Weeks and waiting
I knew it had been a long time, but didn't realize six weeks had gone by until an email reprimand arrived from a friend and reader -- with many friends but few readers, I felt obligated to revisit this experiment. How to summarize those weeks -- Michael had migraines for all but four days of that time period. We've been back and forth to the doctor in Dallas several more times including a visit yesterday to a new one -- a neurosurgeon. My research is at a standstill, and clearly I'm battling writers' block. But the past two days were pleasant ones, two of the days he felt good before the vertigo returned again today. So I'll share a few moments from yesterday.
Hospital waiting rooms have a great equalizing effect. UT Southwestern is a monstrous place, a city in itself, and I've only been on the edges of it. Yesterday, I sat in a waiting area where I'd never waited before, browsing through aging magazines and trying to ignore how green the faces were on the ceiling-mounted TV in the corner. My fellow residents of the waiting room: a very nervous man of middle-eastern descent, and an elderly black man in a slightly tattered Northrop-Grumman ball cap.
The nervous gentleman was dressed in the hospital gown and pants required of those about to go "into the tube" as my MRI-experienced son calls it. A nurse arrived to ask him if he still had a bullet in his shoulder, he replied quickly.
"No, the bullet is gone -- I was shot in the shoulder, yes, but no bullet is still there."
When the nurse left he turned immediately to explain to me that he worked for a jewelry store at a North Dallas mall and had been shot during a robbery attempt. I have no idea whether the old bullet wound had anything to do with the MRI he was facing yesterday. But I was struck by how quickly he felt compelled to explain why he would have a gunshot wound. He offered me more details than I could understand through his thick accent. What little of his scar I could see extending beneath the sleeve of his hospital gown appeared to have healed long ago. But other scars remained, in the nervous twitch of his hand, fretting with the locker key that dangled from a bright pink, plastic-coated instruction sheet. I wondered how many times others had gazed at his dark features with fear or suspicion thus prompting this unrequired explanation.
The elderly gentleman was with his son, a frail, small man who appeared to be about my age, and whose central line was visible beneath the loosely tied hospital gown.
"We think we'll pass before our children, and that they'll take care of us, but it doesn't always happen that way, and I'm happy to do my responsibility to him," the father said, nodding with each phrase.
"Abilene, ah I've been to Abilene, with my prison ministry," he said when I told him where I was from. He had been to Huntsville and other prisons as well.
"I haven't always done my best in this life, so I can identify with them in that way. I've never been to prison, so I can't understand what that is like, but we all make bad decisions, so I can go out of God's love for me, and minister to them."
HIs freckled complexion was fairer than his son's whose light eyes stood out against his ebony skin. The two bore no resemblance but shared a soft-spoken manner. The father was a tall man, still fit despite his age, his hair still more black than gray. His eyes were dark, and they twinkled despite the occasional melancholy in his voice, especially when he spoke of his first wife. "We were together 30 years before she passed of breast cancer," he told me, and unconsciously touched his right hand to his own chest.
"She died holding my hands -- she got to the bathroom and I was helping her back to bed when she slumped to the floor and she just exhaled -- 'uuh', like that -- and I knew she was gone. She didn't suffer long, just a month she was down, but you don't forget something like that, being with her when she passed."
As he talked I was struck with how comfortable he seemed to share such a sad and intimate moment with a stranger. He offered no complaint, no bitterness, and I left him after an hour feeling I'd left an old friend. A friend I never would have met except in a hospital waiting room.
Hospital waiting rooms have a great equalizing effect. UT Southwestern is a monstrous place, a city in itself, and I've only been on the edges of it. Yesterday, I sat in a waiting area where I'd never waited before, browsing through aging magazines and trying to ignore how green the faces were on the ceiling-mounted TV in the corner. My fellow residents of the waiting room: a very nervous man of middle-eastern descent, and an elderly black man in a slightly tattered Northrop-Grumman ball cap.
The nervous gentleman was dressed in the hospital gown and pants required of those about to go "into the tube" as my MRI-experienced son calls it. A nurse arrived to ask him if he still had a bullet in his shoulder, he replied quickly.
"No, the bullet is gone -- I was shot in the shoulder, yes, but no bullet is still there."
When the nurse left he turned immediately to explain to me that he worked for a jewelry store at a North Dallas mall and had been shot during a robbery attempt. I have no idea whether the old bullet wound had anything to do with the MRI he was facing yesterday. But I was struck by how quickly he felt compelled to explain why he would have a gunshot wound. He offered me more details than I could understand through his thick accent. What little of his scar I could see extending beneath the sleeve of his hospital gown appeared to have healed long ago. But other scars remained, in the nervous twitch of his hand, fretting with the locker key that dangled from a bright pink, plastic-coated instruction sheet. I wondered how many times others had gazed at his dark features with fear or suspicion thus prompting this unrequired explanation.
The elderly gentleman was with his son, a frail, small man who appeared to be about my age, and whose central line was visible beneath the loosely tied hospital gown.
"We think we'll pass before our children, and that they'll take care of us, but it doesn't always happen that way, and I'm happy to do my responsibility to him," the father said, nodding with each phrase.
"Abilene, ah I've been to Abilene, with my prison ministry," he said when I told him where I was from. He had been to Huntsville and other prisons as well.
"I haven't always done my best in this life, so I can identify with them in that way. I've never been to prison, so I can't understand what that is like, but we all make bad decisions, so I can go out of God's love for me, and minister to them."
HIs freckled complexion was fairer than his son's whose light eyes stood out against his ebony skin. The two bore no resemblance but shared a soft-spoken manner. The father was a tall man, still fit despite his age, his hair still more black than gray. His eyes were dark, and they twinkled despite the occasional melancholy in his voice, especially when he spoke of his first wife. "We were together 30 years before she passed of breast cancer," he told me, and unconsciously touched his right hand to his own chest.
"She died holding my hands -- she got to the bathroom and I was helping her back to bed when she slumped to the floor and she just exhaled -- 'uuh', like that -- and I knew she was gone. She didn't suffer long, just a month she was down, but you don't forget something like that, being with her when she passed."
As he talked I was struck with how comfortable he seemed to share such a sad and intimate moment with a stranger. He offered no complaint, no bitterness, and I left him after an hour feeling I'd left an old friend. A friend I never would have met except in a hospital waiting room.
posted by Cheryl | 1:39 PM
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