the lady and the boy

the lady

I had a dream of a flute. It was a shitty tune, worse than my sister’s recorder rendition of Hot Cross Buns, and I turned to yell at whatever dingus was piping on that flute. I couldn’t see anyone in the darkness, but then I realized my eyes were closed.

I opened my eyes to a yellow room. There were faint swirls of smoke curling around me. My eyes traced their origin to a swinging metal incense burner on my right. Behind the burner, I saw a woman in a feathered headdress holding a dark wooden flute. She sat on the ground, criss-cross apple sauce, and she comfortably slouched against the wall like she owned the entirety of this eight by eight cube of yellow. Maybe she did.

The moment I noticed her, she also noticed that there was someone else in the room with her. She took her mouth off the flute, looked up into my eyes, and winked. In a second, the world of warm yellow condensed into a singularity of intense blue, then velvet darkness, then bright white.

I blinked. Everywhere I looked, I saw white. White walls. White ceiling. White curtains. White sheets. White bed rails. White TV cables.

Cables?

The cables sprouted from underneath large bandages that were taped to my left wrist and the crease of my elbow. I realized they were neither white nor cables of the TV variety. They were intravenous lines filled with transparent liquids of various consistencies that dripped in from a metal tree of bags swinging above my bed.

The world of white took on a little more color. The bed rails were more of a faded slate. The sheets were a mixed texture of ivory cream and pale blue. The curtains were dark grey but cast in the bright sunlight coming in through the windows, and that was when I first noticed my mom standing in the light, looking at something through the glass.

I tried to call for her, but my throat was dry like the Sahara. I tried to cough, only to feel something foreign in both nostrils. My brain slowly understood that the intrusion was of the tubular variety. There’d been one set of cables I’d missed — a breathing tube running through my nose and down my throat.

Breathing didn’t feel right. Speaking wasn’t feasible. I didn’t have the strength to move my arms. I was acutely aware of how unaware I was of my physical existence — I’d honed my proprioception through my ballet training, thus accentuating my confusion over everything alien that was happening to and within my body. I couldn’t tell if the lumps underneath the foot of my sheets were actually my legs or just a pair stolen off a store mannequin; against this surreal backdrop, that line of reasoning hadn’t seemed like much of a reach. I didn’t know where I was or when it was. All I knew was that nothing about this moment was right.

I started to cry. It was only then that my mom noticed I was awake. She calmly strode over — why was she so calm when everything about this was so wrong? — and gently caressed my right arm, the one free of the intrusive cables.

“You’re fine,” she said with a smile.

I wasn’t. I wanted to scream and ask why she seemed to happy, but I was too tired to fight her. I closed my eyes. Before my consciousness fully floated away, I saw a ghostly outline of the flute lady from before. Instead of the gentle scent of incense, she smelled harshly of sanitizer and latex.

convalescence

The next time I opened my eyes, there was more color in the world. This time around, I understood that the whitewashed environment was a hospital. On the wall across from my bed, I saw a bulletin board plastered with get well soon cards painted by every shade of Crayola marker known to existence — a collective well-wish from my second grade classmates. A brown desk beyond my footboard carried a green cafeteria tray holding a pastel paper cup. Closer to my foreground, a trio of nurses in blue scrubs hovered around my bedside. One of them was drawing dark red blood through the tubes in my left arm. She was holding a plastic box with maybe a baker’s dozen of blood vials, half of them already filled with crimson, and the sight of all of that blood outside my body informed me that this wasn’t going to be a short hospital stay.

I’d contracted myocarditis, a rare heart condition characterized by an inflammation of the heart muscle that weakens its ability to pump blood throughout the body. The doctors theorized that I got it from a viral infection, likely from not washing my hands enough. They said I was very lucky that my symptoms were caught by my general practitioner at my annual check-up; oftentimes, a person will only become aware of the infection after heart failure occurs.

I was seven years old when I went in for my annual doctor’s appointment. The last thing I remember of that day is being wheeled to the PICU and asking for water. My parents said that my heart started failing that night. I had to be rushed to a different hospital where I was put on a machine that could pump my blood in place of my weak heart. At some point, they had to do surgery on me — the only evidence I had was hearsay and the ugly scar on my right inguinal crease.

I was eight years old when I woke up about a week later. I don’t know how old I was when I dreamed of the flute lady in the yellow room of smoke. The doctors had said that I was unconscious throughout the entire machine ordeal and the following surgery, but there’s a chance that part of me was awake during that time. Maybe the dream I had was a surreal distortion of the fragmented terror I saw. I’ll never really know what happened to me, and that’s a discomfort I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life.

I was bedridden for at least a week. My limbs felt like dried rubber. I was able to move them, but they felt heavy and uselessly brittle. I was incapable of fine motor precision. On my first day awake, I had to ask my parents to pour cups of water into my mouth. My toes were always cold, even when I was wearing the thick anti-skid socks, and my body seemed to have forgotten which muscles were in charge of the “toe-wiggling” function to get more blood circulating in that extremity.

I wasn’t strong enough to stand on my own feet and shower, so each night, a nurse came by to wipe down my skin with a wet towel. Every few hours, she’d come by with a pink bedpan to do a “bathroom check.” After collecting any pee and poop, she would place the bedpan on a wheeled cart and then clean me up with a baby wipe. Each time, she’d accidentally brush against my surgery scar in my lower groin, and I’d let out a cry that had her squeaking a string of sorrysorrysorry’s. One time, she’d unintentionally left the cart at just the right angle so that, from my reclined hospital bed, I could see every centimeter of my messy bathroom business in the bottom of the pan. I almost puked at the sight.

I did puke a couple of times. There were dozens of pills and syrups I had to take, and each new drug made a different part of my throat gag. In the future, I’d thank my hospitalization for giving me an iron tolerance towards consuming all sorts of medication, but in the moment, I wondered what unforgivable sin I’d committed as a second grader to be punished with endless revolting medicine. I remember there was one nurse who insisted on crushing my pills into powder and mixing it into water, like a fucked up Emergen-C, and she was somehow offended when I always retched and regurgitated the cloudy liquid all over her scrubs.

A silver lining was that her medicine mix made me appreciate normal tap water. In fact, I had an insatiable thirst for it. I was always asking for more water, always drooling at the sight of a cup ready to be downed, always ringing the button for a bathroom check, always feeling horrible whenever the poor night shift nurse had to come by with the damned pink bedpan. I would wake up at two or three in the morning with a parched throat, and I would whine with increasingly louder pitches until my dad would wake up and bring me a bottle of water. I didn’t know what was driving my thirst — it’s not like I was talking or exercising much in that physical state, and I wondered if I’d been cursed with a persistently parched throat by the flute lady in my dream.

My hunger was equally insatiable. Prior to my hospitalization, I’d had a small appetite and was infamous in my family for taking literal hours to finish eating. After a week of being functionally comatose, I started chowing down like I was afraid my food would disappear. The bloat that immediately followed my binge was both a physical and mental burden on my body. Every bout of sleepiness after a meal was an additional pound added to the incorporeal anchor pinning me to my bed. I felt lethargic, but at the same time I felt so indulged.

I still remember the very first meal I had after coming to consciousness: Campbell’s Chunky Chicken Noodle Soup. Monotonous days of tasting nothing but my own saliva, suddenly broken by a splash of sodium from cubed chicken, softened celery, and questionably bright-orange carrots — the canned soup tasted like heaven on my tongue. Even when I had free access to absolutely banging meals from the hospital cafeteria, I would always ask my parents for a can of Campbell’s. To this day, it remains my favorite variation of chicken noodle soup, a proclamation that would give connoisseurs a stroke. But hey, I was the one who survived the heart failure, not them, so who would they be to criticize me?

the boy

Now, the memory I hate the most.

A few days after I regained consciousness, the nurses started helping me get up and out of bed. We started with standing on my feet assisted, then a hand on my bedside rail without nurse assistance, then completely unassisted. Once I could balance on my feet, the nurses literally walked me through taking tentative steps across the four foot distance between my hospital bed and a nearby armchair.

I’d been feeling an increasing restlessness thanks to having my every daily function — the good, the bad, and especially the ugly/gross — be delegated to an entirely other human being, which pushed me to push my limits. At first, I couldn’t muster any speed beyond a slow totter. After exerting all that energy, I’d collapse butt-first into the armchair, much to the nurse’s exasperation (sudden movement was not good on the heart, they’d always remind me.) Soon enough, I upgraded to a shuffle, or as much as a shuffle as I could manage with rubber-gripped socks. Once I got a hang for the stickiness of the rubber underneath, I learned how to confidently plant my socks for maximum grip strength on the smooth tiled floor. Steadier and steadier, faster and faster, until I could manage a slow but uniform walking pace.

When I got permission from my doctor to walk around on my own, I cheered out loud. It was the first celebration I’d had since I was hospitalized and thrown into the PICU. I think the doctor noticed that, and she offered to show me around the floor.

She waited for me as I slowly plodded out of the glass doors of my room for the first time. I gingerly grasped my IV pole for support. I almost wanted to ask if I could hold my doctor’s hand, but I then remembered how that hand could’ve held the scalpel responsible for the incredibly itchy scar in my groin, and I shied away.

I was barely three steps into my trek when I saw another pair of glass doors, a gateway to a room of a different kind of suffering. For some reason, the privacy curtains had been pulled back, so I had a front-row seat to a sickening sight.

Beyond the glass, I saw a boy my age lying on a reclined hospital bed. He was ghostly pale, whiter than the cream-colored sheets pulled up to his neck. His bed was placed in the center of the room, like he was in an operating theater from the nineteenth century as opposed to a twenty-first century intensive care unit for children, and it was rotated so that his feet pointed towards the inside of the room while his head was closest to the door.

His head was completely shaved. There were half a dozen cables that sprouted from his temples, the back of his skull, and the base of his neck. They coiled in vicious spirals underneath his bed and snaked off to an intimidating series of machines stacked on top of each other on a wheeled cart by his bedside. If not for his fluttering eyelashes, the rise and fall of his chest, or the small drops of dried blood on the tubes, I would’ve thought he was a practice mannequin, because for what other reason would a comatose child be put on display as if he were a morbid spectacle of entertainment?

In that moment, I was suddenly aware of how thin my hospital gown was. The ventilated air grew chilly around my bare calves. In the spaces of fabric that weren’t reinforced with rubber gripping, I could feel the cold tile floor seeping through my socks and into the soles of my feet. Seconds before, I’d been ecstatic at the idea of frolicking about the PICU in my hospital PJ’s; now, I was overcome with a full-body shiver, and I felt goosebumps puncturing through my skin and scraping against my gown. The Campbell’s in my stomach lurched, now at risk of being ejected out of my mouth.

The boy was completely alone. There were no doctors or nurses in the room at the time. More importantly, there were no parental figures to be seen, as if he and his dignity had been abandoned by his own flesh and blood to this horrific medical theater. Maybe I’m doing his guardian an injustice with this claim, maybe they were just in the bathroom at the exact moment I was stun-locked by the sight of their son. All I knew was that, since the moment I’d woken up, I’d always had either my mom or my dad at my side, and if not for their constant presence, I might not have stopped crying since I first woke up. There’d been an endless parade of coats and scrubs who came by to poke and prod at my body in all sorts of uncomfortable ways, but I was always confident that they were doing so because they genuinely wanted to help me — because I knew my parents would never let them touch a hair on my head if it’d been otherwise.

This boy didn’t have that same emotional lifeline. His room was devoid of familiarity — not just his family, but of any color besides white, black, and grey. There weren’t any get well soon cards on his bedside table or on the walls. There were no flowers brought in by relatives or school friends. The only personalized mementos were three X-ray scans of his skull pinned to the light box on the wall opposite from the door. The boy looked to be on his own in a terrifyingly sterile and ironically lifeless environment.

I weakly told my doctor that I wasn’t feeling well, that I’d try to walk more tomorrow. I scooted back into my room without waiting for her answer. I didn’t tell my mom about anything that I’d just seen. I felt an intense gratitude for her devotion to my care, but I also felt an immense guilt that I could receive her love while other children who were hurting as much as me had been left alone to bear their own burdens on their small, lonesome backs.

The next day, I went in the opposite direction of that boy’s room. Instead of my doctor, a nurse accompanied me, sparing me the stress of explaining whatever had happened in my mind yesterday. I circled through the communal play space, the bathrooms, the other patient rooms, most of them inhabited by conscious children, all of them shared by their parents.

When I got to the boy’s room, the blue privacy curtains were drawn. The only sign that he was alive, that the hospital was doing its job, was the muffled beeps and boops coming from his vital signs monitor on the other side of the glass door. For a moment, I wondered if he was actually awake and fooling the doctors who seemed so certain he was unconscious. Maybe he was purposely keeping his eyes closed because he was afraid of waking up to nothing and no one around him. He would’ve been right to be afraid.

I was moved downstairs to the regular in-patient cardiology wing a week later. I never saw that boy again.

He haunts me to this day. It sucks that my happiest memories are so patchy, yet my memory of my hospitalization remains crystal-clear. If my most treasured memories are faded from loving wear, my most terrible memory is pristine from calculated avoidance. Or, maybe the clarity was retroactively manufactured; maybe I’d fabricated the image of that boy with the shaved head and the bloodied cables as the personification of my latent anxieties from being trapped in this hospital wing. Maybe he’d also been a dream, the boy in the operating theater, him and the lady in the yellow room forming juxtaposing halves of a diptych, the yin to the other’s yang.