Michael Kimball - Us

My wife looked so much brighter with her eyes open. She looked so much more alive when she was looking back at me. I held onto her feet with my hands and she pushed her toes against them. She must have been smiling under that oxygen mask, but I didn’t know what to say to her, and she couldn’t talk again yet.

But we talked with our eyes and our hands. She lifted some of her fingers up enough so that it felt as if she were reaching for me. I walked over to the side of her hospital bed and closer to her arms. I lifted her arms up for her and put myself in them. I put my hands and my arms around her too.

I only lifted myself back up away from her so that we could look at each other again. She looked at me and then looked down her face at the oxygen mask. I thought that she wanted to say something to me so I lifted the oxygen mask up and pulled it up over her head, but she just wanted to breathe with her nose and her mouth and her lungs. But I was afraid that she might stop breathing deep enough into herself without the machine, so I pushed the button that called the doctors and the nurses into her hospital room.

They asked my wife who she was and where she was and what day and month and year it was. My wife knew her name, that she was in a hospital, and the year that she was living in. But she didn’t know the day and she thought that it was the month before the one that we were living in.

They looked into her eyes and her ears with a tiny flashlight. They asked her to breathe in, but she couldn’t get much air into her lungs. It was enough to keep her alive.

They asked her to move her fingers and her toes and she did. But she couldn’t lift her arms and her legs up off her hospital bed. She couldn’t lift her head up off the pillow.

They wanted to see if she could drink or swallow, but she couldn’t hold onto the cup of water or the pill that was supposed to keep her from having any more seizures. A nurse set the pill on my wife’s tongue and tipped some water from the cup into her mouth so that she could swallow it. Another nurse brought in a tray of soft food to see what else my wife could eat.

They fed her spoonfuls of chicken broth, oatmeal, and jello. They shook little clumps of ice chips into her mouth from a plastic cup and they put a straw into a little bottle of apple juice and the straw into her mouth to see if she could draw the apple juice out of the bottle. My wife could eat and drink enough that they could unhook the IVs and pull her tubes out, but somebody else was going to have to feed her and she needed to move more than she could then before we could go back home again.

I still had to move her arms and her legs for her so that they would still work when she could move them again for herself. I had to hold onto the cup of water or the bottle of apple juice, but she could put the straw into her mouth so that she could drink. She could hold onto a spoon, but she couldn’t move it to her mouth without spilling the food.

The spoon trembled in my hand too. We were both afraid of her dying.

There were so many small ways that my wife started to get better than she had been. She moved from eating soft food to solid food and to going to the bathroom inside the bathroom instead of into a bed pan or through tubes. She started to smile with both sides of her mouth and then with her whole face. She started to move all her fingers and both her thumbs. She could lift her arms up and reach her hands out and touch me with them.

She could sit up in bed again and then she could get out of her hospital bed. She couldn’t stand up with just her legs, but she could hold herself up with her arms. She could stand up with her walker before she could walk again, and then she could walk back and forth between her hospital bed and the bathroom, and then between the nurse’s station and her hospital room, and then all the way around the floor of the hospital. She could walk and eat and breathe so much that they told us that she was better enough to go back home and try to do those things there.

There weren’t any other tests or procedures for them to put her through. There wasn’t anything else for us to do but for us to go back home and try to keep on living there. The nurse handed me the clipboard so that I would sign the forms to check my wife out of the hospital. My wife could hold onto the pen and move her hand, but she couldn’t write her name out right anymore.

I handed the clipboard with the signed forms on it back to the nurse so that we could go back home. I had already packed our two suitcases back up with our clothes and the other things that I had brought to the hospital from our home. I had everything else from the hospital that we needed to go back home too — my wife, her walker, her prescriptions, and the directions for her home care.

One of the hospital workers rolled a wheelchair into her hospital room and helped my wife to sit down in it. He pushed my wife and her wheelchair out of her hospital room, down the hallway, onto and off of the elevator, across the hospital lobby, and out of the hospital.

We got outside of the hospital and I put the walker down in front of my wife so that she could walk with it. She pushed herself up out of the wheelchair and pulled herself forward with the handles of the walker. The hospital worker backed the wheelchair away from my wife and went back inside the hospital. There wasn’t going to be anybody else to help us anymore.

My wife walked with the walker and with little steps and I walked beside her with them too. Our lives moved slower then than they ever had before, but we kept going.

We got out to our car and I set our two suitcases down and opened the car door up for her. I stood in front of her and held her up under her arms while she turned around so that she could sit down in the car’s front seat. I moved the walker away from her, bent down over her, lifted her legs up under her knees, and slid her legs and her feet into our car with the rest of her body. I pulled the seatbelt out over her shoulder, across her lap, and buckled her in.

I closed her car door and opened the car’s trunk. I put our two suitcases and the walker into the trunk and then I got into our car too. I started the engine of our car up, but I was afraid to drive us away from the hospital. I was afraid that she might stop breathing again and that we would need other people to help us keep her alive again. But I was afraid to turn the engine off too. Our car had kept her alive before.

I backed our car out of its parking spot in the hospital parking lot, put it in drive, and drove us back home. I opened her car door, the screen door, and the back door up. I left the engine of our car on until I got her back inside our house. I turned all the lights on inside our house and held all the doors open so that she had enough room to walk through them with her walker.

I would have carried her inside if I could have lifted her up, but I was too old and too tired. We just wanted to go back to bed and back to sleep together so that we could wake up again and it would be morning at home again. But neither one of us could sleep much that night. Our bed seemed to be shaking again. We were both too afraid that one of us might not wake up.

There are a lot of people who I think of lying in a hospital bed, in their bed at home, in their bed at the nursing home, or inside their casket at a funeral home — my Uncle Johnny in a hospital bed with that cut down his chest, my Aunt Anita with her body so bloated in another hospital bed and then so thin in her bed at home, my father no longer able to get up out of his bed at home, my Aunt Billie in the small bedroom downstairs in my grandmother and grandfather’s house and then in that single bed in one nursing home and then in another single bed in another nursing home, my Grandfather Kimball inside his casket at that country funeral home, my Grandmother Kimball inside her casket at that same country funeral home, my Grandfather Oliver with his oxygen tank and oxygen mask in that bed in another nursing home, and my Grandmother Oliver in her bed in her bedroom upstairs and then in the bed that they made for her in the living room downstairs after she couldn’t really walk anymore and then inside her casket at the front of that long room at the funeral home.