check your sugarcoat at the door

I was watching Nurse Jackie a week or so ago, when a patient is admitted for a bullet to the head and she requires surgery. To calm her, Edie Falco’s character promises she will be there with her right when the girl wakes up from surgery. The young girl ends up waking up alone and tells Jackie later to, ‘keep [her] fucking promises.’ That part was a mainline direct to a very specific memory I have from my first and last (LAST, dammit) hospital admittance.

My birth story just sounds hackneyed seven and a half years after the fact but one tiny detail of it was this: Scared shitless, having just been shot with a spinal and preparing to go into emergency surgery for the first (AND LAST) time in my life, it was all I could do but hang my head over my basketball shaped tummy and cry. My super thick hair was making me crazy (my ponytails are as thick as Redwoods, no shit), sticking in my tears and my mouth and my panic had brought my temperature to a healthy six billionty. This mound of hair was helping to cool me off not at all. I asked a number of people to help me find something to put it up with, to no avail. Be it my age at the time (17) or the fact that I was not a human but a dollar amount because I had kickass union insurance; I was not taken seriously for virtually anything. The drug use they interrogated me of (refusing to accept my sobbing no, no, no but believing it when my mom answered them for me), my insistence that I was going to puke while crucified on the surgery bed and having no use of my arms/hands… (I repeatedly asked the anesthesiologist to remove the oxygen mask and he repeatedly told me I was fine and patients always thought they were going to be sick. According to him, ‘fine’ is having your vomit sent back into your mouth because you’re STUCK in a fucking MASK. What did leak out went down my neck and into my hair. I smelled of roses for my stay in that shit hole, LET ME TELL YOU.)
I finally made actual human-to-human contact with a brunette nurse, who promised to find me a rubber band. Light beamed down on her, choirs erupted. I had a saving grace and my first deep breath.

In the operating room, things happened and babies were born and blood was motherfucking everywhere (leave it to me to make the story of life as visibly morbid as possible). I came to under a heated blanket and my newborn daughter’s dad is sitting next to me. Where he came from, I couldn’t understand, and where I was laying was a whole other mystery in itself. Whatever went into those needles in my hand and back knocked me senseless. Squinty faced, I saw the brown haired nurse. She was the only other person in the room, with her back to me and what I did think of was not my first coherent thoughts as a parent or my premature baby’s well being, but: that bitch promised me a rubber band.

In such a sensitive, scared state of unknowing – that was a personal attack. She did it on purpose. She wanted me to suffer. She was an awful, awful person and she would PAY.

Which, free of IVs and the like, I understand is untrue. Maybe she turned the damn hospital on its head for me and her resources failed her. Maybe she just agreed with what I wanted because she knew, correctly, that I would mellow the fuck out. (I might have been a little… how you saaaay… uncooperative throughout some portion of the evening.)

But I knew what that fictional patient meant when she scolded Jackie, all too well.

Do: keep your fucking promises. You have no idea what they could mean to someone.

-CJ