Coming Clean: A Memoir (18 page)

“The nurse came in a few minutes ago.” He lifted his head from his paper. “He said we could see her in recovery for a couple of minutes before they take her to the ICU.” He was addressing everyone, but he only really seemed to be looking at me: scanning for damage, the way he did when I was a kid and would come home bruised and bloody from a run-in with cement.

The nurse returned to escort us to the post-surgical recovery area, where my mom was lying in a bed, eyes closed. It had been hours since I left the city, and I couldn’t imagine what they’d been doing to her all this time. The nurse told us that she was sedated and couldn’t hear anything we said, but there was a tear running down her face. I wondered if she knew what had happened. My dad spent a long time talking to her, and I was surprised he had that much to say. He wasn’t exactly a demonstrative guy. When he stood up, I noticed the water in his eyes. It was the closest to crying I’ve ever seen him. My aunt passed on the opportunity to say anything to my mom, and so it was my turn.

“I need you. You can’t leave me, okay? You can’t leave me.” I could have sworn that for a second she squeezed my hand. I didn’t want to tell her I loved her or anything else that could be construed as a good-bye. She did not have my permission to die.

We waited for the doctor in the ICU waiting room. My father sat quietly, staring at his left hand. It was most likely a nervous
habit, but I couldn’t help but think he was looking for a wedding ring, something that would tie him to his wife.

My parents had never worn wedding rings. I bought them a pair for their sixteenth anniversary with the money I’d saved from my first waitressing job. I had their wedding date inscribed on the inside of the bands. They lost them days later. Things were always getting lost in our house—it was never worth the trouble of looking for them for fear of what else we might find.

D
R. ABDALLAH ENTERED
the waiting room. “You’re all Mrs. Miller’s family?” he asked.

“My kids and my sister-in-law,” my father said. Rachel and Anna weren’t blood, but they were practically my sisters. He must have known I’d need them there, and lied accordingly. It was a day of firsts; I’d never heard him lie before.

The ICU waiting room was tiny, which I only noticed once the five of us were forced to hold court uncomfortably close to the doctor. I’d read up on him before the surgery—I knew that he’d gone to medical school at the University of Baghdad, which community hospitals he was affiliated with, and that he had an average waiting-room wait time of twenty-five minutes—but I didn’t realize how small he’d be. He was roughly my size, five foot four. He appeared to be about my parents’ age, perhaps a few years younger.

I knew that he’d never say he was sorry for what had happened. He couldn’t, legally, I was sure, but I could see it on his face, in his downcast eyes, as he told us what had happened in the operating room.

Complications. Lacerate. Liver. Kidney failure. Bile ducts. Laparoscopic. Bleeding. Sepsis
.

I repeated the words over and over in my mind as he said them. I needed to remember all the details for my mom, so she could know what happened to her, and so I could try to figure out how to get her fixed. The surgery, Dr. Abdallah explained, took a turn for the worse when he accidentally severed the vein going to her liver. Since the surgery was laparoscopic, using small incisions for minimum invasion, they couldn’t find the source of the bleeding quickly enough to prevent massive blood loss. In searching for the vein, they had ended up destroying her bile ducts. The lack of blood had caused her kidneys to go into distress.

“Is she going to die?” Apparently this was the only question I was capable of asking anyone, first my father and then the doctor. It’s the only thing I cared about.

“She’s not out of the woods yet. We’ll know more in the next forty-eight hours.” Dr. Abdallah looked as rattled as we did. He did these types of surgeries all the time. They weren’t supposed to end like this. “The ICU nurses are helping to settle her. They’ll come get you when you can see her.”

“Thank you, doctor,” my father said, as Dr. Abdallah turned to leave. He nodded and continued walking.

My father had always had a somewhat Norman Rockwellian view of doctors—and he was ready, willing, and able to chalk the whole thing up as an accident. I wasn’t so sure. I saw Dr. Abdallah as careless—someone who, despite the abnormalities of her physique, assured my mother that everything would be A-OK. The part of me that wanted to protect my mother from
everyone, including my father, wanted to throttle my dad for his “thank you.” But the part of me that needed comfort curled up into him instead.

There was no one else that could have given me the all-encompassing bear hug I needed right then. My dad was the perfect size, his shoulder the perfect height. When I was a kid, he was trim and muscular, with curly blond hair and a bushy red beard. He’d filled out since then, his hair and beard turning a snowy white and his belly resting over the waistband of his jeans. In his flannel shirt and Long Island Ducks cap, he looked like a bus-driving Santa Claus.

No one else knew what to do. Rachel and Anna remained quiet, and Lee started babbling about how hard it was when my grandmother died, how losing her mother was something she was still coming to terms with. My dad stiffened at her words but said nothing. My grandmother was an old woman who died from old age. I still needed my mom. I needed her to say the right things when my heart was broken, to help me pick a wedding dress one day, to teach me how to be a mom. I was just starting my life, and she needed to be there for it. I could tell my dad was thinking along the same lines. “It’s different,” he whispered, and I burrowed myself deeper into his chest.

I knew what my mother would’ve said if she were there: that Lee was doing the best she could, that everyone has limitations to what they can give of themselves. She gave me this speech whenever I was angry with my father.

A nurse in purple scrubs entered the ICU waiting room and waved for us to follow her. “She’s conscious, that’s a good sign,” she said.

The ICU was a big white and blue room with curtains separating
the hospital’s most critical patients. In the time since leaving the surgical recovery room, the nursing staff had hooked my mother up to more tubes and wires than I could count, all of them connected to machines that beeped sharply. My stomach lurched with each noise. When my mom saw us, she immediately started pointing to her breathing tube. She wanted it out, but we told her we couldn’t. I wanted her to ask me for something I could give. I needed to feel like there was something I could do.

Once she realized we weren’t going to pull the tube out, she changed tactics and signed for a pen. If there was one thing my dad was good for, it’s a pen and paper. But her handwriting was shaky from anesthesia and all that came out was gibberish. She abandoned the written word in favor of using her finger to draw letters for us, as we stood around her bed shouting guesses in a game of charades.

She wanted to know what had happened to her and if she was going to die. I didn’t want to tell her. I wanted her to think it was all totally normal. But I also wanted to be the one to deliver the news to her. I didn’t trust anyone else to keep it gentle.

“The doctor nicked a vein, and because of the nature of the surgery, you lost a lot of blood. So in the next few days they’re just going to monitor your internal organs to make sure everything goes back to normal,” I told her.

In typical Mom fashion, she looked at me, looked at everyone else, then gave me a look of
yeah, right
. But no one countered my watered-down story.

The games continued. She pointed to her ears, making some sort of stabbing motion. She repeated it over and over. We were all confused, and she was angry with us—angry for not understanding
her, angry for not taking the tube out so she could just tell us what she meant. I found myself getting defensive, the way I would when she’d call me out on my dating life or failed diets. She may have been dying, but she was still my mother.

I negotiated with God in my head:
If you let her live, I’ll never get mad at her again.
Even though I knew this was an impossible promise—my mother could be absolutely infuriating—I added in a
I’ll do something good with my life, something that will help people
for good measure. That was a promise I might actually be able to keep.

It was Lee who finally understood what she was trying to mime and spell out for us: My mother wasn’t completely unconscious during the surgery.

She remembered hearing the ruckus in the operating room. She wanted to know what was wrong with her liver. She heard someone there say “mistake.” She wrote the word “mistake” in the air with her fingers to emphasize that this was a direct quote. And then she spelled out Stony Brook. She wanted to be transferred to the hospital where I was born.

The nurse told us we needed to leave, that we were getting my mom too worked up. I asked her if it would be all right if I slept there.

“It’s not allowed,” she told me. “But I’m your mother’s overnight nurse. If you just happen to wander in during the night, I won’t mind. And a tip—the chairs in the waiting room convert into cots.”

Anna offered to take Lee to the train, promising to come back tomorrow on her lunch break. I told my dad to go home and get some sleep. I had a feeling that he’d need to process this alone. Rachel helped me turn the chairs into cots and we settled in for
the night. We’d been spending nights together in the hospital since we were born.

I knew that despite her vehemence in the ICU, my mother was fragile. If she were going to get through this, it would be because of me. I thought about all the times she told me the story of my premature birth, how she and my father were always there because they wanted me to know that I was loved and had people to live for. I knew that there was still a part of my mother that would try to take care of me, even now, a part that would protect me from having to watch her die. She’d spent years telling off mean teachers, school bullies, and the inner voice in my head that reminded me regularly that I was nothing more than the garbage I grew up in. I would protect her this time. I would promise her she was going to get out, as she had done for me so many times. And I would not leave her side, because if I did, I didn’t trust her to keep fighting.

The week that followed blended together into one long day. I refused to leave the hospital, despite the pleas of my father and friends. I’d taken up residence in the waiting room, giving my credit card to Rachel and Anna so they could stop by Target and pick me up new clothes, shoes, clean underwear, toiletries, and reading material. I’d resorted to taking daily paper-towel baths in the handicap bathroom. The lone stall was the only place where I felt like I was really alone, and it became my place of refuge: a one-stop shop where I could bathe, cry, and pray that my mother would be allowed to live. It was the one place I could fall apart for a few minutes.

I was in the bathroom when she pulled out the catheter in her pulmonary artery. I’d only been gone a few minutes, but when I returned to her curtained-off corner of the ICU she was covered
in blood and surrounded by nurses. She’d been asleep when she did it. Morphine had always given her nightmares, and she had been on a steady diet of it. Normally when she’d wake, I’d be there to take the brunt of her anxiety: In her medicated haze, she was always confused and angry. With each opening of her eyes, she’d demand that I leave her alone. I wasn’t there to watch her that time, and instead of me, it was the wires she wanted gone. The nurses restabilized her and went on about their business. I planted myself in the chair by her bed and spent the next few days staring at her monitors.

The morphine and other drug cocktails kept her disoriented and frustrated. The doctors checked on her cognitive skills daily, and she answered mostly wrong. She couldn’t remember my birthday or sometimes my name. She always gave my dad’s information, my dad’s birthday, my dad’s name. He visited twice a day, before and after work, and each time he’d walk through the ICU door she’d whisper “Brian!” and reach for his hand and smile. When it was all falling apart, it was my father she reached out for. I had never seen this kind of affection between them. Perhaps this was the one good thing to have come from this, a reminder that my parents, despite their history of making one another miserable, loved each other.

When I wasn’t allowed in the ICU, I spent my days swapping stories with other patients’ loved ones, and when things were silent, I used my phone to look up information about the machines my mother was connected to. I looked for numbers that I should keep an eye out for, and when they appeared, I called the nurses. They didn’t seem as concerned as I was. “If something’s wrong an alarm goes off, and we’ll come running. I promise,” the
nurse on shift assured me. I couldn’t help thinking we needed to be more proactive than just waiting for an alarm to go off.

The first real inkling that the mom I knew was returning was when she called me over and whispered, “I don’t always say what I mean. I want what I can’t say I want.” To most people this might have been drug-induced babble, but I spoke “Mom” pretty well. I knew that she was telling me she was going to fight them—it was a vital part of who she was. She needed to tell them not to touch her, or that she didn’t want reparative surgery. “Listen to what people mean, not what they say” had been a mantra of hers, and she was telling me, in her way, what she meant. It was my job to make sure they did everything they could to save her.

True to her word, she fought them on everything, from linen changes to isotope scans. Legally, I was not her proxy—my father was—but the doctors and nurses looked to me to give the okay for her, and I did. The test results didn’t do anything to lift our spirits. Her liver was not working. Her kidneys hadn’t kicked in. But she was getting stronger despite her broken body, and almost two weeks after her surgery she was stable enough to be transferred to the ICU at Stony Brook.