I think more often than not, as of lately, I’ll open up a blank word document, sit down, and prepare myself to write something, and I just don’t know what to say.
Like I mentioned in my last post, it feels like my life has become some kind of fucked up TV sitcom. Newton’s Law says that what goes up must come down. If you apply that logic to my family then I guess, any bad thing that can happen will.
The other day, my grandma was in a car accident; we thought that she was okay but, the car wasn’t. As it turns out, we were wrong.
Yesterday, I took her to the doctor, a check-up that we’d had scheduled for a while. She didn’t mention the car accident, I did- I’m stubborn like that. So, I was told to bring her to Good Shepherd Hospital, they wanted to do an MRI and some other tests, so I dropped her off there before I had planned to go to work.
That was at about 2p.m.?
Well, I went home to get dressed for work, get all of my work crap together, and then she calls me at 4p.m. and my first thought was ‘okay great, she’s done and ready to be picked up.’ Nope. I wasn’t that lucky. I’m not lucky at all apparently, if I have any luck at all, it’s bad.
You’ve heard of the black sheep of the family. I’m not the black sheep, I’m the black cat. Any and all bad luck finds its way to me.
Grandma called to tell me that not only were they keeping her in the hospital overnight but, that they’d found a 5cm mass in her brain. For those of you who don’t know, that’s about the size of a small lime. So, I did the only reasonable thing I could think of… I lied to her, I told her that I was fine when she asked, and I proceeded to fall into a panic spiral. Perfectly normal, right?
From there, I called my boss, I called a coworker that I’m friendly with, and off to the hospital I went with my little brother. What the hospital didn’t tell me, however, is that A.) the hospital’s visiting hours have changed due to Covid-19 and B.) only ONE visitor was allowed at a time, and that only ONE visitor was allowed per DAY. You see, these things would’ve been nice to know, seeing as we live almost an hour away from this particular hospital but, I tried not to hold that against them.
Especially when one of the volunteers, this really nice older woman with dark, curly hair insisted on wheeling me upstairs to see my grandma. I’m still in the boot, and I probably will be for a while since these fractures don’t want to heal and my podiatric surgeon appointment isn’t until the beginning of November. She was nice to me. She fought to help me and BJ both see my grandmother last night despite the bullshit policy and the crazy long walk.
She left me with my grandma and said to let the secretary at the desk outside of her room to know when I was ready to go, that way she could lead BJ up to the room, and take me away again to comply with their one visitor at a time only rule. Don’t ask me why, especially when she was in a private room. It was 6p.m. so I took 15-minutes to myself before trying to find the secretary who wasn’t there because of shift change. There was another secretary but, instead of calling for the volunteer, told me to wait 10-minutes until the other secretary came back.
That would’ve put me at 6:25p.m. and visiting hours stopped at 6:30p.m. By the time the volunteer would’ve made it to me, across the hospital, BJ wouldn’t have gotten to see her. So, I decided to pull a jailbreak maneuver. The ‘wheelchair’ as they called it, wasn’t really a wheelchair. When I looked it up on Google just now, I found that it’s called a Patient Transport Chair. So, unless you’re squeezing the strange bar at the back of it, it remains locked in place and does not move.
It was my bright idea to put one of the arms in an upright position, place my left knee on the seat by my backpack, hold the lever at the back, and attempt to use it as a knee scooter. If no one was going to help me, I was just going to have to help my God damn self. Never in my little brother’s 18-years have I ever seen him move so fast as he did yesterday when I told him that the hospital was keeping my grandma, or that they’d found a mass in her brain.
Maybe it was because he feels bad that he didn’t go see mom more often all of the times she was in the hospital. I don’t know. What I did know was that I didn’t take him all the way out there just for him to be robbed of his chance to see her, ask how she was doing, and give her a hug himself. I made it down three hallways, one elevator, and past one entrance of the hospital before a nurse caught me to ask what I was doing. From there, she herself chose to push me the rest of the way back towards the main entrance that we’d come into the hospital through.
Finally, we got to a balcony that I recognized. I’d been two hallways down from where I would find the last elevator to bring me to BJ. I’d tried texting and calling him 2-3 times on that short roll towards the balcony area but, whether it was his phone, bad reception, or his very little amount of battery life… he didn’t answer. So, when I got to that balcony, and I saw the entrance we came in, I started shouting his name.
There was a flight of stairs in front of me that he had to come up, and from there I sent him on to see our grandma with barely 10-minutes to spare. From there, the nice nurse who’d ‘rescued’ me from myself took BJ off to find our grandma’s room in the maze that is Good Shepherd Hospital, and the original volunteer woman came (having heard me calling BJ’s name) and got me. She took me back down through the elevator, admonishing me about staying off my hurt foot, and asking why I was doing something crazy like that when it meant that I could’ve further damaged my already unhealing leg.
My answer was simple. We’ve lost enough this year.
Losing mom was hard on all of us, and now there was this too. He deserved to see her as much as I did. Because he’d come with me, worried just as much as I was. And he got to see her. Because I was stubborn and I wouldn’t wait around for a secretary who’d apparently gone to get lunch, or coffee, or whatever.
The volunteer woman brought me to a comfy chair down in the lobby where I was allowed to wait for BJ until his visit was over. I assumed she’d gone back to what she was doing before she needed to wheel me around and asked me a question.
“Chocolate makes everything better, right?” Despite wearing a mask, I smiled and nodded. Part of me thought that I may have missed something, until she told me to hold out my hand and she placed 2 little Dove chocolates in my hand. You know, the kind that come wrapped in the colorful tinfoil? She told me that one was for me, and one was for BJ, and that she would be praying for us and was hoping that everything would turn out well for us.
I wish I would’ve asked her name.
I wish I would’ve seen her again today when I went back to pick up my grandma before I came to work.
I wish I could have told her that yes, chocolate does make everything better. Even if it’s just for a moment because, that one moment of laughter, and that one moment of kindness meant the world to me and my little brother. So, if somehow, you’re reading this, even if I never see you again. Thank you. Thank you so much.
We don’t know too much right now. Just that my grandma has a 5cm tumor in her brain- they did use the word tumor. Also, that she’s going to need surgery, which they think might happen on Thursday but, we’re not going to know until she goes and sees the neurosurgeon again, who she needs to call on Monday.
I feel like a clumsy card house. You find the right balance and slowly start to rebuild the broken things. You think you have a solid foundation, or any foundation at all, and then a harsh breeze comes and knocks everything over all over again.
I wish I could tell you what was going to happen next. I wish I knew what was going to happen next. For now, I’m just trying to hang in there, and I’m hanging on for dear life.
-S.N.L.
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