kathleen watt

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Chapter 44

Going Home 

 

EARLY ON THE DAY OF MY DISCHARGE, 

in the last week of April, after almost a month in the hospital, as Evie and my sisters helped me decamp, the Chief of Microvascular Surgery stopped by. He had heard I hadn’t been sleeping.

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“We find that people generally get behind while they’re here and catch up when they go home,” he reassured me, “so don’t worry.”

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He moved on to my diet. This was low octane stuff to be delivered by this surgical demigod. He flopped over the pages of my chart, found I’d lost 25 pounds, and advised me to fatten up.

 

As if! I’d already planned a new summer wardrobe for my slim new self. But the surgeon had not the slightest interest in my dress size.

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“We want you to bulk up for chemo,” he said, “when we expect you to lose weight again.” 

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Huh. A loophole.

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“I assume you don’t mean, y’know, extra mayonnaise, chocolate, fries. . .?” I rasped, in my new post-tracheostomy voice.

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“Pretty much whatever it takes,” he replied. His benign expression never cracked.

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Okay then. Good times!

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A social worker brought me my former life in a giant plastic bag I’d last seen the day I was admitted. I drew from it my street clothes and laid my hospital johnnies on my rumpled life raft. I signed my discharge papers and mounted the hospital-mandated wheelchair for my ride to the outside world. In my lap, the giant plastic bag was re-filled with select vestiges of my hospital life. Markie carried the remaining live plants while Kris held the door and Evie wheeled us through.

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I intended to show our gratitude on the way out, our genuine affection for the nurses and aides who’d rescued me so often during my month on the floor. Outside my room, however, the corridor yawned, deserted but for a guy waving a giant floor polisher from sill to sill. Everyone had moved on, not from me but to the next patient in need. I had been part of a flow that would continue when I left. “My” room became Room 201 again. No fanfare, no goodbye, no thanks-for-coming.

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“Wait up, you guys,” I wheezed. “Are we sure it’s okay to…just… y’know…leave?”

 

I was far, far removed from the autonomy I had surrendered four weeks and a lifetime ago. But yes, I was cleared for take-off.

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Flanked by my sisters, Evie wheeled me through the glassy corridor to the elevator, down the ten floors of the celebrated atrium to our topiaried dancefloor, across the busy lobby, out the front door. The ride felt to me like a desperado’s getaway. And then it was over. Blinking at the bright sky, I traded my wheelchair for a Yellow Cab.

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After my protracted stay, the passage from sickroom to curb was a reemergence from a cocoon of daily attention into the wider world, where life had continued without me, in complete indifference. I thought of Dutch master Pieter Breughel’s Landscape with Fall of Icarus—a sweeping sixteenth-century genre painting, dominated by a sturdy peasant plowing a high field. We look past him out to sea, over cliffs and sailing ships, to a pale horizon. Below the plowman, a shepherd, on the rocks amidst his flock, props himself lazily upon his staff. At water’s edge, an angler sits beside his bait pail. The only sign of fallen “Icarus” of the title are his tiny legs, white and flailing, disappearing beneath the waves. No one even notices.  “The ploughman may have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,” wrote poet W. H. Auden of it, in our own times, “But for him it was not an important failure...” 

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Once we arrived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, my lion-hearted women bundled me out of the cab and turned back to settle with the driver. For an otherworldly moment, I stood alone in front of our brownstone stoop, feeling not myself at all. A spring mist gloved my skinny body in half-remembered sensations of the neighborhood. The new shape of me no longer fit the me-shaped space I had left behind. There would be more than memory to retrofit. A sense of parallel dimensions—there, and not here—here, but not there—was palpable and discomfiting. On the stoop, I sagged into the brownstone rail to catch my breath and wait for my beloved escorts. 

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Seldom throughout the saga had I succumbed to naked emotion, due not to any special mettle, but simply because so much had been downright interesting. When not altogether obliterating, the process thoroughly absorbed me in its strangeness and the rarified privilege of hovering between life and death, in the company of genius and love, either of which had the power to determine my outcome. In the nimbus of illness, I’d experienced none of the context that stirred so much emotion in those around me. I’d visited a country so categorically other—had almost lost myself there, in body and in mind—and returned, not exactly to the place I had left, but to a collateral otherness. And no part of that turmoil had not been, at least, interesting.

 

Once over our apartment threshold, however, the sudden full whelm of Home engulfed me. I wasn’t ready for the catch in my throat. And then my cheeks were wet.

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In the kitchen, Kristina got busy puréeing all available edibles. I wanted to reward her with an appetite, though I had none. I tried the creamed broccoli because she made it for me. I held my breath, as I’d practiced; I turned my head, as I’d practiced; I positioned a spoonful of broccoli purée, pressed my tongue to my palate and…

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Now, the key to accomplishing the swallow sequence is fingertip pressure upon the tracheostomy to keep it out of play. The only thing worse than forgetting this step would be to remember it too late, and hurry to slip it in ahead of a mouthful on its way down—as I did in my first swallow at home.

 

Fortunately, the next step in the swallowing sequence is to voice “Ahem,” moving air outward, keeping the windpipe clear while directing swallowed food toward the proper pipe. When I remembered the open trach, my hand flew to my throat in time to press a tiny morsel of al dente broccoli into my windpipe. My “Ahem” was a raucous, explosive reflex. Kristina jumped, startled, her eyes full of pained solicitude and self-reproach. Once again, I survived, and others paid my piper. For their sakes, I would switch to a bland half-cup of Cream of Wheat, for now.

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Markie helped me luxuriate in my first bath in a month. I had wounds everywhere, but once securely swaddled and propped up, I could ease the rest of me into the womb-warm water she had drawn for me. Much as I had on the giddy evening of our Dancing Day, six long months earlier, when, exactly like this, but with strawberries and champagne, Evie and I had slipped into the bath—and the first of all four siblings in succession crept in, past our “Do Not Disturb” door-hanger, each giggling and whispering, “It’s only me!”

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I thought of my mother, in the last year of her foreshortened life, unable to dull the stabbing pain of her diabetic neuropathy, except by floating weightless in warm water. “If you get the water exactly the right temperature, you can feel like you have no body,” she once mused. Driving together on a cold, damp afternoon in that year when “right now” was the best time for everything, we turned off a slushy roadway into a modest local day spa for a spontaneous float. At that off-hour, the hot tub was just warming up. We waited. My Mom looked decades older than her sixty-three years, and the proprietor required me to sign a proxy waiver.

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Then, in our underwear, my mother and I dipped in together. I supported her head and shoulders as she lost herself in a weightless suspension. I propped her away from the jets while I adjusted the heat. Sitting beside her, I loved the luxury of serving each other in this way, watching her feet bobble over the rumbling water, losing track of the minutes.

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When I turned to her again, I saw beads of perspiration had sprung to her cheeks. I’d misjudged the heat, the time, her sugar level, her stamina… I’d misjudged my own intentions. Frantically hauling her from the tub and frightened, I dumped a draft of full-fructose orange juice into her to revive her in the bare nick of time.

 

This stripe of excruciating self-doubt became familiar to me throughout the long, catastrophic roller-coaster of my mother’s last illness. How I would have welcomed a word of guidance from her, even as frail as she was, and weary of giving guidance to everyone.

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I shrank from the memory of that day’s spa outing. My mistake was both an indictment and a corrective. For I’d since seen the view from the bed. It is not only valid. It is essential, and sometimes all that stands between best intentions and tragedy.

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But on my first day home from the hospital, suspended in my own weightless float, I forgot my body and let go of every unpleasantness—my  mother’s illness, my failed flap, the drowning Icarus, the brute life-saving trach, the blessed Yankauer. I floated in the opulence of grace and love that had brought me the extraordinary gift of this ordinary bath.

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