Michael Kimball: Us

There were people inside the hospital rooms who were propped up in their hospital beds and watching the television up on the wall. Some of them were eating food off trays and some of them had to have their food spooned into their mouths by other people who could stand up and move their arms. Some of the hospital rooms were quiet with machines and with somebody dying in the hospital bed. Some of the people didn’t move or look at me when I looked inside their hospital room at them. They were dying in different ways and at different speeds.

There were other people who looked back at me as if they were expecting me. They looked almost hopeful when I looked inside their hospital room at them. They were mostly probably waiting for somebody to come to see them. They were probably waiting for a doctor or a nurse or maybe they were waiting for a husband or a wife.

I wasn’t a doctor or a nurse who could help them get any better or tell them that they were ready to go home. I didn’t have any pills or needles or bandages or salve. I didn’t have any instruments to heal them. I didn’t know what the numbers or beeps or counts on any of the machines were supposed to mean. I didn’t understand their kind of medical pain. I couldn’t offer any comfort to them or say anything to them to make them feel any better. I couldn’t somehow help them. I didn’t bring them any flowers or a get well card. I didn’t bring them a bathrobe or anything else from home. I wasn’t their husband or father or brother or son or even their friend and none of them were my wife.

Everybody who I found anywhere inside the hospital was still alive, so I thought that my wife must be too. I went back down to the emergency room to look for her. I found the ambulance driver and the one who rode inside the back of the ambulance with my wife, but they didn’t have my wife with them anymore.

I went back outside to find our car. It was still parked there. Nobody had moved it or towed it away and nobody had turned the engine off either. I saw the exhaust coming out of the exhaust pipe of our car and it made me think that my wife must still be breathing somewhere back up inside that hospital.

I waited in the hospital lobby until I heard them call my name over the hospital intercom. They called my name again and it sounded as if my wife were calling me from another room from somewhere inside our house. Her voice was sort of fuzzy and distorted, but she was calling me back up into the hospital. I went back up to the floor and to the desk that I thought she said and the woman there said that they had a woman there who might be my wife.

She walked me down a hallway and into a hospital room. She took me past an empty hospital bed, behind a curtain, and past a bank of machines. They had most of her body covered up with sheets and blankets and she seemed too small to be my wife. Her head was propped up with a pillow and they had laid her hair out on it, but her hair looked too thin and too gray to be my wife’s hair. Her arms were laid outside the sheets and the blankets and her skin seemed to be colored with the colored lights from the machines that seemed to be keeping her alive. Her eyes were closed and another part of her face was covered up with an oxygen mask. She didn’t look like my wife like that, but I had never seen my wife dying before that night and I didn’t know what it was going to look like.

The nurse handed me the clipboard with the forms on it and sat me down in a chair next to my wife’s hospital bed. There were other doctors and other nurses inside the hospital room. They seemed to be taking some kind of care of my wife, but they all also seemed to be waiting for me to fill all those forms out before they did anything else for her.

I wrote my wife’s name down while they watched over my wife and me. I gave them our address and her birthday and her social security number. I skimmed over the medical history list. I checked asthma and cancer, allergies to certain medications, and recent surgery. I filled all the blanks in. I wrote my name in for her emergency contact and I signed a line that said that they could treat her to keep her alive. I gave them my insurance card, my credit card, my driver’s license, and another card with my name and picture on it.

One of the nurses took the clipboard with the forms on it and the cards that I gave her and left some charts with my wife’s name on them on another clipboard in a plastic holder at the end of her hospital bed. Another nurse picked the clipboard back up, took my wife’s temperature and then her pulse, and then wrote them down on one of the charts. Another nurse measured her blood pressure and how much my wife could breathe in without the machine on and then she turned the machine back on and wrote those things down too.

They found a vein in my wife’s arm so that they could hook an IV up to it and drip the bags of fluid into her. They said that the IV might wake my wife up, but it didn’t stop her from sleeping either.

They found another vein in my wife’s other arm and took some blood out of it. They said they needed to check her blood to see what was in it. They wanted to know if her blood had enough sugar and enough minerals in it. They said that they would know if her kidneys and her liver still worked.

One of the nurses took the blood away for the tests and then two other hospital workers came in and took my wife away for other tests. They rolled her out of her hospital room and down the hallway on her metal gurney with her IV bag and her respirator alongside her. They were going to test her heart and also her brain. They were trying to find out how much of her still worked.

My wife wasn’t very alive then. She couldn’t keep herself alive, but there were doctors and nurses who could. There were machines that could feed her and that could help her lungs to breathe and her heart to beat. But one of the doctors told me that since her eyes didn’t open, and she didn’t seem to hear anything that he said to her or move any on her own, that my wife probably wouldn’t be alive without the machines and that she might not be alive in the morning with them.

I felt as if I were already in mourning. I looked at the nurse and the nurse put her head down. I looked back at the doctor and the doctor looked back down at the charts on the clipboard in his hands. I looked away too. I tried not to cry. I lifted my hand up to my face and held onto my jaw so that it wouldn’t shake. I thought that they might not leave me alone with my wife if I started to cry.

The doctor said something else and the nurse did too. I couldn’t hear them anymore, but I nodded at them both. I didn’t say anything more. I kept looking at my wife.

They didn’t move for a long time. They were quiet too. Then the nurse said that she would come back to check on my wife. The doctor left the clipboard in the plastic holder at the end of the hospital bed. He left the hospital room and the nurse did too.

They left me there even though I wasn’t supposed to stay inside the hospital room with my wife. It was too late and the hours weren’t right, but they left me sitting down in the visitor’s chair next to my wife’s hospital bed.

I watched my wife try to stay alive for that night. I turned the visitor’s chair so that I was facing my wife’s face, but she didn’t open her eyes up to look back at me. It didn’t look easy for her to breathe even though she had all those machines trying to help her to do it.

The machines and the wires made her look so tired. I was tired too. I wanted to get into the hospi tal bed with my wife and go back to sleep with her. I wanted to sleep her sleep with her.