This is a place with its own specific codes: blue for heart failure, some serious malfunction of that most important muscle; pink in the case of a child abduction. When we don’t want patients and visitors to panic, there are the secret codes. When the system pages Dr. Stork, it means that a woman in labor is in crisis. A call for Dr. Strong means that there has been a security breach.
But there is no code to signal our most important visitor, no announcement when he comes. I see him often, the night-winged angel of death perched on the highest gabled roof of the hospital, his inky eyes searching for the souls that fly out of our windows. His, the reign of this entire kingdom.
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In the wards, the doctors come and go like gods, consecrated by their white coats and stethoscopes. They pronounce and diagnose and stand in judgment. Then they leave and we are still here. In the ICU you are reduced to your barest essence. No possessions, no homes or wallets, all you bring here is your body in whatever state it has fallen into.
There is always a rhythm to it. The family comes in in shock. What happened to the son, the lover, the brother who said goodbye this morning and went to jog along the Presidio? How has he been transformed into this shattered thing? Why are these tubes piercing every part of his tender and beloved body? They will cry, they will rage, they will be exhausted by the decisions that have to be made, the arrangements, and the paperwork. Yet in a few days they will accept this new reality and do the best they can. Tears will become an unnecessary extravagance.
Then another relative will arrive from somewhere farther away and he or she will be shocked by everything all over again. There will again be tears and denial. There will be anger. Then in a few days he or she will also be exhausted, accepting. The cycle will resume. These are the rhythms of our days.
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I have seen miracles too. Once a girl came in, gaunt and wasted. Twenty-six years old and dying of a disease that made her prone to stomach cancer. They had cut out two-thirds of her intestines, so she was a tiny wasted thing in the bed. Her mother gave her things to throw and she exorcised her anger by screaming across the room and throwing teddy bears, paper plates, cutlery.
I didn’t try to stop her because her screams were weak, more like long, exhausted sighs. The objects she threw fell a few feet away, rolled under the bed. I didn’t try to stop her as I might have with a louder screamer, a more adept thrower, because I didn’t think she’d make it through the weekend. We made her as comfortable as we could; we checked her vitals hourly, gave her a heady concoction of sedatives. The chaplain came and she wept through instructions for her own funeral. Various family members trooped through the room saying their farewells. And then they left and we waited.
And then miraculously she didn’t die. Her vitals went up and she survived the weekend. Then she survived the week and did not stop surviving. There was no explanation for either her having this rare disease so young or for her remaining among the living.
She comes to visit us sometimes. She brings flowers, cookies, balloons. She fills the ward with her laughter. She hugs me tight and says, “I couldn’t have made it without you.” She looks deep into my eyes as if she sees me. She makes my heart pound. She is beautiful, thin as a supermodel from the lack of so many coils of intestine, and the men love her for it. They do not realize she is a miracle.
She brings flowers for the nurses, large, waxy white orchids. They are supposed to be for everyone, but I know they’re mine. I was her principal care nurse; I watched over her in those crucial days. Once when no one was watching, I folded a sprig of her orchids into my jacket as I left the hospital. I took it home and put it in an old painted vase I had found at a thrift shop and sat it in the middle of my kitchen table.
Then I poured a cup of tea and stared at those incandescent flowers. They lit up my kitchen. Three blossoms climbed the curved stalk, which ended in two perfectly rounded buds. I looked at the flowers with their large creamy wings lifted in flight, the mysterious interiors with all their carvings and curvings, the yellow passages into their hearts. I brought my face to the sprig. There was no scent, only the purity and smoothness of skin against my lips. I couldn’t resist. I dipped the tip of my tongue into the innermost crevice of a blossom and the inner lips pulled at me as if to hold on forever.
Here is the secret of that girl, the one who was cured and who brought us flowers. When we were alone, when even her mother had left, I held her clawed hand and I prayed to whatever power was poised above us, enormous and invisible, weighing her life on its scale, fingering the cobweb of her breath, scissors opened around it and ready to snip. I begged this unseen creature for her life, and somehow it was pacified. The scissors were withdrawn; her life was spared. He looked at me once before he left, the mighty winged angel of death. He promised me he would return, but then I didn’t care. We aren’t supposed to do such things, of course. We aren’t supposed to pray or have favorites, but I did. For her, I prayed. These flowers are my just reward.