while they pushed me down the hall on that high bed.

I talked to them, but I don’t remember what I said. I stared down at my bloody cup, feeling the world whizz by, the turning down hallways, the hospital doors. We must have ridden an elevator into the ICU, but I don’t remember. The ICU felt like it was in a basement. I don’t know if it was, but it’s a dungeon. I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t know where I was. I was just on this bed, in this mask, holding a cup of blood and disintegrating tissues like some corrupt priest.

A short, Indian woman in a white coat came to my side and said, “We may need to intubate you. Do we have your permission to do that?”

I didn’t know what that meant. I just looked at that woman, blood in my hands, and wheezed, “Please just fix me. Please.”

I don’t remember what happened after that.

I don’t know if I blacked out.

I don’t know if I was awake when they shoved that tube down my throat.

I don’t know if I screamed or if I whimpered or if I felt nothing at all.

I don’t know if I struggled or if they put me to sleep before they did anything.

I don’t know.

I don’t know that I want to know.

My home is fewer than 30 minutes from the hospital. By the time my husband arrived in the ICU, I was already asleep with a machine breathing for me. That same doctor told him, “It’s too soon to tell.”

He broke down.

Four days later, they woke me up. I don’t remember the first time they woke me. I don’t know why. My husband says my eyes were blank. One nurse told me that my dad was there, and when I saw him, the monitors went nuts.

I don’t remember.

I don’t remember.

I don’t remember.

A part of me wants to forget. To block it all out. Another part of me–the part that is fascinated by story, by humanity–wants every detail. I want to know what my husband saw, what he heard. I want to know what people said. I want to know what they felt. I want to know what they did to me.

But my brain has made so much of it go dark. My husband doesn’t like to think about it. He doesn’t like to remember.

But he says he remembers the words, “It’s too soon to tell.” They haunt him.

I do not remember the date of when they put me back on the vent, but I think it was early or mid-June. I was in that hospital for two months before they transferred me to Vanderbilt, where they saved my life.

May 5th, my old life ended.

July 11th, they put a piece of metal in my heart, and life began anew.

You can’t tell how much I broke, how much was bitterly rebuilt, unless I show you the scar in my armpit, on my breast, and the stretch marks across my gut, where the steroids and fluid mutated my body to its bursting point. I can show you the scars in my neck from the IV placed there for plasmapheresis treatment. I remember how two nurses had to yank it out. They told me to count to three and exhaled, and then they yanked hard, and a thorned vine burst out of my throat, and I screamed. No numbing, nothing. Just pulling a spiked tube out of my throat like it was nothing. I see the scar in the mirror, and I remember. I have scars up and down my arms from all of the IVs. All the places they punctured again and again, desperate to find veins that hadn’t burst or given up. I have never been afraid of needles, but IVs make something in me scramble. It’s the same feeling I get thinking about cockroaches. Get me away, in another room, another house, another city.

But I walk into a store, a church, a shop, now, and you have no idea how sick I am, how sick I’ve been. I just look like your standard, nerdy, middle-aged mom.

And I try really hard not to tell people, not to blurt it out.

But it comes out, sometimes in small ways. “I have lupus, so I might not be able to …” Disclaimers.

Because I broke.

And I had to be put back together again. I may be better, but, once you break a body, it just doesn’t ever quite go back.

I can sit at a computer for hours and write and research.

I can talk for a long while.

And I can walk outside again.

But not in the heat.

And not for a terribly long time.

I didn’t sit down intending to write a flashback. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve written this one over and over again. I don’t know. It’s just there, hovering just out of sight, in the corner of my eye.

It’s been two years.

And that’s not far away enough.