Bleached

"...One... Two...!"

It's 3am and over 24 hours since I took the last of a three-month supply of Percocets. It's dark, but not quiet, as I lay on the folding bed next to the baby-jail of mesh constructed to contain my niece. A few weeks ago, Anna went from being a 10-year-old person to a 10-year-old brain trauma patient, and now she's in Baltimore's Kennedy-Krieger Juvenile Rehab Center, and it's my turn to sit with her (Kennedy-Krieger requires a family member to be present at all times). The floor is loud with the screams of crying children, and the smiley animals that have painted on the tile floor are mostly covered by scary metal things with hooks, and clamps, and straps, the kind of things that make parents cry. But, it's 3am, and I'm Jonesin' big time, so I thought I would put my laptop to use...

A few minutes ago, Anna shouted, "Eight times eight equals sixteen!" It's about time for her diaper to be changed again, which happens about every hour. And every hour I stand out in the corridor, because, apparently, I am about the only one that remembers that Anna is a person, and not just a patient.

People treat "Patients" differently than "persons." It's like suddenly it no longer matters that there is a room full of people when a patient's pants or gown is stripped away and a diaper is changed. It's all so... "medical." But, even full of cramps, and a headache and nausea, I stagger out to the corridor to wait, because, if it were my arse being wiped, I would want every one to do that for me, patient or not.

"...Three... Four...!"

Anna's brain was injured in a car accident and she was life-flighted to Fairfax Hospital (in Fairfax, VA), where they removed the top front part of her skull, which was surgically inserted into her abdomen for storage until the brain swelling goes down enough to replace. And after a week in a coma, Anna's eyes opened, and a week later, she began to mumble things. But there are casts on both of her feet, and on her left arm. The feet are casted to keep them at proper angles to avoid muscle and tendon injury until she learns how to use them again. She broke her wrist in the hospital, fighting against the straps that prevented her unconscious hands from ripping at the tubes and stitches in her scalp.

Earlier in the evening, during one of Anna's many 30-minute naps, I snuck across the street to a lone, narrow three-story building whose front had been painted bright yellow. Mama-Mia's was the only place to get a meal that didn't involve traversing the basement's cement corridors through hundreds of yards of a combined physical plant to get to the cafeteria at Johns Hopkins, which was the predominant land-owner in this mostly poor black neighborhood. Mama-Mia's is little more than a dank short place to stand along a dingy counter that guards the grill. In fact, it seems as though the entire building is supported by that old grill, and despite the name, there are no Italians there. But I don't care; my insides are twisting into knots, and I'm dizzy and I can't take a breath without it hurting.

"...Five... Six...!"

During the 5am changing, I'm in the corridor when another patient is wheeled by on a gurney. She is screaming, sort of, and her limbs are twisted up, like a nest of metal coat hangers that had been run through a garbage disposal. She's maybe ten, like Anna, and her eyes are looking upward, her mouth is agape, and she's groaning and squeaking as she's wheeled past, through the double doors toward the elevator. When the elevator doors close, they clip the squeaking and screaming, and the floor returns to the normal ambient din of suffering children and grieving, worried adults.

And in between cramp spasms I'm thinking about... bleach.

"...Seven... Eight...!"

There's something about a children's ward... Banker, brick-layer, lawyer, layman, president or plumber, whatever you may have been before those elevator doors open is bleached away when you step out onto the 3rd floor. No, you're just a worried parent at that point, just like all the other worried parents who were bleached before you that evening. You ask the same questions, you dread the same answers, you yell the same, walk the same, you look the same,... cry the same. Your child has made the transition from "person" to "patient", and you've been bleached.

I've snuck out front to grab a smoke, and I watch as an Asian nurse tentatively exits the lobby onto the street. She looks nervous, cautious, as though she were sure that one of the neighborhood's many ex-convicts was sure to drag her into an alley if she gave them half a chance (at least, in her mind). I watch her try to casually dart through the cars to the guard station on the opposite corner, as though she were in Beirut.

"...Nine... Ten...!"

Anna can't feed herself. But she can tell you that she does want something or doesn't want something. She can answer, "yes" or "no", and she can ask for a nurse when she craps her diapers. She can also smear her feces on herself, on her face, on her chest; Brain injured people do that from time to time for some reason, even though they are disgusted by it. In between naps and craps, we talk a little. I ask her, "Do you know how you got hurt?" She doesn't. "Do you know where you are?" She doesn't. "Do you remember where you live?" She thinks she lives at the hospital. I tell her that she was in a car accident. And I fire up the map software on my laptop and show here where she lives, and where she is now on the map. But talking to Anna is like talking to an extremely drunk person that has the occasional moment of subtle lucidity.

"...Eleven... Twelve...!"

Dr. Tresher stops by and asks her a few questions. He introduces himself, but Anna has a hard time lifting her shaved and stitched, skull-less head, and the right side of her face is paralyzed, like Bell's Palsy. But she remembers that he is "Dr. Treasure". And the doctor is delighted, as well he should be considering that Anna is just barely cognizant that *she* is in the room, let alone anyone else. I'm cramping even worse, and the room is spinning like I'm fighting the worst flu ever suffered.

"...Thirteen... Fourteen...!"

During her breakfast feeding, the nurse's aids move Anna into her wheelchair and strap her in. She has a skateboard helmet on and she's getting spoon-fed something (not sure what exactly). After breakfast, I ask Anna if she wants to take a spin around the block. She does, and I gimp and grunt the wheelchair around the floor a couple of times. We stop by a window and I show her the tops of a couple of the spires on Johns Hopkins across the street, and I tell her about how it is cold outside now. She should be going home a week after Thanksgiving, I tell her, forgetting that she has no concept of what "home" is yet. But *I* sure do, and I'm feeling sick as a dog and I'm eager to get back to my own room so I can collapse and groan in private.

"...Fifteen... Sixteen...!"

Around eleven o'clock, and over thirty-six hours after my last hit of perc, the physical therapist shows up, glad to see that Anna is already strapped into her wheel chair. She asks Anna if I am her father, and Anna shakes her half-paralyzed face a couple of times and says, "That's my Uncle." The therapist asks Anna if she wants Uncle to go with them, or should he stay. Anna is quick to say (a very rare thing), "Come with."

In the basement, on a mat table, we're playing Uno. I'm holding Anna's cards while she tries to get her one "good" hand to reach for the card while trying in vain to keep herself seated upright on her own. But we're taking breaks in between hands so that her casted arm, the one with the wrist she broke in Fairfax fighting against the restraining straps, is stretched, and she is counting.

"...Seventeen... Eighteen...!"

But each count is more of begging cry than a simple recitation. It hurts. A lot. And Anna is counting as she is crying. But it isn't the cry of a child being disciplined, as though counting out spanks. It is the cry of painful determination. She's not crying for it to stop, she's sucking it up and getting the damn job done willingly. But each cry is gut-wrenching for all of us, and suddenly, my eyes aren't seeing things so clearly. The therapists think I'm getting teary-eyed, but it's just allergies is all. I'm trying to casually wipe the snot from my upper lip and thinking about how I will be home in a few hours.

My hands are shaking, my gut is twisting, but it's those damn "allergies" that are killing me most of all.

"...Nineteen... Twenty...!"

..."Bleached," I think to myself.