12/13/16, Twilight
Cotton candy tufts of pink melting to orange,
Fading to nothing,
Along the lines of building tops, parallel to the land and trees and vehicle hoods.
Midnight blue, velvet asphalt reveals pockmarks—manholes and bumps.
The night arrives.
Indeed, the color overhead has shifted now, evading my hungry gaze.
“Remember the moon,” she told me.
I do remember, I do.
For my job, I listen to hundreds of recorded medical visits. I dutifully click my mouse to assign a functional code to each utterance spoken by patients, providers and their families. It’s a lot of clicking.
Many recordings are de-identified, meaning names and certain information may be removed from the audio, and all are labeled with an eight digit number. Thus each heap of human interaction I encounter is both an integer and an anonymous memory, untethered by time and earthly context.
I frequently anticipate this work with an amount of dread —and coffee— that I cannot exaggerate. On bad days, I pause repeatedly just to calculate the minimum time I’ll need to finish coding. It’s a compulsion I now find very hard to resist.
When I signed up for this job, which was offered to me by a sweet and unfailingly supportive family friend I barely knew at the time, I really had no idea what to expect. Now, years of mechanical clicks later, it still seems odd that this is someone’s job—mine.
Because I so often fail to describe my job in a coherent way and because it obligates me to extraordinary amounts of time alone, I have given much thought to the existential considerations of what it is that I do, and I have come to the conclusion that sixteen words are the minimum required to convey the magnificent and terrible limbo my occupation inhabits: “Hi, honey. I’m at the doctor’s. They just told me I have three weeks to live.”
“Hi, honey. I’m at the doctor’s. They just told me I have three weeks to live,” says the patient’s voice through my headphones. Seconds before, the familiar tones of the iPhone keyboard had warned me of the present phone call. She hangs up quickly. She doesn’t sob. She mentions errands to be run later that afternoon. Minutes later, the woman’s physician returns.
The time patients spend alone in the exam room is excised from the coding record per standard procedure. It’s been nearly three years since I heard those sixteen words of which no record exists.
I once heard a Spanish speaking family cry together in horror when the father realized he had lost his wallet. As the children began to moan, I heard a mutter: “Oh, hell.” It was the doctor. “They’ll help him find it, let’s finish up here,” she said flatly.
Just the other day, I heard one patient celebrate the finding that the gnarly, painful tumors in his gut were “benign.” Another learned he had a 50% chance of surviving his upcoming surgery. “Okay,” he responded. He sounded tired.
Working out at Pop Physique feels like what I imagine being a sweaty piece of bubble gum in the back pocket of someone’s spandex pants feels like. You squat in front of a mirror a lot with a hot pink ball between your thighs while Oksana shouts, “Tuck! Tuck!”
Oksana is a real cutie pie. She teaches the eleven o’clock Pop Sculpt class on Saturdays that I promise myself I will attend but rarely do.
Tucking is basically the same motion as humping. I can never make it through a class without needing to stifle a giggle. There inevitably comes a point when Oksana yells “Tuck-tuck-tuck-tuck-tuck-tuck” with such astounding speed that my pelvis cannot possibly keep pace. Unable to face my sorry reflection in the giant mirrors, I look around to see if any of my moderately fit, superbly dressed classmates are still thrusting like a metronome. Nope. Nobody. It’s impossible.
When class is over, we clean our mats and put away the bizarrely sexy props. I thank Oksana for the hour’s torture. She asks my name (again) and we laugh. Then I waddle out the door on Jell-O legs in pursuit of an iced latte. I guess you could say I like my bourgeois weekend activities crammed back-to-back.
I pass the Charm City Circulator stop by the Washington Monument, iced beverage in hand, as I search for my car. By that point, I am so goddamn confident and eager that I will introduce myself to anyone. If you just spent an hour squeezing your buns to pop music, you might feel pretty self-assured, too.
One particular Sunday, I noticed a middle aged lady sitting on the bus bench. She was following me unabashedly with her steady eyes. “Good morning! How’s it goin’?” I bubbled.
“Hey, you got any money? I need something to eat.”
These are the moments I await like a lioness. I’ve got change, food, cigarettes and gum neatly squared away in my purse and a relentless arsenal of friendliness. But this day, regrettably, I had left my purse at home.
“I’m sorry, hon. I don’t have any cash on me. You take care. Have a blessed day.”
“Have a blessed day” is an expression I learned here in Baltimore. I never heard it anywhere else although I don’t imagine it’s a totally uncommon salutation. I adopted this the same way I embraced the local custom of jaywalking through moving traffic.
“Well, what about that? What’s that?”
I froze. “You want this? It’s an iced latte.”
As soon as the words left my mouth I regretted them. I held out the caramel-colored drink for her examination with an apparent readiness that disobeyed my immense hesitation. I recalled the milky, cocoa flavor of the drink in my mouth as I prepared to sacrifice it.
“Is it sweet?” she asked, gripping the cool plastic cup with indifference.
Here was my out. “No, it’s not really that sweet.”
I looked down at her clothes. She wore an old-fashioned dress that reminded me of my friend from elementary school who regularly donned Colonial era clothing to show her enthusiasm for American history. I swallowed hard.
“Do you want to try it and see if you like it?”
She hesitated. “It’s not sweet?”
“No. It’s not that sweet.”
“No thank you.” She handed back the cup.
“Okay. Sorry!” I complained.
She said nothing as I strolled away. When I looked back several minutes later, she was still upright on the bench waiting for the free bus. Her brown eyes had already relinquished their hold of my being and my coffee was gone.
I look upward to a pale blue break in the rocks overhead. Too far away to reach.
There is a funny feeling one gets inside a cave. Even though the rough stones that surround me do not touch my skin, I feel their touch orbiting me like an unwelcome caress. My guts wiggle their uneasiness.
The daylight entering the cave produces an aqua aura glow. I am hypnotized. I notice around me swarms of silver and turquoise treasures embedded in the crusty rocks. Higher and higher up, the jewels sparkle that intercept the entering beams of light.
Turquoise stones are said to endow the wearer with friendly regard, luck, protection and power. Turkish soldiers were the earliest to carry this charm; first attached to their bridles to prevent falls, and then to their own bodies as its properties gained a reputation for protecting against any injury. In crystal healing, turquoise is utilized on the Third Eye and the Throat Chakra to open the channels of intuition and enhance communication. I like to wear turquoise because I think it’s really pretty.
The desire to slip just one little ring onto my finger is overwhelming. I reach out in robotic duty to my impulse. Just when I’ve brought my hand close enough to the wall, the ring slips out of my reach. I try again. I shiver awake. My sweat has dampened the scratchy white sheets encasing my body. I begin to cry.
It is a humbling thing to whimper in front of a stranger. Though it is only my first night in the hospital, my pathetic heaving cries have already mortified me to the “sitter” assigned to supervise my every move. She sits beside my bed all night and helps me to the potty when I need it.
“Hey? Are you cryin, girl? Why you cryin’ girl?”
“I’m fine!”
Oh, God. She noticed. Please, please go back to watching a show on your Galaxy. I need this from you, I tell her in my head.
“Why you so sad?”
I don’t know what she makes of my refusal to answer these questions. I don’t know why I can’t answer them, either.
“I’m fine. I’m okay. I’m just sad.”
I roll over to signal my unwillingness to chat and feel a tug at my wrist. A sensitive place there connects me to an IV machine. How could I forget?
When she comes back from her next break, the sitter stands over me with her pregnant belly sticking out like a lollipop. She starts talking.
“I don’t know what you been through, honey, but I can guarantee you I been through worse. But I pray to God and hope that things will be better. It can always be worse.”
I can’t tell where she’s from based on accent alone, but maybe it’s Nigeria. I am so furious with her for invading my solitude that I’m unable to speak. I wonder who the hell gave her the job of suicide watch.
At six the next morning, a shrill-voiced nurse parades into the room. I’m already awake because the lady on the other side of the curtain has been up asking for Benadryl and ice. I don’t mind because she’s on dialysis and I just want her to be comfortable. We watch Donald Trump at the RNC on separate televisions. Neither of us can use the bathroom alone.
The nurse meets my eyes with friendly alertness. It doesn’t stop me from wanting her to go away, though. I wade through our introduction like an annoying stream. But she has a duty of care, and for her that means getting to the root of the problem.
“Why did you take so much medicine?”
“Because I wanted to sleep.”
“Oh, you wanted to sleep? You took too much. You took a lot of medicine. That can actually hurt you. It can kill you.”
“I know.”
“Did you mean to hurt yourself?”
“Yes.”
She doesn’t have much to say after that, just mostly how I shouldn’t have tried to hurt myself. Everyone here thinks it’s so simple, don’t they? And I’m no help, laying here wordless, letting them say what they will.
I order breakfast on the phone. By the time it arrives I’ve fallen back into the cave dream.
“But who will read it?”
My friend Ilene wants me to be a librarian. She sees herself in me because she was an English major. She was a librarian in Queens for some time, she tells me. The benefits are great and it’s interesting work.
I nod. It’s important to be polite to people. I smile because I love her.
Ilene has a blog. I guess one day a lady on her flight to Ireland suggested the idea, then she went ahead and did it. But by the time I met her last summer, the glamour of airing her written word on the internet had waned. She is more anxious in her seventies than she used to be, I bet. And she is certainly very dizzy sometimes. Her only son has a newborn and she doesn’t want to be a burden.
“I tried the vistaril last night. It worked really well and I’m not even groggy today. Maybe you could try that one?”
“Well they gave me that seroquel and it hasn’t been doing anything.”
“I tried that one too for a while but it wore off. I feel like they just give that to everyone.”
I wanted to give her hope that something might make her feel better. She needed to rest. Ilene was the first person I talked to when I arrived at the inpatient unit. She asked me where I went to college. I felt embarrassed. I described my Wellesley College Spanish/English double major. I sensed her communion in the love of words. She said she had started a blog.
We talk about the blog a lot. The clear morning after my anti-histamine aided rest, I was especially interested in conversation. It tickles me when I get to chatting. I love to laugh easy, to let somebody sigh their troubles. I like to share my cigarettes with strangers. Ilene wouldn’t have smoked even if we were allowed, but we could have gone for a cup of caffeinated coffee for a change. Something to wash down the foamy scrambled eggs at least.
I say I think her blog must be a lot of fun. I say she has a lot of interesting experiences to put in her blog. She agrees through tears that quiver in the corners of her eyes. She sighs. She says, “But who will read it?”
Sometimes when I think about that moment, I get stuck. The vulnerability of that worry is like quicksand. It’s like a drag off an American Spirit yellow. Who will remember what I said and did?
Mostly, though, I think if I say nothing and do nothing, no one will remember it. I’ve been wanting to write a blog for a while. I’m not sure where it will take me but my hope is that it will be a journey where I can reflect and maybe even connect with you through my experiences of the world. Here goes nothin’!
Thanks for joining me…
xo,
Jami
Aqua Aura Blog 