Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar (27 page)

But after an entire month of seeing it, the sudden confusion and noise from the sundowners became my Pavlovian cue: the crying and sometimes yelling signals that my workday was done. My last afternoon, at around 4:30, I was on my way out of the building when I heard somebody crying. I can handle my daughter crying, my own crying, my friends crying—but senior citizens crying? I don't have the strength.

I followed the sound, and soon I came upon Peter. He was crying quietly and pushing his walker into the corner of two intersecting hallways.

He was pushing his walker into a wall and crying.

I'm no animal, so I stopped.

“Peter?”

“Yes? WHAT IS HAPPENING?”

You guys have to understand. It wasn't just Peter and me in the hallway. There were people
everywhere
. Other seniors, staff. It's a busy corridor. But Peter's little scene was falling on deaf ears, not just because of all his near-deaf friends, but because the hearing staff wasn't listening.

“You're fine, honey. Come this way.”

Peter shook his head but allowed me to lead him away from the corner. I walked with him down the hallway, totally unable to believe that I was the only one who would help him.

“We're going to get you back to your room,” I said.

“My room is gone,” Peter whispered.

“No, it's this way.”

“It moved. Where is Catherine?”

Catherine was Peter's wife. She lived in the building next door, a basic senior center. This was a palliative care facility. The last stop. Catherine was fully capable of looking after herself, but she was no longer able to look after Peter.

I could have romanticized the situation a million different ways and depressed the shit out of myself, but I chose not to.

“Catherine isn't coming today,” I said. “It's Thursday. Catherine plays bridge on Thursdays, remember? Look, here's your room!”

“Ah yes, ah yes,” he said, though I don't think he really recognized it. I think he was just trying to hide his confusion. He was a sweet man.

“Are you okay now, Peter? Do you need anything else?”

He looked into my eyes and patted my hand. “God bless you,” he said.

After I left Peter's room, I decided to say good-bye to Dean. Dean was the one with the Werther's Originals in his room, the kind with the chocolate in the middle. He was one of my favorite patients.

I knocked on his door.

“Hello?” I heard, a little weepy.

He was crying. Fucking sundowners.

“Dean? It's me.”

“Oh, hello. Sorry, I'm a mess. I don't know what's wrong.”

“Do you need anything?”

“I don't think so.”

“I just wanted to say good-bye. Tomorrow is my last day. I was thinking I could come back and visit, or maybe work here part time—”

He interrupted. “Don't ever come back to this place. Ever.”

I sat down.

“Why?”

“You don't need to be in a place like this.”

I wanted to talk to Dean, but I didn't know where to start. You can't talk about the weather or bullshit like that with people in a place like this. I think the reason most people avoid visiting these guys is because it's impossible to spend any time there without thinking:

Wow, this really fucking sucks. This place really, really fucking sucks. You've lived your entire life free to do what you please. You've had a family, a home, a yard, and now you're HERE. And you're paying A LOT OF MONEY to be here! You're stuck sharing a room with some other old man you don't know. You eat shitty food in a loveless cafeteria. You have a bed that, chances are, someone else pissed and shit and died in. If you get stuck in a corner of some hallway, people ignore you. And now you're going to die in this building with a view of the freeway.
Instead I said,

“Uh, so, tell me about your wife. We've never talked about her.”

Dean looked up and tears filled his eyes. “Elizabeth!”

He stared into my eyes, moved by something I couldn't pinpoint. The silence was kind of extreme.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I shouldn't have asked about your marriage. It's none of my business.”

“No, no, it's just . . . I haven't said her name in years.”

My stomach hit the floor.

I have zero experience responding to this kind of human intensity. I'm used to “I didn't get any sleep last night,” or “This coffee is gross,” or “Mondays, right?” I have no experience in
a ninety-one-year-old man breaking down in front of me over the love of his life whom he lost four years ago, after spending a lifetime with her
.

Dean shimmied over to his closet—without his walker, so I knew he meant business. He opened the closet and took out a large box from a shelf. He brought it back to the desk where I was sitting and placed it before me. A photo album.

We spent the next two hours poring over his life, from birth until his wife's death.

“I haven't talked about this in years.”

At one point, Dean's roommate appeared in the doorway.

“GO AWAY, ANDY!!!” Dean shouted.

Andy hobbled away, no questions asked.

Two hours after my shift ended, my family was at home, wondering where I was. I was sitting in a facility, listening to a man I barely knew recall his life, talking a mile a minute as the memories rushed back. I barely understood what he was talking about. Trips, people, children, cars, pets, homes. He was painting the picture of his life for me, quick as his tongue could move.

I got home late. When I saw James, I broke down.

“Don't die,” I begged him. “I can't do that job. I'd rather be a waitress. I'd rather shovel shit. I can't do enough for them.”

“You don't have to.”

“I could have stayed all night, all year, and I'd never be able to do enough.”

“You don't have to.”

I went up to Sal's room and snuck in. The room had that sweaty, sleepy kid smell that you want to bottle up and huff in your car when you need a hit of oxytocin. I stroked her ringlets and thought about her life. If she'd ever be ninety-four. If she'd have a view of the freeway.

A week later, I graduated at the top of my class. I listened to Dean and decided not to take the part-time job at the center where he and Peter lived. After all, my husband wasn't dead. I didn't need a backup plan quite yet. I stayed at home and had more kids with the husband who didn't die. I made James get better insurance. I pushed all three of my little kids around the zoo in strollers. I don't worry about being a single waitress, but I still worry about not doing enough for people, and when I drive past palliative care centers, I pretend I don't know what's going on inside.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE
NURSE
WHO GAVE ME AN ENEMA BOTTLE AND TOLD ME TO DO IT MYSELF WHILE I WAS HIGH ON
MORPHINE

Hello, Nurse,

I don't expect you to remember me, given that you work in a busy emergency ward helping many dying or seriously dismembered people each evening, but I came in one late November night in 2007 with severe abdominal pain.

The relentless agony of my abdominal pain was almost on par with the time I was giving birth and the head of my child got stuck in my vagina and I pictured all the women giving birth in the 1800s, in their cabins with babies stuck in their vaginas, dying by candlelight. So I would like to thank you for the morphine. It stopped my screaming and gave me a decent “just peed in my pants” buzz, about the equivalent of a fifteen-minute post-joint mellow. I would also like to thank you for the blanket you gave me when I got the chills. Offering an old, hair-tangled elastic so I could pull my hair from my sweaty face was a lovely gesture, the slight scent of Shalimar so soothing. I am nothing if not appreciative for the good things you did for me.

That said, I'm writing to clarify a point of hospital policy. You see, I'm not 100 percent certain whether protocol dictates that patients give themselves enemas, or whether nurses are supposed to administer them.

I ask because, if questioned, let's say, by a stranger on the subway, “Suppose you go to the hospital and need an enema; who would give it to you?”

My guess
would have been
a nurse.

You see, I'm still not even certain why I had the enema.

I loathed having to admit to you and the ER doctor that I had pooped that morning.

Regardless, you handed me the Fleet enema bottle and said the words I will never forget.

“The bathroom is down the hall.”

“Pardon me?” Of course, dear nurse, it wasn't that I hadn't heard you. I merely wanted to be quite sure you weren't being comical. I was, as you know, under the influence of a heavy narcotic.

“The bathroom is down the hall. You take the top off the tip—it's lubed—you bend over, squeeze, and hold in the water for as long as possible. Then sit on the toilet and let it out.”

“Okay.” It was at this point, as I took the bottle from your hand—which was firm and resolute in its intention to pass it to me—that I realized you were absolutely serious.

I shuffled down the hall, bottle in hand, waiting for you to call out to me, waiting for me to be wrong about what I was about to have to do to myself, but you never called out to me. I'm a nervous wreck when it comes to attempting new things, but the morphine certainly took the edge off having to put a bottle of fluid up my ass in a public washroom. Also, I really don't like feeling mortal, and poo is just one of the obstacles that gets in my delusional ways. I'm a clean freak. I don't use public washrooms. I don't poo.

Whether it was standard procedure to have patients give themselves enemas, or merely you taking a break to grab an egg salad sandwich and deftly using my morphine-dazed state to your advantage, I will never know.

Nurse, I remember the moment quite well: standing bent over in front of the toilet, my one hand propped against the wall, the other gripping the bottle, poised to insert it into my asshole. Yours was a Herculean feat, getting me into this situation, yet you . . . you managed to do it simply by giving me the tool and your meager directions. Let us agree that without the morphine in my system,
you
would have been giving me that enema. I would have been lying sideways on a bed, iPod blaring, knees to my chest, trying not to imagine looking at my own asshole through your eyes, concentrating on something like the failed series
The Cosby Mysteries
.

In the cold, but thankfully private, bathroom, I took a good long look at myself in the mirror, and thought,
Crunch time
.

Fortunately, you didn't lie when you said the tip was lubed. Also, it was thoughtful that the bottle and fluid were heated a little. That might have been protocol rather than a sweet gesture on your part, to help enter my part with relative ease and less constriction. Nonetheless, it made the event more comfortable.

As the bottle squeezed empty in my hand, strange sounds erupted in my body. Clugs and squeals. This is where you failed me, dear nurse: you see, you weren't precise in your instructions. At this point I realized I had no idea
how long
I was supposed to hold the water in. I stood, half-naked in mid-squat, clenching my ass with as much tension as one can feel under the influence of morphine, and I realized that I had no idea whether “as long as possible” meant seconds or minutes. But perhaps I'm being too hard on you, because really, the morphine had robbed me of any concept of time.

I inched my way over to the toilet, wondering how long I could possibly hold the water in. For a moment, it occurred to me that gravity could help contain the water in my butthole. When I put my head between my ankles, however, I found I was utterly unprepared for the head rush and morphine spins that resulted.

I fell.

As I fell, a spray of water erupted from my body and spattered to the floor. Not much, but certainly enough to make me ashamed. Me, being a girl who did not want to tell you I'd already pooped that morning. I couldn't stop the ejection. So I gave up, got up, and voided into the toilet.

I can't claim I was spry in my movements, given the morphine. I'm not sure how long I sat on the toilet wondering if I was done, because it certainly seemed as though a lot more went in than came out. And like I said, you weren't very clear about how long this entire thing would take.

I may have blacked out, as I can't recall exactly what state the washroom was in after my fall. But I did my best to clean up the mess with the dry, unabsorbent paper towels available to me in the bathroom.

 

When I emerged, I walked back to my gurney and pulled the curtain. You arrived within a few minutes.

“Do you feel better?” you asked, and emotionally I don't think I did. You probably noticed this by the tone of the low yes I grumbled as I tried unsuccessfully to mount myself onto the gurney bed, like it was a tiny toy horse. At last, I lay facedown on the bed with one leg hanging off, turned my head, and looked at you.

I could read nothing on your face. Were enemas not your forte in nursing school? Were you a deviant? Were you put on earth to help me find my inner animal spirit? I will never know.

What I do know is I had just gone against all of my moral excellence in that emergency-room public washroom. And because of that, my pain was gone. For that, I salute you.

I know that you probably understood how phenomenal your immediate effect on me was, what with the cessation of the pain that was as agonizing as my baby's head being stuck in my vagina, but I doubt that you imagined how your actions would shape me in the days and years to follow. I'd like to quickly tell you how this experience had a positive effect on my life:

The following week I visited my family doctor. When he entered the room and asked,

“What's new?” I responded: “Life changed for me when I gave myself an enema while high on morphine in a public washroom.” And I have been a favorite patient ever since. He makes extra time to see me for last-minute crises with my children, and that really saved my rear the last time Henry had strep throat. You see, I'm now an infamous self-administering enema giver. That's
clout
in the medical world. And it's a skill I won't forget about.