Red Room Where the Writers Are

The call came in as soon as I'd arrived at work.  "She's fallen." my mother said in a rush.  "We're at the hospital in Madill.  Her brain is bleeding."  My grandmother, the prune in a lawn chair from an earlier entry.

There's always a thought one has on days like this, or at least I do.  I drove up alone, stopped by the house to change out of work clothes, gather a few books, the laptop, the thin crumbs my life would leave were I to vanish from my skin.  The sun was bright.  A slight chill tanged the air.  Barbed wire fences, cattle, plunging oil derricks flashed by as I drove.  I thought that the days that our lives changed are the same as any other.

One slip, I was told.  Her face smacked flat on the bathroom tile floor.  Blood leaked from the mouth and nose.  Several minutes of black unconsciousness.  I saw her first several hours after the fall.  The entire right side of her face looked as if it had been splashed with Merlot and pumped full of air.  I hadn't seen her since the get-together a few months ago.  That time had changed her.  Her arms hideously thin and covered with bruises.  Her skin so thin that when she raised herself on the bed, it tore along the elbows and bled out onto the sheets.  Fractures in her facial bones.  Some blood leaking under her skull cap.  The doctors had given her too much pain medication and she hallucinated constantly.

The small hospital in Oklahoma gave us three conflicting diagnoses, moving from she needed to be transported to a hospital with a neurosurgeon immediately to there's nothing wrong that a few pain pills won't cure.  Frustrating.  My uncle, T-, wearing a black private detective hat and a floppy jacket that said ARMY, paced and boiled.   He threatened the doctors.  We tried to keep him calm.  Eventually, we loaded her into the back of a jeep and drove her to a hospital in Denton ourselves.  The doctor there in the ER said he didn't see a bleed, so she was loaded up and driven back to Oklahoma.  The next morning, they called again, and said oops, yep, there was a bleed and she really needs to be brought in.  That was today.  She ended up in a third hospital, one in Ft Worth that has a brain neurosurgeon.  A long day.

The ER room at Harris Methodist in Ft Worth was full of the poor and the sick.  Big men with tattoos and hairy bellies; woman with too much makeup, high-heels and sweatpants, fat thighs and weak eyes; one girl with a worried look and FAMILY tattooed on her right foot.  One group of about 15 people, covering all the age ranges.  They were pulled as a single group back to a "consulting room" by a police officer.  People averted their eyes as they approached and stared at them after they walked by.  I saw them later, huddled together in the far corner of a waiting room, looking small and beaten, the women openly crying, the men with their hands in their pockets, their eyes blinking fast.  Two small children played on the floor at their feet as if nothing had happened.  It's hard to look at people whose tomorrow will be radically different than their today for these reasons.  Some of them will return home to a room full of things that must be packed up -- books, clothes, shoes, hair and tooth brush, deodorant, underwear, the towel they always used, their favorite cup, their secret letters, a stash of porn, early photos, a DVD of a vacation.  It won't be until they return home and begin the gathering they'll realize how much that person had spread into the very fabric of the home in which they lived and how hard it is to box the only things remaining and shove it into a dark corner of the storage shed.

These are the things I thought as I watched my purple and swollen grandmother on that table, as I watched her pick invisible somethings from the air, pet dogs that didn't exist.  My mother and her two sisters remain at the hospital, a long night of cramped chairs await them.  I returned home to a quiet house an hour or so ago.  I hauled the lemon and orange tree inside that I bought my wife so the coming frost doesn't kill them.  My wife and daughter asleep in our bed.  My son in his, his bare foot pokes out from the covers.  The wind beats against the windows.  A cold front rolls in on waves of black air.  I'm home now.  I'm beat.  This day is old and it has tired me.  Looking at how our lives come to a close, I am not inspired at the moment to turn mine into something grand.  My language has changed in the few hours I've spent with my family.  I've said "Fuck all."  I've heard them exclaim, "Her ain't gonna like that none!"  It instills in me an urge to crack open a cheap beer, guzzle it down, and let the foam drip from my chin.

The doctors had given my grandmother an anti-seizure medication as a precaution.  These head traumas sometimes cause seizures, they said.  She had a bad reaction to that medicine.  It turned her angry like a cheap whiskey does to the men.  It took two people to hold down an eighty pound woman without enough strength to stand up.  Eventually they strapped her down to the bed.  She was cussing up a blue storm apparently and when we heard about this in the waiting room, we were all proud in a way, smiled at her ineffective and inarticulate railing against the situation.  "Fuck yeah," the kids said, their piercings bright under the humming fluorescents. "I knew she done had it in her."  Even though her passing was not tonight, and she'll likely be able to go back home in a day or so since the bleed turned out to be something that should work itself out, we were proud that she made her want known to the straps that bind us all down.  She spoke out with rage.  Who wants to go quiet?  She told those fuckers a thing or two, she did.  I'll sleep tonight with the phone next to my head.