needs: Hospital and when I can’t make any decisions
Despite being a person grounded in decision, results and getting things done, a stay in hospital melts that away. Nothing heralds this change. I’m just standing there, tired and sore, before a display cabinet of quiche and salads while the world is waiting. The same kind woman from the day before is repeating the same question. She knows I can do this. Choose. I can. I have before. I’m just a girl standing before a salad, wishing it was a cheese burger. I look around the cafeteria and realise I can’t work out if I will sit or stand. When my phone rings, I watch myself not take the call.
I normally make 100 decisions before drop off, but now the blood in my body stalls to a muted throb. I had deferred the decisions about my girl to doctors and nurses. I had deferred the decisions about life outside the hospital to my beloved. What was left? I had powered down.
Hospital and the things I had seen were lightning bolts that shocked me into this state. Those moments, when everyone is asking her, moving her, pushing her. Those chasms of silence where these is no response to that touch, or gulfs of pain when her cries are not of this world, wrench that part of me that made her from scratch. When her foot fails to find the floor, or betrays her in a mis-step and gives only a drag, those moments tap me, and shake me.
I am supportive, hopeful and strong. I am fearless for her and I am humor for her. I am kind and grateful when it fails her and I’m brave when she is not. I am all that she needs all the while something freezes inside me. Seeing those things, worrying around those questions, searching for the help, shuts part of me down. Not the part that is whispering to her, or the part that talks to doctors, just the part that can choose lunch, take calls and remember to charge my watch.
“Have you decided?” She asks me with sympathy- she has seen me struggle these last few days. I smile, tears well up, I can cry in front of the cafeteria lady. “Yeah coffee, black, large, and a ****”.
means: not being able to decide is a beacon for me
Life on a ward is hard work for me. If I am finding myself slipping in an in-between void, I need to address that. I am powerless before the dragon she needs to slay. The rest of my life is shaded grey and her needs, and the means I muster, are in vivid hyper colour. She needs medical care, buckets of fearless love, truckloads of courage and sea containers of humor. I deploy music, origami, stories and touch. To be all this, to do all this, to wrangle the means to meet her needs, I need air and this is what it looks like for me:
- A coffee with a friend in the hospital cafeteria every second day;
- A daily call with my beloved;
- A hot shower;
- Reading something comforting (*always Fangirl, by Rainbow Rowell);
- Watching something funny (*always gossip girl);
- Music taking me away (*pulling the curtain and dancing it out for both of us)
