And, barring a catastrophic turn of events that would, in their cathartic horribleness, be even worse than cancer, we are free of Stefan.
A couple of hours ago we were moved to an interior window room to spend time with a wonderful couple who have so far watched the cooking channel with the sound down and burped twice. It is like remission.
But I should back up to Stefan's faceplant. Or even before that, to his 'visit.'
As I said, the last couple days were horrible--the chemo must have been doing its job because I was barely there to hold on to myself, my lunch, or my sense of humor. N was a trooper, and I have a vague sense she spent hours staring at some husk of me. But things were at least mildly improving. Except Stefan was getting healthier, too. And, as I said, I am of course deliriously happy for that, but it gave him...energy. He became Gollum.
I was in the bed. N was running an errand. It was quiet. Then the breathing. Panting, irregular breaths. Getting closer. Oh god. Oh god.
And then the thin rattling scree of the curtain, my privacy curtain--the thin concept of closure that is the only thing that keeps one patient from another--one's bowel movement from another's dreams, one's night-sweats from another's snoring...my curtain gets drawn back, and there is his bald head, and his searching eyes.
He doesn't need anything really, he's just lonely, and afraid, like all of us in here.
But he's in my half of the room and I am hopped up on enough steroids to simultaneously cry at a friend's email and impale a baby on a hood ornament. And if this creeping creature doesn't get back to his side of the curtain I am probably gonna blow a vein in my neck...and start crying like a mother at a wedding. And probably fart.
It may be a reminder, it may be news, but Stefan shouts in the night. Stefan calls out for his mother and his wife for approximately an hour each time he soils himself--thirty minutes before he fills his diaper, and thirty minutes after. Usually around then an aide comes in to clean him or I give up trying to sleep and hit my buzzer to draw their attention to it. We sleep, if at all, in hour and a half intervals.
He is restricted from getting out of bed, gets dizzy when the physical therapist sits him up, and has been in that bed for four of the five weeks his radiation therapy is to last.
He asks the nurses to cuddle, to hold his hand. There is what N calls a cunning in his lost state. He has managed to create a world from the wisps of reality he can grasp where he gets what he wants and needs, often at the expense of those around him. Or, being honest, me.
When, each day, his wife reminds him that his father died forty two years ago and his mother thirteen, he seems a little put out, like 'How dare they? without asking?'
And while the staff are as good to him as they are to all of us, there is a sigh when they draw his straw.
I wish him well, and all health, but he is a tiresome man.
So that was a while ago. Cut to this morning. N and I are now aware of Stefan's antics. He has started making cracks about my 'visitors' when I get the doctors in on rounds. He has started asking his nurse or aide 'who's that guy?' and when lunch arrives, "is that for me or him?" He's getting in my head.
Which, apparently is not enough. Nope, it was the bed he was after the whole time.
Those of you who are parents--or who remember being dangerous children--will recall that sound of no-sound (very Buddhist, I know) that comes right before something terrible occurs. It is the sound of a fall happening, the potential energy of skin and bone rushing for a glorious meeting with something fun like floor, or radiator, or garden trowel.
And then sound returns with lightning alacrity and Stefan is moaning and N is raising her voice to say "He fell?!" and I am scampering around the aforementioned flimsy curtain to behold the gaunt leg-backs of a man predominantly under my bed, face-down and bewildered.
I run into the hall, where for just a second I am stunned by the fact that nobody else understands that all hell has broken loose. They are just walking around, preparing syringes, moving BP monitors, squeaking their ever-present crocs on the floor.
Then I stumble out with some such genius as "Uh, a patient fell on the floor!" I may even add "Help." and then I go back into our room where N shields me from the mess and mass of people who storm in and spend the next fifteen minutes extricating a banged-but-fine codger from the space beneath my bed.
By the end of it he is on a back-board, cackling at how funny it was, yukking it up with a staff whose capacity for patience humbles and explodes me every second: people this man has shit on laugh with him about his escapade, because the alternative to patience here would be emptiness. They function on a wavelength my fear and illness and steroids cannot allow.
When the dust has settled N takes over. She has noted for days that when the Drs come in on rounds we spend most of the time talking about how the roommate kept me up. She is dressing in that way women have of dressing that just barely, barely restricts a growing fury. Some of the scariest times of my life have been spent sitting or standing next to a flung-on shirt or coat, knowing I am in trouble and knowing I deserve it.
But for once this is not my bad: N can no longer stand that the level of my care is being actively degraded by the escapades of Stefan and his long slow climb back to health.
She makes forays into the lounge, to the nurses station, sends me out when I need to bear my own opinions to the Drs. It is handled well and quickly and with understanding. One resident is foolish enough to try and make light of Stefan's skydiving, and I can hear the tensile strength of N's voice rise as she cuts right past his attempted joke, I can hear the air slice as she turns her head past his idiot gaze to address herself to his attending, and I can hear her get her way.
No one begrudges us: it is all understandable, but the gears of a large ward are slow to turn, and we needed this event to make us accept that the river, beautiful and many-faced though it is, is not worth this kind of disruption.
We are in the interior of the building now, with evening sun streaming in instead of morning, with the arches of the next building across the way instead of Roosevelt Island, and with the tickling white billow of one of the hospital's smokestacks changing the scenery instead of the tugs and barges and police boats' deep Vs.
But it s worth it so far, and will likely stay that way. I am here to get better, and I may be here a while. And that has to take precedence.
I apologize if this is a bit over-written, but I feel OK for the first time in days, so am shaking out the cobwebs a bit. Please forgive the exuberance: I do not intend to hoard any these days.
