Honor Aside

Chapter 9

The stress was unbearable. My sister was sick, I was undergoing tremendous change, and everyone still wanted me to move back home. I couldn't leave, however. I knew that I had barely begun to change the course of my life. I needed to stay away a while longer. During this time, my sister moved back in with our parents. She needed their help with some basic tasks. You didn't visit. Her marriage was also almost over. One day, I saw that I had gotten a message that she was in the hospital a couple of days before I had tentatively checked my parents' messages. My heart dropped and I considered leaving to visit her immediately. However, it turned out that only a couple of people could visit, since the pandemic limited visitation. The visitors' names were on a list that could not be updated. I agonized over what to do. I reached out to my sister, trying to get hold of her. Finally, she responded. She was bored and tired of being in the hospital. She'd been admitted when she showed up for a doctor's appointment and couldn't breathe properly. The doctor advised her to go to the ER right away, and my dad called an ambulance. That tells me that it was so bad that they weren't comfortable waiting for a 20-minute drive. Weren't there.

I eventually video called her. She had lost weight, her face was red and gray, she had lost so much hair, and her lips were pulled taut over her teeth. I was so scared for her. I told her that the changes concerned me, but that I was focused on how she felt and whether she was healthy. She had developed a blood clot being in the hospital, which pained her constantly. The doctors had ordered many tests. She had struggled to breathe because of aspirational pneumonia, which happens when food particles that don't properly make it into or stay in the stomach enter the lungs. The doctors were also trying to determine the extent of tissue hardening in her organs and gastrointestinal tract, which would indicate which treatments would help. Her leg wound, once a wide yellow dent in her skin, was continuing to heal. She still had not started immunosuppressant therapy, which was the only way to slow the tissue hardening and hopefully reverse symptoms like poor circulation to the extremities. The clock was ticking. 

I talked to my dad. He cried and said that they were doing all they could. He had told my sister she could divorce Ratface. Apparently, seeing her so ill in a hospital bed had convinced him that she needed a divorce. Reading between the lines, here's what I heard: "My daughter has suffered irrevocably because of my emotional abuse and manipulations, including those that resulted in her ill-fated marriage, but now that she can no longer provide children or fulfill the traditional duties her backward, village-dwelling husband expects, I have decided to let the poor guy off the hook." It just looks bad to your relatives if you force people to stay married when one of them can't do what they're supposed to do. Also, Ratface never provided or did the traditional husband things. He was just "trying to be able to work as a doctor in Canada." Poor guy.

I visited home when they finally let her out. She needed to see me, badly. She asked twice to make sure that I was still coming home when I'd said I was. I went and saw her, held her. She was so thin. My family was, of course, happy to see me. I wanted to see them all, but first I needed to sit with my sister in her room and ask her how it was going, without my interfering parents around. I don't want to fucking go to that room again. Burn it down and immortalize it, all at once. Keep it close and make it go. She was so relieved to see me, and I knew the few months prior must have been incredibly hard. At some point, I got out my notebook in which I'd been recording her symptoms and what her doctor had said, alongside my own research notes. We discussed the disease progression and I verified which tests had been done, and what they'd revealed. The barium swallow test had shown normal mobility of food going down her esophagus. However, the doctors had wanted to do an endoscopy of her esophagus and stomach but they hadn't been able to find a vein in her hardened, circulation-challenged arms and legs. They wanted her to go to a surgeon who would make an incision, and then they'd be able to do the procedure. The head of gastroenterology at the hospital called her and said she didn't need to go through with it, since she'd been through so many tests and her body was under siege. She just needed to be stable enough for immunosuppressants.