I began in literature. You get into literature because this is where the big questions are solved. This is where life and death are treated with attention, beauty, dignity, bravery. Mortality is faced in the pages of Tolstoy. Self-knowledge and love found in George Eliot and Jane Austen. Humanity and second chances in Dickens. Vanities wrested away to be mirrored to you in the unfathomable depths of Melville. Quiet fires in Brontë, political machinations in Trollope; it would all be found in literature. This was my Real. Four years of college, and then a surprise acceptance into Rice University’s Phd program: I’d already made it.
And then one summer my mother needed me: she was home alone, in pain, and I was thirty minutes away. I had spent a rare night in town after drinking with friends. I had just woken up in the afternoon and everyone else was at work. I didn’t call an ambulance because she wasn’t dying, but this was the first time I ever saw my mother crippled by something, and I just didn’t understand. She had recently undergone pelvic mesh surgery, and days later--slow days of apparent progress--intense waves of pain suddenly brought her back down.
What was I to do? This wasn’t in Dickens.
I drove to her as fast as I dared, helped her into my dusty Ford Escape, and drove another thirty minutes to the local hospital where she worked as an RN in Radiology. She was withdrawn and pale, but per her instructions we visited the internal medicine doctor instead of beelining for the ER. I was useless. Waiting and waiting and being wheeled here and there and finally to the radiology waiting room for an outpatient scan. She was pale, cold, weak, and shivering in pain. It was awful. Waiting. I felt completely out of my depth. I remember the absurdity of attempting to maneuver her wheelchair into a registration room--eyes tight with pain, body wracked over itself. We were going to answer questions they already had answers to. But all I knew to do was fall in line. I knew no shortcuts, or inside tracks. I could not advocate because I had no knowledge.
Mom saved herself, barely able to operate her own cell phone, but managing somehow to call her coworker. I just remember her saying “Come get me.” It was the same plea that got me to pick her up, and yet I had made no difference in her pain. But now help came. He swooped in, made eye contact with me and I saw myself, impotent and perhaps a bit in the way. Brian pulled her from registration (“You can take care of this, can’t you?”) and off they went. I stayed in the little room to confirm her birthday, her insurance, her address, her emergency contact. The little banalities you don’t care about when you’re on the patient side of medicine.
Somehow later I was standing over my mother who already looked better. Warm blankets piled over her form, now blessedly allowed to lay down in some patient prep room. They had made room for her because they could. Why hadn’t I asked for a warm blanket forty minutes ago? Why hadn’t I tried to track down her coworkers? Why hadn’t I taken care of my own mother?
She was seemingly swept to the CT table, the whole team working as a team. On 3, 1 2 3, and everybody moves with purpose because everybody had a job to do. Had I ever walked like that in my life? I noticed things I never had before. I remember crying like a child during the scan. My mother wasn’t dying, but she was in pain and I had done nothing about it. CT images appeared but I didn’t know what they meant. These tears were for my mother, but they were also for my own impotence.
Three years later I am standing in the same CT room as that day, but I’m wearing scrubs. It’s a stroke protocol and while the patient is being moved from the EMS cot to the CT table, I take a blood sugar just before the technologist begins the scan. This patient has been in the ER less than ten minutes and diagnostic imaging may be leading them down a road of definitive care. I get to watch the images flash on the screen. Perhaps today we see something glaring. I have a slightly more confident gait. I now sometimes move with purpose, even if only to crouch down to explain to a patient who I am and what my interaction with them will be that day. Sometimes they are in tears of pain, sometimes they are impatient and annoyed, sometimes confused, often a little scared.
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