“And pajamas,” I say. “Halter tops make for good access. To my veins.” He says he’ll bring me a robe when he comes back, though he’ll likely not be back. If you are the sort of child who only comes into the hospital once every ten years, then the whole world comes to visit, and your room is filled with flowers and chocolates and aluminum balloons. After the tenth or fifteenth admission, the people and the flowers stop coming. Now I get flowers only if I’m septic, but my uncle Ned makes a donation to the Short Gut Foundation of America every time I come in.
“Sorry I can’t stay for the H and P,” my father says. He would usually stay to answer all the questions the intern du jour will ask, but during this admission we are moving. The new house is only two miles from the old house, but is bigger, and has views. I don’t care much for views. This side of Moffitt Hospital looks out over the park and beyond that to the Golden Gate. On the nights my father stays, he’ll sit for an hour watching the bridge lights blinking while I watch television. Now he opens the curtains and puts his face to the glass, taking a single deep look, before turning away, kissing me goodbye, and walking out.
After he’s gone, I change into a lime-green top and bright-white pants, then head down the hall. I like to peep into the other rooms as I walk. Most of the doors are open, but I see no one I know. There are some orthopedic-looking kids in traction; a couple of wheezers smoking their albuterol bongs, a tall, thin, blond girl sitting up very straight in bed and reading one of those fucking Narnia books. She has CF written all over her. She notices me looking and says hello. I walk on, past two big-headed syndromes and a nasty rash. Then I’m at the nurses’ station, and the welcoming cry goes up, “Cindy! Cindy! Cindy!” Welcome back, they say, and where have you been, and Nancy, who always took care of me when I was little, makes a booby-squeezing motion at me and says, “My little baby is becoming a woman!”
“Hi, everybody,” I say.
See the cat? The cat has feline leukemic indecisiveness. He is losing his fur, and his cheeks are hurting him terribly, and he bleeds from out of his nose and his ears. His eyes are bad. He can hardly see you. He has put his face in his litter box because sometimes that makes his cheeks feel better, but now his paws are hurting and his bladder is getting nervous and there is the feeling at the tip of his tail that comes every day at noon. It’s like someone’s put it in their mouth and they’re chewing and chewing.
Suffer, cat, suffer!
I am an ex-twenty-six-week miracle preemie. These days you have to be a twenty-four-weeker to be a miracle preemie, but when I was born you were still pretty much dead if you emerged at twenty-six weeks. I did well except for a belly infection that took about a foot of my gut — nothing a big person would miss but it was a lot to one-kilo me. So I’ve got difficult bowels. I don’t absorb well, and get this hideous pain, and barf like mad, and need tube feeds, and beyond that sometimes have to go on the sauce, TPN — total parenteral nutrition — where they skip my wimpy little gut and feed me through my veins. And I’ve never gotten a pony, despite asking for one every birthday for the last eight years.
I am waiting for my PICC — you must have central access to go back on the sauce — when a Child Life person comes rapping at my door. You can always tell when it’s them because they knock so politely, and because they call out so politely, “May I come in?” I am watching the meditation channel (twenty-four hours a day of string ensembles and trippy footage of waving flowers or shaking leaves, except late, late at night, when between two and three a.m. they show a bright field of stars and play a howling theremin) when she simpers into the room. Her name is Margaret. When I was much younger I thought the Child Life people were great because they brought me toys, and took me to the playroom to sniff Play-Doh, but time has sapped their glamour and their fun. Now they are mostly annoying, but I am never cruel to them, because I know that being mean to a Child Life specialist is like kicking a puppy.
“We are collaborating with the children,” she says, “in a collaboration of color, and shapes, and words! A collaboration of poetry and prose!” I want to say, People like you wear me out, honey. If you don’t go away soon I know my heart will stop beating from weariness, but I let her go on. When she asks if I will make a submission to their hospital literary magazine I say, “Sure!” I won’t, though. I am working on my own project, a child’s book of sickness and death, and cannot spare thoughts or words for The Moffitteer.
Ava, the IV nurse, comes while Margaret is paraphrasing a submission — the story of a talking IV pump written by a seven-year-old with only half a brain — and bringing herself nearly to tears at the recollection of it.
“And if he can do that with half a brain,” I say, “imagine what I could do with my whole one!”
“Sweetie, you can do anything you want,” she says, so kind and so encouraging. She offers to stay while I get my PICC but it would be more comforting to have my three-hundred-pound Aunt Mary sit on my face during the procedure than to have this lady at my side, so I say no thank you, and she finally leaves. “I will return for your submission,” she says. It sounds much darker than she means it.
The PICC is the smoothest sailing. I get my morphine and a little Versed, and I float through the fields of the meditation channel while Ava threads the catheter into the crook of my arm. I am in the flowers but also riding the tip of the catheter, à la Fantastic Voyage, as it snakes up into my heart. I don’t like views, but I like looking down through the cataract of blood into the first chamber. The great valve opens. I fall through and land in daisies.
I am still happy-groggy from Ava’s sedatives when I think I hear the cat, moaning and suffering, calling out my name. But it’s the intern calling me. I wake in a darkening room with a tickle in my arm and look at Ava’s handiwork before I look at him. A slim PICC disappears into me just below the antecubital fossa, and my whole lower arm is wrapped in a white mesh glove that looks almost like lace, and would have been cool back in 1983, when I was negative two.
“Sorry to wake you,” he says. “Do you have a moment to talk?” He is a tired-looking fellow. At first I think he must be fifty, but when he steps closer to the bed I can see he’s just an ill-preserved younger man. He is thin, with strange hair that is not so much wild as just wrong somehow, beady eyes and big ears, and a little beard, the sort you scrawl on a face, along with devil horns, for purposes of denigration.
“Well, I’m late for cotillion,” I say. He blinks at me and rubs at his throat.
“I’m Dr. Chandra,” he says. I peer at his name tag: Sirius Chandra, M.D.
“You don’t look like a Chandra,” I say, because he is as white as me.
“I’m adopted,” he says simply.
“Me, too,” I say, lying. I sit up and pat the bed next to me, but he leans against the wall and takes out a notepad and pen from his pocket. He proceeds to flip the pen in the air with one hand, launching it off the tips of his fingers and catching it again with finger and thumb, but he never writes down a single thing that I say.
See the pony? She has dreadful hoof dismay. She gets a terrible pain every time she tries to walk, and yet she is very restless and can hardly stand to sit still. Late at night her hooves whisper to her, asking “Please, please, just make us into glue,” or they strike at her as cruelly as anyone who ever hated her. She hardly knows how she feels about them anymore, her hooves, because they hurt her so much, yet they are still so very pretty — her best feature, everyone says — and biting them very hard is the only thing that makes her feel any better at all. There she is, walking over the hill, on her way to the horse fair, where she’ll not get to ride on the Prairie Wind, or play in the Haunted Barn, or eat hot buttered morsels of cowboy from a stand, because wise carnival horses know better than to let in somebody with highly contagious dismay. She stands at the gate, watching the fun, and she looks like she is dancing but she is not dancing.