The time passed just as slowly in my mother’s room as it had in the car: painfully so. Each beep of the machine, each thump-thump of someone’s feet as they walked past her room, each tick of the clock above the door, all the noises only intensified the fact that everything was happening in slow motion.
I’d inquired about my mother at the registration desk of the hospital. The woman behind the desk gave me instructions on how to find her, and I’d listened, but I was surprised I’d retained any of the information. I’d managed to find the ICU and the nurse there had led me to my mother’s room once verifying our relationship.
I opened the door to her room and was both shocked and relieved by what I saw. My mother was sleeping—the same thing she’d been doing for weeks now. Sleeping. But this time she was sleeping in a hospital, her wrists restrained, cuffed to the side of the bed.
“That’s for her own protection,” the nurse had explained when she’d seen my eyes go wide. “She’s been unconscious since she was brought in so we haven’t been able to evaluate her mental state. We don’t want her to wake up and do anything to harm herself.”
I nodded because it made sense, but I wanted to cry from the logic.
My mother had swallowed enough sleeping pills to kill herself.
Enough sleeping pills to slow her heart rate to the point of near death, to cause the hospital to pump her stomach, to fill her veins full of drugs to counteract what her system had already absorbed.
The nurse explained everything she could, but then left us, telling me she’d let the doctor know I was there. “It’s a waiting game now, honey,” she’d said with a softness to her voice that felt a lot like pity.
When the doctor had showed up, he’d not really told me anything new or worthwhile.
Mom would pull through, but the effects of the drugs she ingested weren’t the real worry. The real and immediate danger was the fact that she’d taken them to begin with. She was breathing on her own, they’d been able to get her heart rate up, she’d been intubated, but after receiving medication from the hospital, she’d quickly started breathing over the machine, so they took her off it. Now, they were just waiting for her to wake up on her own.
I sat in the uncomfortable chair just to the side of her bed, and I watched her sleep. I hoped she wasn’t dreaming, hoped that she was, for just a moment, blissfully unaware of all the pain she’d obviously been living with. I hoped she was just resting. Existing. Perhaps healing. Because she’d done none of that so far.
And I was partly to blame for that.
How many times had I left her? To what? To finish a degree? To continue to live my life like nothing had happened while she obviously lost her mind? I thought back to every time I pushed my mother’s problems aside, every time I passed her off to someone else, every time I told myself she’d be fine.
It was all my fault.
Eventually I fell asleep in that uncomfortable chair, and when I woke up, it was to my mother’s frail voice calling my name.
“Hayes,” she whispered, obviously afraid, sounding terrified. “Hayes.”
I sat up and moved the chair to her bed, as close as I could get, and rested my hand over hers still strapped to the bed.
“Hey, Mom,” I said, my voice wavering, throat tightening, and eyes welling. “I’m glad you’re awake.”
“Where am I?” Her eyes were flitting around the room with panic.
“You’re in the ICU at the hospital. Mrs. Harris found you unconscious last night, so she called an ambulance.” I watched as my mother tried to mentally piece together what I was saying. I reached forward and pressed the button on the side of her bed and in just a few seconds a voice rang out.
“Nurse’s station, can I help you?”
“Yes, my mom has woken up. Can someone please let her doctor know?”
“Of course.”
I grasped my mother’s hand and felt her try to grasp mine in return, but her grip was weak. “Someone will be here soon to explain everything, Mom. But I promise, everything is going to be okay. You don’t have to worry about that. Trust me.”
She nodded silently, obviously still petrified, and I couldn’t help but feel like our roles were more reversed in that moment than ever before. I was her caretaker, and I had to make sure I did everything in her best interest. She needed to get better and I needed to help her. She obviously wasn’t going to be able to do it alone, and I felt like a horrible son for ever imagining she could.
Mom was quiet for the few minutes it took for a nurse to come check on her. The door opened and a new face appeared, smiling brightly.
“You’re awake,” she said as she approached my mother, looking at the monitor she was hooked up to. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m tired. And I feel like I can hardly hold my head up. My throat hurts a little. Other than that, I’m all right.” She looked at me for just a moment, but then glanced back to the nurse, who was wrapping a blood pressure cuff around her arm. “Why am I bound to the bed?”