The Art of Starting Over

Chapter 43 - Dyschronometria

I looked out of the window and succumbed to the white fog infiltrating my skull, letting it numb my brain cells. I didn't fight it anymore. Why would I? It wasn't as though things were got better or easier when my head was clear.

I let it swirl in slow circles. I let it diffuse the electrical activity in my brain and blur the room, distort the voices, isolate me from what was going on around me.

Two weeks. Sosa said there were two weeks left until Christmas. So that meant we'd been at the hospital for... what? Four, five, six days? I didn't know and I didn't ask. Every day was the same in this goddamn place anyway.

Millie was right. Sosa came around. Right in the face of tragedy, when Keith called and told her we were taking Millie to the hospital again, Sosa came around.  She came straight to the emergency room and it was as though our argument had never happened. It was funny how fear did that. It made you forget things, frivolous things, insignificant things compared to the inevitable monster breathing down our necks.

She visited every day. Maybe even more than that. I wasn't sure. Sometimes she came on her own, sometimes with Derek, sometimes with Shaun. Jeremy's eyes were deadly the first time Shaun walked into the hospital room, but he retreated quickly when he saw his arm around Sosa's shoulders. He looked at me inquisitively but didn't question it. And neither did I. Quite frankly, and horribly, I realised I was too tired to care.

I tried to remember the actual date when Keith and I woke up, our necks stiff from sleeping on the small couch, to the sound Nanna vomiting. Her lips were smudged with blood and bluer than I'd ever seen them. Her urine was dark brown in her urine bag. Still, she refused to go to the hospital.

Keith helped me get her downstairs. I gave her an anti-emetic and, after a few breathing exercises and a cup of coffee, she said she felt better. She never went back to her room after that. We set up the couch for her and spent a couple of hours watching soap operas. I wrapped her up in a blanket because she was cold. 

I tried to think whether days or hours had passed when I walked out of the kitchen with her meal tray and found her unconscious. I wasn't able to wake her up. Her lips were blue again. And she was so cold.

I remembered Keith trying to pry me away from her as he phoned the ambulance. I remembered him setting her on the floor, putting her in the recovery position. She'd looked like a child in his arms despite his own slight frame. I remembered him rubbing my shoulders as the doctors told us that things didn't look so good. He called Sosa and Carmen, and his face turned to stone when I asked him to call Jeremy as well.

But that was it. That was all I remembered.

The rest was a continuum of bleeping, buzzers, uneaten take-away meals and the hard back of the armchair in that god-awful room. Nurses came in. I went out while they did what they had to do. I went back in and she was the same, if not worse. Friends came in. I went out to give them some privacy. I went back in and she was the same, if not worse. I nodded yes. I shook my head no. I said thank you. I slept. I woke up. I prayed. I stared.

She was the same, if not worse. Never better.

"Ally," Sosa's voice rang in my ear.

I blinked repeatedly to clear my brain just enough to focus on what she was saying. "Hmm?"

She was looking at me patiently, concern covering every inch of her face. "What do you think? Will you go?"

"Go where?" I asked, dazed.

"To the staff party. It would do you good. You need to get out of this room. Keith can come too."

Keith and Jeremy in the same room? I didn't think so.