24 Hours

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven

                My mother had worked as a nurse, very briefly. She’d told me many stories about her many patients, some of which were very disturbing.

                But one in particular caught my attention.

                A man had walked into the hospital having severe headaches. I pictures him holding his grasping his head in pain as he was lifted onto a stretcher by several assistants, dressed in a navy work uniform. They drove the rollaway bed in which the man lay to the ER (emergency room), where he was laid out onto an actual resting bed.

                They rigged an IV and attached him to a heart monitor. He had a small machine attached to his hip, indicating that the man possessed a severe medical disorder.

                They identified the headaches as a sign of internal bleeding, and it was too late to operate on his skull to fix the problem. The bleeding was in his brain, and it was a risk of having the machine for his medical disorder, which my mother explained was probably doing something with his blood. It was going to clot differently now, she’d said.

                So the hospital staff brought in the man’s devastated, worried family. They visited him, one by one, as he lay on the hospital bed. The poor man was unconscious as his daughter gripped his hand in both of hers, leaned her head, and cried into the cupped palms. My mother heard her desperate sniffles from in the hallway, accompanied by the quiet whispering of hopeful prayers.

                After the girl said her final good-bye, a boy that looked slightly older than the girl was escorted into the room. He, too, took his father by the hand.

                “Dad,” the boy whispered, his voice heavy with pain and grief, “I love you. You’ve been the best father anyone could ever hope to have, and I love you. I love you so, so much.” Then he collapsed into a fit of sobs and was dragged away from his still-unconscious father. The boy continued to mourn as the night went on.

                I love you, the boy would say.

                The man’s last visitor was his wife. She was a middle-aged woman with frizzy brown hair drawn up in a ponytail, and a checkered flannel shirt that was tucked into her jeans.

                She knelt down beside the man, leaned over, and drew her head to his ear. Her eyes began to well up with warm little tears. But my mother didn’t see her saying anything, nor did she hear a word. The woman bent over and whispered into the man’s ear.

                Then she reached her hand into her pocket and picked up two little red strings. She tied one securely around her own wrist, followed by the man’s. Then she stroked the man’s face, kissed him on the lips, and walked out. She did not say a word for the rest of the night, not even to comfort her mournful children.

Not even the children, though, said much more. They only cried, and the man’s young daughter would mumble prayers and blessings under her breath when she though the nurses weren’t listening.

                Those who cared would care in silence.

                The man did not make it through the following morning. By the time the sun rose, the man was still lying on his hospital bed. The heart monitor did not make a noise.

~

                I wonder what it must have been like, I thought, sitting down on the carpeted floor of the hallway outside the principal’s office, to believe that the last words you said to someone you loved so much would not even be heard.