Soul Mosaic

Oxygen ping-pong

I’d sent my son downstairs to sit in the sunny atrium and call his friends. He needed a break. This was one time when I was glad for teenage friends on cell phones. A tiny touch of normalcy for him from the last couple of days.

All morning, we’d watched Ed’s oxygen numbers bounce up and down on the monitor. It was like watching a race where the lead was uncertain yet, but our “runner” might just bolt forward at any moment. Clearly, his levels were trending up. If they could just break through to normal….

I watched my husband sleeping in the bed. He was still on a lot of morphine to keep him quiet. However, given that his oxygen levels were inching toward normal, they started to bring the morphine dose down. As soon as his oxygen levels stabilized for sure, they wanted to get him off the respirator and bring him out of his coma.

The respirator had been a lifesaver for sure. But leaving him on it longer than needed risked infection. On the other hand, bringing someone out of their coma and removing the respirator is uncomfortable for the patient and excruciating to watch.

We wanted to be there to greet him on his “return from the coma”…and see, Was he still “Ed?” His brain swelling had not gotten any worse and was starting to improve. But the moment of truth would only come when he was awake. Then we would learn what all of this trauma had done to him.

The place out of time

There is something about the ICU waiting room that I wish could be captured and spread throughout the world — unconditional love.

The ICU waiting room is a place out of time. While everyone hangs in limbo for an outcome, for a hoped-for word on a loved one, for relief from the intense pain of not knowing either way, life, as you know it, stops.

In that room, you enter the land of pain, fear, and sorrow – the great equalizers. No matter what walk of life you came from, rich, poor, or famous, no matter what color or race you are, when you enter the ICU waiting room, each one of you is the same — a hurting, terrified human being.

“Your husband’s blood oxygen has dropped. It’s hovering around 47% right now. Below 50% we usually see brain damage.”

The words hit me like a rock against my skull. All of us went so silent that the quiet crushed against my eardrums.

“Is my husband going to live?”

Those were words I never expected to hear coming out of my mouth at this point in life. Especially given Ed was only 47.

The doctor hesitated.

But I was blunt, direct, to-the-point, with words that meant I wanted no fluff answers. I had been in the medical field too long. I knew how doctors and nurses sometimes sugar-coated things or used evasive words so as not “freak the family out.” I didn’t want coddling or patronizing. I couldn’t bear “uncertainty.” Tell me now – Is he dying or is he going to make it?”

What is happening to me?

It was one of those warm, fall afternoons, not sunny, but still, the array of colors splattered on the trees across the pond dazzled.

On the TV, my son was watching the old movie, “The Trouble With Angels.” It was a 1966 comedy with Rosalind Russell and Haley Mills about life in a Catholic girls’ boarding school, where Mills is the determined troublemaker, and Russell is the equally formidable Mother Superior. It is a funny movie, especially if you had the nuns for teachers as I did, and one that we played now and again for comic relief.

I was sitting at my painting easel in the corner of the living room, near the window that looked out on the pond. By all accounts, it should have been a serene afternoon. At any time in the past, with a similar setup, it was. And today started that way. But then, it suddenly changed.

The longer the movie played, the more afraid I became. Dread, foreboding, and this overwhelming sense of …guilt…being in trouble…bad things about to happen, flooded through me.

I tried to shake it off. This is stupid, I remember thinking. I mean, what the hell was wrong? Yet the longer I sat there trying to paint, the more afraid I got.

Worse. I had never experienced anything like this before. I mean, sure, when I was a kid at home, and my father was raging. But I was a 51-year-old adult woman having a peaceful afternoon with my son in my own home. So what was I suddenly so afraid of?

I tried to summon all that rigid strength I’d always had at my fingertips, to quell the fear. I could always depend on being strong. But that day, for the first time in my life, that strength failed me. Shocked, I realized I had no control over the intensifying terror racing through my body.

All I could think was, What is happening to me?!