Chest Pains

The ICU isn’t as private as you would think.  For example, in the waiting room you get to see people wheeled past you, with their fearful families trailing behind.  And hours later, you might see that same family return, running down the hall in such a way that you know their loved one belongs to the code blue you just heard.  And your fears for them are confirmed when you overhear the doctor’s ‘Im sorry’s and ‘We did all we could’s.  And of course, no doubt remains when you hear their wailing start.  The wailing that just keeps going until you can’t stand it anymore.  But really, how can you care about their loss at all when your aunt is dying.  Except she’s not dying today so you go back home and wait.  And think about funeral outfits.  And hate yourself for thinking about funeral outfits.

So you go home and wait.  And while you wait your stupid, distracted samaritan of a neighbor decides to help a school bus back out into a main street.    The practical neighbor, dressed in all black because she’s a mom and moms tend to have a lot of dark neutrals. The practical mom who just wants her children to get to school on time, so she rushes to help the bus, when she should have just let the fucking bus driver solve her own problem.  But she doesnt help.  Instead she gets slammed by a pick up truck so hard that her leg becomes seperated from the rest of her body and the bones in her head become pulverized.  And she lays there, in the street, as cars pass her and her children watch from the bus window and your daughter watches from the bus window.  And she dies there, with no privacy either.  Later the news vans will rush to the scene and the voice over will talk about the tragedy while the viewers watch a high powered hose wash off the street.  Wash her blood and guts off the street, because its so important that viewers know there was blood and guts involved. 

So no privacy in the ICU and no privacy as the news helicopter circles around to catch the shocked neighbors standing next to the bus where her children sit and hope that they didnt really see what they just saw.

But it’s all private inside me.  Two evil little rodents in my chest screaming and scratching so I can’t even breath and my heart actually hurts, a tight squeezing pain.  Two nasty rodents in my brain, one showing me images of my aunt, swollen with fluid, tubes stuck everywhere, adding and removing liquid to her body.  One showing me images of the truck slamming the neighbor, her leg gone, her face unable to hold a recognizable shape.  Two rodents showing me scenes that I never actually saw, but that doesn’t stop them from showing me over and over again.  Two invisible rodents bothering only me.  I go to work, I go to the store, I go to the football game and no one else sees what I see.  My own private painful world.

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