Ah Stefan. I have not known the rhythms of another creature's bowel and pain cycle as I know yours since the days of our last dog.
Stefan terrifies me, twists my heart, infuriates me, terrifies me again--things seem to be coming back to terror at this stage, this early, don't-feel-any-different stage.
Stefan terrifies me because of the whole "there go I" thing--N had a great section of her book explaining the value of taking 'but for the grace of god' out of that phrase; it renders the language so much more honest. Even her cutting room floor shards are good.
Stefan is in his mid-70s. His sickness, I think, shares only enough with my own that he and I can be on the leukemia ward together. He's got other issues and seems to be on the radiation track--they take them away in their beds and they go to some other place I imagine to be somehow less boring and scary at the same time.
His lovely wife comes by when she is done work. She has an understanding of how it goes here; they've been here a while. She said: "You are the third person who's been here since my Stefan came in [pause while I crack a little inside] and every one sits just the way you do, looking out at the view. I had him on this side for a while, but now I keep him over there."
Stefan comes and goes, but he's rarely totally here. He has three main stages: complaint, joy, and weeping--although I have to say they tend to mix.
He is bed-ridden, bald all over, and his skin is smoothed by something to do with the disease, so he doesn't look as old as he is--or at least didn't to me when we got here.
But it is hard. Like most New York interactions, it really comes down to Real Estate: is the view good enough to justify the nights?
Every night, he cycles through the same torture. He mumbles complaints to himself: "I'm sick. I'm sick. I have this pain."
When he hears staff in the halls, the tether to reality weakens the rest of the way and he thinks it is his wife, who has since gone home for the day: "Cath? Cath? Catharine?!"
The calls get louder and louder, and when the second and third syllables--tied together in a local accent that made N recognize his age and local-ness as soon as she heard him--get added, then it starts to hurt to listen.
And nobody comes. He doesn't or can't use the call button attached to our beds, and I think he has been here so long and cried for so many wolves that there just isn't a sense that his cries need immediate attention.
Everyone knows what it is. He's going to the bathroom, alone, in his diaper, in pain, semi-tranced, in a bed three feet from my face.
The staff know that it just has to happen, and then they have to come in and clean him. There's not another way, and they are used to the cleaning. It is part of the care.
I am not. I am not used to averting my gaze from full diapers on flaccid thighs as I tiptoe across to the bathroom to measure my urine output. I know we occupy different spaces in the world, poor Stefan, but this terrifies me more than the needles and the red syringe of chemo ever could. This is the ghost of Christmas yet to come.
"Cath?!" Catharine?! Catharine!?" When the exclamation point steps in front of the question mark, that's when he's peaked.
The long vowel in the second half of the name has become the sound I always imagine the Staten Island Ferry made when it's drunk or drugged or whatever captain plowed into the Manhattan dock and those ancient swaying tree-trunk pilings tore a calm deadly hole in her side. It sounds like metal being torn by something softer but with more endurance. It sounds like loss that knows it is already lost.
And it is annoying as shit. I will not pretend otherwise. My nerves have climbed with the sighs then, calls, then screams of my roommate, and by the time he hits the torn-metal note I want to slip my not-swollen-yet feet into my boat shoes, march out into the hall, and angrily berate every staff person there that they have not come in and at the very least spoken to Stefan to calm him down. I want to shout at them, I want to go try and sleep on the couch in the lounge. I want to do something.
I want to unload on Sefan's head with a bedpan. I want to lift him up and squeeze him till he just shits it out and gets it over with. I want to push his bed out into the hall and slam the door--the doors to the rooms are NEVER closed.
Then someone eventually comes in, and talks him down if he has not emptied himself yet, or starts the job of cleaning him if he has. And the cycle resets.
During the day, when they come in to take blood, he is actually hilarious. He has a sensitivity to touch and temperature that he does not have to regular pain, and so the process of getting his insulin checked or a shot into him is a riot.
"Mr. Beal I need to take a little blood OK?"
"I love you."
"Ooh, that's nice, but I need to hold your arm, OK?"
"Seriously, I need you to make sure everyone here knows how fabulous you all are, it's the best ice cream, I gotta wait a second so you know how, through all time, next year I'll have a party. I love YOU ALL!"
"OK, but I'm going to need to take some blood."
"OK."
"This is just alcohol--"
"Cover my legs. I'm cold. Stop stop stop what are you doing cover my legs."
"OK I'll cover your legs in a minute, but this is alcohol to prep the--"
"AHHHHHHHHH! OHHHHHHH! What the oh my god!!"
"Mr. Beal, that was just the alcohol. I know it is cold. OK, here goes the--"
[A growing howl] oooooooooooooooooh..."
"I'm gonna stick the syringe"
"..oooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHH..."
"Three, two, one!"
"...oh."
Like it was a let-down. Like, what was all the fuss for? Like a dog in the middle of a tantrum stopping dead because maybe he smelled cheese. Just "oh."
And N and I are so thankful, doubled over in what George Carlin calls "Kneeling in front of the casket" laughter, so much harder to suppress and so much more wondrous because we have to hold it in. A sick man and his supporting wife with their hands over their mouths, scant feet away on the other side of the curtain, doubled over, bodies sputtering to hold the gasps, maybe tearing up a little.
Thank god, Stefan, for the release. And I hope it goes one way or the other Stefan, for you and for me both. I hope you get better, or I hope you die. Because I can hear in the mumbles, and I can see in the hands grasping at the bar of the bed, and I can hear in the taut "I Love You" your wife throws back into the room with her hand. Because you terrify me, Stefan, and because I guess I love you a little, because I don't know where I am yet, except in a bed in the same place as you.
I hope you get better Stefan. I hope you beat it.
But in the night, you bad bastard, when it first starts. "Cath? Cath? Cath!"
Then there is no mercy. Then I want to slide my drug-ports out of the way, slink out of my bed, pull back the curtain and punch your face in over and over and until the whining is gone, the pain is gone, the diaper is gone, the fear is gone, the sick ignorance of where this leads is gone. Just make it all into you, into something I can attack, and bash it and bash it and bash it until there isn't anything left.
And the river flows by. Or stops. And changes its mind each night.
