Emergency Landing Part 3 - Final

See Part 1 here

See Part 2 here

Health Sciences Centre, St. John's Newfoundland and Labrador.

I slept off and on for a few hours. Daughter went to my place and stayed and gathered up items of need. Niece came to meet her at the hospital with more essentials, including a book of poetry. I heard all the noises around me. Triage is a very noisy place but what struck me most was the comradery of the staff. Often raucous and humorous but also so extraordinarily helpful with each other, shouting "you want help with that, here, let me do that, let me lift her head, let me bandage that head for you." I found it extraordinarily moving. Around me were the unconscious, the moaners, the injured, the dying. I looked at my tubes and my wires and my vitals on screen and someone spotted me and came over and said, beaming, "everything is improving".  Blood and urine had been taken every hour or so and the kidneys were ticking back up.

Around 6 a.m. I was moved to a kind of holding station with 2 other beds. It soon became evident that the man across from me was dying, his family came in and a priest. the last rites were performed.  The woman next to me was youngish, 60 or so, but had post-covid dementia, something not written about much but appallingly evident in ER now, as one of the nurses told me. She wanted to play with the contents of the linen cupboard: incontinence pads, kleenex and wipes and laid them all on her bed and moved them around like a chessboard. She was non-verbal. Her 30-ish daughter was with her, crying, trying to calm her but the nurse stopped her, the playing kept her mother happy and quiet.

I got my first meal halfway through the day. the man across had died and was moved and I cried inconsolably, realizing that his last moments should have been private and were public enough for me to hear it all, the grieving and the prayers. My innards were still in turmoil from the infection. But I managed to get the bland meal down me. I could not manage the next meal. It was revolting. Daughter went away and got me a sandwich which I devoured. This was going well.

Later that night I was moved to a ward in the "real" part of the hospital with a real bed. But when I left the holding station I passed the nursing station where the four staff on duty applauded and cheered me on my way out on the gurney. Which moved me no end. I imagine not many leave there alive and alert. I waved back like a queen. Crying again in gratitude. 

The real bed felt like paradise. The large room not so much. Across from me a woman dying. A year older than me according to the hushed conversation of her family. Her granddaughter and the rest of her adult children came in the following morning. Again, tears, overhearing her granddaughter telling her she had good marks in school. The loving words of one son asking his mother if she wanted to go out for one more cigarette - which told me, perhaps, what she was dying from. But I cried once more, pretty inconsolable in Daughter's arms when she arrived. She cried too.

Kitty corner all night was a man raving in dementia. Begging for his mother, then for a nurse, then for his mother. Attendants trying to soothe him, always kind, always calling him mister. It was disturbing how loud he was. Not much sleep.

Next to me, in the morning, a team consulted with the man in the bed next to me, I had a glimpse of him and he looked familiar, a man I might have seen on TV or a film, perhaps. The team were telling him that his liver, kidneys and other organs showed masses, they needed to get into his bowels now and see where else it had spread. He was fighting it, and repeated over and over, "are you sure? are you sure?" Later, I presumed it was his wife who flew by the bottom of my bed and landed at the bottom of his. All the curtains were pulled but sometimes they were dragged open accidentally to give me a glimpse of the real world. I am blessed with good hearing and a voracious curiosity, so could hear their conversation. He eventually asked her "Are you still going to leave me?" And she responded, coldly "Does this change things?" "You'd leave me to die alone?" "How long do you have?" "Maybe three months." "Would I have to take care of you?" "We had thirty years together, what's three months? For God's sake, Rita!" "I'll have to think about it." And with that, she upped and left. 

At that moment, another team of medics dropped by me. The chief, who turned out to be a prof at the university, internal medicine, asked me if I minded she had some students in tow I was quite thrilled to see her seven students were all male with her in charge. Quite a reversal of roles. They answered all my questions and she was cautious when she said, if you are still doing well, we will release you later on tomorrow pending the readings and your vitals.

Later a trainee doctor came by and I asked her a ton of extra questions as to what exactly happened to me. She  had the time to sit down and explained exactly what had happened. The norovirus had invaded my stomach and my bowls causing constant nausea, diarrhea, eventually dehydrating the body, releasing enzymes in an effort to keep the kidneys going which were shutting down and then in turn shutting down the heart and the oxygen levels. My inherent kidney disease accelerated all of this plus my aging body which had no resistance to infection.

My terminal brother, who was also in a hospital in Cork, was communicating through much of all this through WhatsApp we were so worried about each other. Our last communication was when I said to him :"We're a right pair of langers* aren't we, lying about in our beds, being waited on hand and foot." And he cracked up. I loved cracking him up through our times of misery. "A right pair of langers alright," he responded, "you nailed it." 

Later the following day Daughter and I left the hospital. Breathing that air outside, looking at the trees in disbelief, watching the birds, I cried again. Knowing how fortunate I was, how free, how privileged. The parking lot was packed. I was aware, as never before, of how much pain and sorrow awaited all those car drivers and passengers in the hospital behind me. And yet, here was I, leaving the experiences I will never forget.

One of the lucky ones. Dodging death. In awe of the heroes and heroines in the emergency rooms, saving lives, comforting the dying, healing the wounds, finding spaces for the homeless, the doomed and demented, cheering each other on through the countless tragedies. Overhearing the last moments of so many. The real champions of our world in the real Olympics are our health care workers. I'd hang a gold medal on every single one of them any day of the week. 

*langers: Cork slang. langer (plural langers) (slang, Ireland, derogatory) Fool; idiot; annoying or contemptible person, langers can also mean drunk.

Here's a Cork song about langers. Some of it is in Irish, in case you're confused.

I play it for my dear brother who died a few short days after I left the hospital while he remained.