04.15.04 - 9:55 a.m.

Still overloaded. C'est moi.

Mom? Still in the hospital, more than a week out, and may not be getting out today. On Tuesday, her bleeding time was too low. On Wednesday, her bleeding time was so high that they stopped all her blood-thinners. This morning, her bleeding time was too low again. The bounce back and forth is both surreal and discomfitting. Hospital life is enervating: sitting around in your robe all day, with slippers rather than sneakers, your view limited to the window in your room and the windows at either end of the hall. One starts to feel sick even when one isn't, in fact, sick. Once upon a time, people spent a week in the hospital for a relatively minor back injury. Maybe they were more interesting then: more lively, with healthier patients walking the halls.

I've walked the halls a good bit recently, visiting Mom. She can walk the halls: she isn't attached to anything, not even so much as an IV. (She was for the first few days, but it wasn't necessary. Also, it hurt her hand and she had trouble reading, and she couldn't sew.) She can walk, and so we do when I go to visit, wearing a path in the linoleum, shuffling at the pace of paralyzed, epilectic snails. I goose-step, or slap my sandals on the tiles, or pretend I'm one of those Tennessee Walker horses, or try to imitate the energetic overt marching-marching of a college marching band, like Grambling State, but nothing relieves the tedium.

As we walk, I get little glimpses into a half-dozen other lives. Everyone in the hospital is more acutely ill than my mom: most of the women are just post surgery. Some have complications from their chemotherapy. Some are just at the point where their bodies are completely unravelling, ravaged by cancer. A few - a very, very few - are pregnant women ordered to bed by their physicians, but most people on Mom's floor are patients of her gynecological oncologist. And, as Mom said, Dr. S's patients are really pretty sick.

That isn't much comfort to her.

The window from Mom's room gives us a fabulous view of the Marriott across the Elk River. We make bets on when the neon red Marriott sign atop the building will be turned on. 8 p.m., a gloomy gloaming, within five minutes or no? I said, no. I lost that bet. Otherwise, there's not much to see: some apartments with balconies sort-of overlooking the Elk River, the ugly bulk of the mall, the ass-side of the Civic Center, made interesting only in the last couple of days by the arrival of the circus.

At one end of the hall, there's a fabulous view of the interstate, curving around. Cars hurtle by, mostly silent (at least the building's pretty soundproof) and despite the movement, there's something unchanging about the view: cars are always hurtling by. That's what they do: they hurtle. They throw themselves down the highway. At night, they have headlights. In the day, none. Your vision of this snippet of someone else's life is limited only to that single hurtling moment, and they never think of you: standing at the window of the architecturally uninteresting hospital, watching them drive by.

The window at the northeast end of the hall is even more spectacularly uninteresting, if possible. There is a fine vista of the gravel-covered roof and the little red lights perched at the edge to signal helicopters off on foggy nights. Building - Don't Land Here!. The gravel is interrupted only by a series of stepping stones leading to an enormous metal... thing. I think it must be the heating/air conditioning unit, since it reminds me, somewhat, of a heat pump on super-steroids. (That's one bad-ass heat pump. That's a heat pump to put other heat pumps to shame, baybee.) In addition, you can see a few clipped edges of other buildings, blinds drawn, windows closed, eyes shut. Lifeless (although I often see human faces on houses, I rarely see them on office buildings. They're too massive, with too many windows and too little character.). If you stand at one corner of the window, you can get a glimpse of the golden dome of the capital building through the haze and fog. The housing development across the river is more clear, but hardly more interesting. The townhouses are as industrial as any big-city high rise, bland, impervious, impersonal.

Then we walk back. Sometimes we take a turn by the elevators and lean over the balcony's edge, looking down into the lobby, or into the baby-delivery waiting-area. Then we shuffle back past the classroom, past the nurses station, past the whirlpool tub and the visitors' restroom, past the just-darkened rooms where other women in all-too-similar boats are recovering from the surgery they hope will save their lives or are preparing to die, until we're back in Mom's room. We might make two, three, four circuits, but nothing changes. We chat about nothing - that's what you chat about, nothing. Sometimes Mom comments on one of the other patients - usually someone who hasn't had any visitors, whom Mom visited since she hadn't had any visitors - and then we're back in the room, doing our who's-going-to-get-the-good-chair dance.

Being a patient - existing as a patient - subject to the rules and whims and rhythms of the hospital reduces you to certain essential functions, reminiscent of childhood or very old age. Someone brings you food and puts it in front of you: you eat it. Maybe you even lift the thick insulated plastic lids with a certain avidity, a certain enthusiasm, a certain animalistic greed-glee. Mealtimes are the only interesting times. (What did I get today!) There's not much else to puncture the bland cycle of the day.

Except: of course there is. Someone gets sicker. Someone else gets better. The names on the other doors change. The name on your own doesn't.