Have You No Shame? And Other Regrettable Stories

Have You No Shame?: Part 1

On the evening of February 1, 2007, my grandmother took a shower before bed.

She and my grandfather, wary of the minor household accidents that could send an octogenarian prematurely to the glue factory, had increasingly complex precautions in place for such an event.  Both of them had to be home, both of them had to be awake, both of them had to be in the same floor of the house.  As a result, the simple act of bathing had become quite a production.  I imagine her moving into the bathroom, taking off her faded housecoat, and lowering her body onto on the special bath chair with excruciating slowness.  She had never moved quickly, but lately, everything seemed to take forever.  You could bring a pregnancy to term in the time it took her to get out of the car; by the time she had made it up the walk to the front door the kid would be taking his LSAT’s.  My sister and I had begun to joke on our visits home that the Grandma we saw, inching down the hallway at a snail’s pace, was actually the refracted image of the real Grandma, who was moving at the speed of light.

            “Don’t tease Grandma,” said my grandmother, speaking as she often of herself in the third person, like Jesus Christ or Kanye West.  “Grandma’s old.  Someday you’ll be old too.”

            Shortly after she had turned on the water and started to wash, my grandmother began to slip out of her chair.  She grabbed the faucet handle, a single lever controlling both temperature functions, to break her fall, jerking it all the way to the left as she tumbled to the floor of the tub.  Unable to move with the bath chair blocking her way out, she remained trapped under the heavy spray of scalding water for close to three minutes.  My grandfather heard her screaming over the TV in the next room.  He rushed into the bathroom, although after a life spent on his feet butchering sides of beef and several rounds of arthroscopic surgery, he wasn’t exactly Speedy Gonzalez himself; and with great effort, managed to turn off the water and heave his naked wife out of the steaming tub.  As she lay on the blue bathmat, screaming in pain and terror, he did what any thinking person would do in an emergency: he called my mother.

            “I almost went to a movie that night,” my mother said.  “I would have had my phone off when they called.”  She paused.  “Of course, your father was out of town.”

            She ran several red lights and made it to their house in ten minutes flat, took one look at my grandmother, and suggested calling an ambulance.  My grandmother said she didn’t want to make any trouble for the paramedics.  Refusing to argue, my mother wrapped my grandmother in a blanket, carried her down the steps and placed her in the back seat of the car.  My mother suggested driving straight to Clarkson Hospital, where they had a recently installed state-the-art burn unit, but my grandparents were adamant.  Bergen Mercy was where their primary care physician was on staff, Bergen Mercy was where my grandfather had has his most successful knee surgery, (the one that didn’t almost kill him) Bergen Mercy it would be.

            Several minutes later, in the Bergen Mercy emergency room, a nurse took one look at my grandmother and sent her in an ambulance to the burn unit at Clarkson.

            “I don’t want…to make any trouble for anyone,” my grandmother said weakly.

            She had second-degree burns on nearly a third of her body, including her right leg, her torso, and most of her back, with a few small sections on her arms and hands.  While her vitals were checked, her wounds dressed, her blood flushed with morphine, my mother and grandfather stole a few minutes of sleep on the couches of the waiting area.  At about 4 a.m., she was finally stable.  My mother went home, tried vainly to sleep for an hour or so, and called me.

            “Is she going to be okay?” I mumbled sleepily

Ben rolled over in bed, pulling his pillow over his face  “Who is that?”