The Pumpman Cometh
At 10 PM I push against the bedroom door, cursing its hollowness and creaks. Light floods upon the playing field, the center, the action. Marlou. She groans. She's cranked up in bed, and this attitude has become more or less permanent because of her frequent vomiting. Linda, longtime friend and the night's volunteer nurse, follows me into the room. She walks to Marlou's bedside and announces the nightly medications. What, Marlou asks? I can hear her bitter, dismissive tone. I can hear trouble brewing. What?
It's time for your pills, I say. And what then, asks Marlou? In her enfeebled state, this question is either profound or delirious or both. Indeed, what next? I stall. What do you mean, I ask? What is going to happen after the...pills? Marlou slurs and can barely utter the final word. Surely her strength cannot ebb further, but I have been wrong throughout this saga. What happens next?
What happens next is what has been happening within me throughout. It is that, for the first time in my life, I truly know what to do. I know not to discuss what happens next or to argue, and I know not to concern myself with whether my words will succeed or fail, for they are the right words. And there is no success possible now.
I love you very much, I say. It's time for pills. And the next thing for us is bed. We are going to cuddle. Then we are going to sleep. And tomorrow we will wake up and face another day.
Of all the things I have said, the last seems the most like a lie. But it has come to me, the appropriately sober and credible word. Face. We will face it.
Okay, Marlou whispers. I say nothing, just whisk about the room while Linda gets the medication into her patient's system. By way of distraction I burble on about the state of the lettuce in the garden. There is this kind and that kind, and the netting my brother put in place works quite splendidly, and Linda is opening the new ointment. Marlou's vomiting is so intense that her pills have been ground into a paste, mixed with a hand cream. Linda dons the prescribed glove and works the pharmaceutical ointment into Marlou's forearm. All the jokes about people taking, or not taking, their meds flutter about my head like bats.
I am so shot full of weariness that I fear for my balance, and in the end, ask Linda to help me get my legs under the sheet. I sink into slumber. Every few hours, Marlou emits a gasp, then a telltale bubbling sound and I yell for Linda. One of us hits the 'up' button on the electric bed, the retching begins, then the wiping and the toweling, and the lowering of the bed and the return to sleep. I know this isn't as bad as sleeping in a foxhole at the Somme, but it's a good first step.
The nursing assistant who arrives in the morning keeps telling Marlou that her stethoscope is cold. Sorry, she says, again and again. Marlou's belly is distended. Cancer, if one thinks about it, is utterly purposeless and self defeating. It kills its host, just as mistletoe kills the tree, but the latter manages to cast off a few seeds, and cancer casts off nothing. Watching the nurse, considering this appeal to cellular reason, I have the fantasy that one can get through to the cancer cells, talk to them, maybe all of us work with a counselor. The nurse is raising her head, looking to one side, now considers something and motions me outside the bedroom. She shuts the door.
I ask her what she has heard in Marlou's belly. Nothing, she explains. That is the problem. The normal sounds of digestion, even the very faint sounds of the weak and infirm, are absent. She suspects that Marlou's digestive system is now totally blocked. It's like a Colorado River dam with no spillway. Everything is backing up. That's why Marlou is vomiting so often. What happens now, I ask? The nurse asks me to bear with her, places her laptop on our dining room table, taps away, opens her mobile phone and chats with someone. I lie down next to Marlou, Linda raises my feet to the bed. I wonder if the nurse can order a few meds for me. Anything will do. Pastel pills with colors that don't clash, maybe in a dispenser with a shaker top. I fall asleep. The phone rings, and Linda in the kitchen answers. I fall asleep again.
Waking, I remember a moment from summer camp, at least 50 years ago. A counselor, a college biology student, stood in the summer heat examining a beetle. It was a large bug, one of the common black variety, but the kids had found an odd specimen. The beetle had been lying on its back, twitching. Its front legs waved faintly in the air. Its back legs did not exist. The creature's abdomen had disappeared. Half of the thorax had been hollowed out, nothing but the shell left around its posterior. Ants might have eaten half of it away, the counselor speculated. Somehow, the front portion remained alive. How could this be? Well, the counselor said, it was true that the legs moved a bit. But was this insect truly alive? He prodded at the beetle's front limbs, watching how they faintly flexed, seemingly fascinated by his own question.
* * *
Leviticus, Torah scholars will tell you, may seem about as interesting as a GE dishwasher manual, but there's more than meets the eye. True, the text goes on about ritual slaughter at mindnumbing length, but the priests saw something in the observed death of animals. They saw life. In studying the agony and the mystery at the conclusion of existence, they learned something about its start. Which, I am thinking, does explain one of the small miracles unfolding around me.
People keep returning to help Marlou. Most eventually suffer some sort of burnout, but that is to be expected. New ones keep taking their place. The last film Marlou saw was 'The Man Who Came to Dinner', from the classic play. An irascible Broadway columnist on lecture tour slips on ice and convalesces in a Midwest family's home. He can't seem to leave. The family can't get rid of him. And so it is with our helpers. They come from some distance. They see a friend in great distress and pain, and though the hours and days must be emotionally exhausting, no one seems to reject the experience. All keep coming back until they no longer can. And why? It is hard to say, but like the ritual priests and their slaughter, everyone seems to be getting closer to life.
Liz has returned from Los Angeles, replacing Linda. In a spontaneous moment, I ask her about getting this dying thing under control. What does she think about assisted suicide? Liz, like everyone else who has flocked to Marlou's bedside, does not bat an eye. It's a logical question, she says. Something to think about, naturally. As for Marlou, she would not go for it, Liz is almost certain. And what about me? Would I?
The package arrives late, via special courier, and I have to sign for it about a dozen times. The carton sits in the dining room. Marlou's parents eyeball the thing, note the 'must refrigerate' lettering on the side and worry if we shouldn't shove the entire box in the fridge. I ignore this and retreat to my office.
Within a few moments I will issue a general edict that everyone in our home must be refrigerated for several hours before anything else can transpire. I laugh privately and heartily for a good 10 seconds before the reality of bodies and refrigeration hits me. And where is the fucking nurse?
He arrives at 11 PM full of apologies and wanting any real explanation. He opens the carton and goes about assembling the morphine pump. It takes half an hour for the thing to finally be up and beeping. The nurse places the pump switch in Marlou's hand. I place my own hand on her hand. Liz hits the light switch, and another day has ended. By dawn, having slept and not rested, another nurse is on the scene. She has been eyeballing Marlou's nocturnal button pushing, correlating that data with the machine's setting for the release of morphine, and has a question. Would Marlou like to up the dose?
In the morning warmth, for spring has arrived, Marlou listens. She says 'no' to the nurse. I roll my wheelchair into the office and shut the door. The nurse follows. She is a young woman, but not averse to hanging out with death and dying, so I suspend my judgment and bite my tongue. I tell her, in as diplomatic terms as I can manage, that when I see my wife lying on her side recovering from another bout of vomiting, I don't like what emanates from her eyes. It is something beyond sadness, even resignation. It is that look of life knowledge that one sees in the eyes of concentration camp victims. And there is more, I tell the nurse. Marlou's breathing has changed overnight. She gasps, sucks in air in desperate gulps.
Marlou is not in pain, the nurse tells me. You are in pain, she adds, but not your wife.
I let the nurse tend to Marlou, head outside to check on the lettuce seedlings and find that the latter have moved to lettuce adolescence. The sun splashes against my face. I need a mission. I decide to roll to the bank. Incredibly, scores of local constituents are rolling my way, clutching steaming cups of Peet's. Sure enough, the coffee place has reopened. Huge fans whir inside. One of my neighbors tells me that the place had a close call. The entire building almost went up in smoke, but now it's in business again. The air conditioning system has shut down, and there's no heat. But the fans will keep the air moving. It's an improvisation, but Peet's is moving and I am moving and everything will keep moving until it stops.
It's time for your pills, I say. And what then, asks Marlou? In her enfeebled state, this question is either profound or delirious or both. Indeed, what next? I stall. What do you mean, I ask? What is going to happen after the...pills? Marlou slurs and can barely utter the final word. Surely her strength cannot ebb further, but I have been wrong throughout this saga. What happens next?
What happens next is what has been happening within me throughout. It is that, for the first time in my life, I truly know what to do. I know not to discuss what happens next or to argue, and I know not to concern myself with whether my words will succeed or fail, for they are the right words. And there is no success possible now.
I love you very much, I say. It's time for pills. And the next thing for us is bed. We are going to cuddle. Then we are going to sleep. And tomorrow we will wake up and face another day.
Of all the things I have said, the last seems the most like a lie. But it has come to me, the appropriately sober and credible word. Face. We will face it.
Okay, Marlou whispers. I say nothing, just whisk about the room while Linda gets the medication into her patient's system. By way of distraction I burble on about the state of the lettuce in the garden. There is this kind and that kind, and the netting my brother put in place works quite splendidly, and Linda is opening the new ointment. Marlou's vomiting is so intense that her pills have been ground into a paste, mixed with a hand cream. Linda dons the prescribed glove and works the pharmaceutical ointment into Marlou's forearm. All the jokes about people taking, or not taking, their meds flutter about my head like bats.
I am so shot full of weariness that I fear for my balance, and in the end, ask Linda to help me get my legs under the sheet. I sink into slumber. Every few hours, Marlou emits a gasp, then a telltale bubbling sound and I yell for Linda. One of us hits the 'up' button on the electric bed, the retching begins, then the wiping and the toweling, and the lowering of the bed and the return to sleep. I know this isn't as bad as sleeping in a foxhole at the Somme, but it's a good first step.
The nursing assistant who arrives in the morning keeps telling Marlou that her stethoscope is cold. Sorry, she says, again and again. Marlou's belly is distended. Cancer, if one thinks about it, is utterly purposeless and self defeating. It kills its host, just as mistletoe kills the tree, but the latter manages to cast off a few seeds, and cancer casts off nothing. Watching the nurse, considering this appeal to cellular reason, I have the fantasy that one can get through to the cancer cells, talk to them, maybe all of us work with a counselor. The nurse is raising her head, looking to one side, now considers something and motions me outside the bedroom. She shuts the door.
I ask her what she has heard in Marlou's belly. Nothing, she explains. That is the problem. The normal sounds of digestion, even the very faint sounds of the weak and infirm, are absent. She suspects that Marlou's digestive system is now totally blocked. It's like a Colorado River dam with no spillway. Everything is backing up. That's why Marlou is vomiting so often. What happens now, I ask? The nurse asks me to bear with her, places her laptop on our dining room table, taps away, opens her mobile phone and chats with someone. I lie down next to Marlou, Linda raises my feet to the bed. I wonder if the nurse can order a few meds for me. Anything will do. Pastel pills with colors that don't clash, maybe in a dispenser with a shaker top. I fall asleep. The phone rings, and Linda in the kitchen answers. I fall asleep again.
Waking, I remember a moment from summer camp, at least 50 years ago. A counselor, a college biology student, stood in the summer heat examining a beetle. It was a large bug, one of the common black variety, but the kids had found an odd specimen. The beetle had been lying on its back, twitching. Its front legs waved faintly in the air. Its back legs did not exist. The creature's abdomen had disappeared. Half of the thorax had been hollowed out, nothing but the shell left around its posterior. Ants might have eaten half of it away, the counselor speculated. Somehow, the front portion remained alive. How could this be? Well, the counselor said, it was true that the legs moved a bit. But was this insect truly alive? He prodded at the beetle's front limbs, watching how they faintly flexed, seemingly fascinated by his own question.
* * *
Leviticus, Torah scholars will tell you, may seem about as interesting as a GE dishwasher manual, but there's more than meets the eye. True, the text goes on about ritual slaughter at mindnumbing length, but the priests saw something in the observed death of animals. They saw life. In studying the agony and the mystery at the conclusion of existence, they learned something about its start. Which, I am thinking, does explain one of the small miracles unfolding around me.
People keep returning to help Marlou. Most eventually suffer some sort of burnout, but that is to be expected. New ones keep taking their place. The last film Marlou saw was 'The Man Who Came to Dinner', from the classic play. An irascible Broadway columnist on lecture tour slips on ice and convalesces in a Midwest family's home. He can't seem to leave. The family can't get rid of him. And so it is with our helpers. They come from some distance. They see a friend in great distress and pain, and though the hours and days must be emotionally exhausting, no one seems to reject the experience. All keep coming back until they no longer can. And why? It is hard to say, but like the ritual priests and their slaughter, everyone seems to be getting closer to life.
Liz has returned from Los Angeles, replacing Linda. In a spontaneous moment, I ask her about getting this dying thing under control. What does she think about assisted suicide? Liz, like everyone else who has flocked to Marlou's bedside, does not bat an eye. It's a logical question, she says. Something to think about, naturally. As for Marlou, she would not go for it, Liz is almost certain. And what about me? Would I?
The package arrives late, via special courier, and I have to sign for it about a dozen times. The carton sits in the dining room. Marlou's parents eyeball the thing, note the 'must refrigerate' lettering on the side and worry if we shouldn't shove the entire box in the fridge. I ignore this and retreat to my office.
Within a few moments I will issue a general edict that everyone in our home must be refrigerated for several hours before anything else can transpire. I laugh privately and heartily for a good 10 seconds before the reality of bodies and refrigeration hits me. And where is the fucking nurse?
He arrives at 11 PM full of apologies and wanting any real explanation. He opens the carton and goes about assembling the morphine pump. It takes half an hour for the thing to finally be up and beeping. The nurse places the pump switch in Marlou's hand. I place my own hand on her hand. Liz hits the light switch, and another day has ended. By dawn, having slept and not rested, another nurse is on the scene. She has been eyeballing Marlou's nocturnal button pushing, correlating that data with the machine's setting for the release of morphine, and has a question. Would Marlou like to up the dose?
In the morning warmth, for spring has arrived, Marlou listens. She says 'no' to the nurse. I roll my wheelchair into the office and shut the door. The nurse follows. She is a young woman, but not averse to hanging out with death and dying, so I suspend my judgment and bite my tongue. I tell her, in as diplomatic terms as I can manage, that when I see my wife lying on her side recovering from another bout of vomiting, I don't like what emanates from her eyes. It is something beyond sadness, even resignation. It is that look of life knowledge that one sees in the eyes of concentration camp victims. And there is more, I tell the nurse. Marlou's breathing has changed overnight. She gasps, sucks in air in desperate gulps.
Marlou is not in pain, the nurse tells me. You are in pain, she adds, but not your wife.
I let the nurse tend to Marlou, head outside to check on the lettuce seedlings and find that the latter have moved to lettuce adolescence. The sun splashes against my face. I need a mission. I decide to roll to the bank. Incredibly, scores of local constituents are rolling my way, clutching steaming cups of Peet's. Sure enough, the coffee place has reopened. Huge fans whir inside. One of my neighbors tells me that the place had a close call. The entire building almost went up in smoke, but now it's in business again. The air conditioning system has shut down, and there's no heat. But the fans will keep the air moving. It's an improvisation, but Peet's is moving and I am moving and everything will keep moving until it stops.
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