The bed is directly under the clock. It has sheets so clean they hurt to look at. The red button hangs off the right side of the bed. We push it when we need a nurse, but we don’t push it very often. A teddy bear always shares the pillow—his name is Winston; she named him after Winston Churchill. One of the only things in the room we own is the blue velvet blanket that covers our bare feet. Of course, we own the bear too. The clock owns us.
Three feet to the right of the bed is a blue-cushioned rocking chair with a matching footstool. The chair is trim and still. I almost never sit in it; I sit on the side of the bed, close to her.
The faint whirr and hum of machinery is so present that it is itself a part of the room, much like the smacking of Keds in the hallway and the tick—tick—ticking of the clock above the bed. There is no tocking at all. The scent of disinfectant enshrouds the room, masking the odor of vomit, and I stink of cigarette smoke.
Beyond the rocking chair, six-by-eight foot windows show us the Outside, and how life is supposed to be for a seventeen-year-old girl. We can see the patient courtyard from here, and the busy Seattle streets. There is a park a few blocks east where kids our age play baseball during the day. She sees the sun rise, but never set. We keep the blinds closed. We watch movies, not television.
Kissing the left side of the bed is a nondescript table. On top of the table there is a telephone, a Kleenex box, a tube of chapstick, a bag of Sour Apple-O’s, a pen, a diary, and a glass of ice water. A small pink tub rests on the table next to the Kleenex. The pink tub catches the vomit.
I had flown back to Seattle at the end of July. This time it was Amy’s Aunt Mary who paid for it. I didn’t question why the family had so much faith in my effect on Amy back then. At that time I didn’t question anything; I just did what I had to do.
When I arrived at Room 209, I washed my hands thoroughly—always thoroughly—and then went over to the bed and hugged Amy.
For the majority of my five-day trip, I was the only visitor to her hospital room. We liked it that way. Amy’s mother had decided that my stay was her opportunity to rest, to take a break from her long summer with Amy in the hospital. She needed a vacation from her sick, demanding daughter, and she said so frankly. She was by nature a nurturing woman, but a child with an illness like Acute Myeloid Leukemia will fuck up just about anyone’s righteousness.
Amy and I talked quietly for an hour or so after I got in. We didn’t have any catching up to do because we called each other on the phone every night, so we just lay down together in her hospital bed and planned out our week, excited for the time we had.
Around noon, my lunch arrived. It was actually prepared for the patient but she couldn’t keep down any food. They charged her for a meal either way, so I ate her lunch for her and she had her nutrition administered through an I.V. They called it Total Parenteral Nutrition; we called it TPN.
Regardless of what Children’s was feeding their patients that afternoon, it would be served slightly warm and soaked with kitchen sweat. A latex aftertaste—presumably residual from the gloved fingers of the staff—was always present. That day I had the fish sticks.
In the afternoon, the drugs determined our schedule. The Dilaudid was for the pain, but caused vomiting. The Ativan was for the nausea but made her sleepy. Long-term exposure to these drugs also caused mood-swings and short-term memory loss. While I was taking care of Amy, I experienced each of these side effects in all their authority.
I have always been afraid of vomit. Whenever someone in my family came down with the stomach flu, I would hide in my room to avoid even seeing it. I couldn’t sleep at night, and when I heard them in the bathroom I would gag and burrow into my sheets.
I remember the first time I saw Amy throw up. When she was on the most toxic round of Chemo she didn’t eat at all, so her vomit was all blood and bile.
“Leave me alone, I can do it myself!” she had hissed between mouthfuls. But I held her just the same. By this time I was used to the mood swings and they did not injure me. As I rubbed her back, much to my surprise, it was concern rather than disgust that distorted my face. When she finished, I rinsed the pink tub and returned it to its place on the table next to the Kleenex. I did all this as if I were stroking her hand, or kissing her forehead—without so much as a pang.
If she needed water, I would fetch it with lots of ice. If she needed a heat pack, I would put one in the microwave for two minutes, fifteen seconds. If she slept, I would secretly read the quizzes in her Seventeen magazines and hum Mötley Crüe (for me) or the Beach Boys (for her). The nurses would go about their business, seeming to ignore us, but I suspect they later wondered and speculated and gossiped in hushed tones over coffee. We were the juiciest piece of gossip in the bone marrow transplant wing of Seattle Children’s Hospital.
We always took a stroll through the halls after supper and watched a movie in the evening. I usually went to Blockbuster in the morning on my way to the hospital to get something we would both watch. Nights that seem so ordinary to normal people were a thrill for us. Anything to break the slow, impersonal monotony of the hospital days. The days of waiting.
The Dilaudid was adjusted to a continuous drip around midnight and soon after she began to mumble, or sleep, or softly snore. Before two o’clock, I would step cautiously out into the violent glare of the nurse’s station and the whitewashed hall. Elevator to the parking lot.
