Jackhammer

Saturday morning around 11:00 Fred looked at me calmly and said, “We need to go to the emergency room.” Then he said, “You should probably walk the dog before we go.” Come again? “We’ll be there a long time,” he reasoned, “he’ll need to go.” It seemed quicker to take the dog out than to have a conversation about why walking the dog and going to the emergency room shouldn’t happen in the same sentence, so I gave Fred an aspirin, dashed Rusty up the street to the corner and back, and then headed off to Rust Medical Center, way out on the west side, to start our Memorial Day weekend. Fred was short of breath and having pain in his left lung that was spreading into his back, neck, and shoulder. Apparently it had started the night before and he hadn’t wanted to say anything. “I thought I could get to Tuesday,” he explained. He was trying to “get to Tuesday” so I wouldn’t miss the trip I had planned; I was heading to Chicago to visit my best old friend and go to my 30^th college reunion at Notre Dame.

Two women hooked Fred up while, just behind a curtain, another woman was nursing a crying baby. There was nothing HIPAA-friendly about this set-up. I could hear everything the woman and her doctors talked about, as she could listen to everything the women who were sticking little polka dot monitors all over Fred’s chest and on his arms and legs were telling him.

In short order, Fred was plugged in, pricked for blood, and x-rayed. The nurse wound us through hallways cutely named things like “X-ray Avenue” and “Radiation Road” and finally ended up in a decent size room with all sorts of random equipment lying around. It felt a little more like being in a garage full of your dad’s old tools than in a hospital room.

We settled in, and Paul, our nurse (nice touch, Universe!) was in and out with questions, information, and an empathetic ear. Things went on like this for a good while, and then, out of nowhere, Fred got dramatically worse.

Fred and I have been married for nearly twenty-four years, and I’ve seen him in pain a few times. Fred in pain looks a lot like most people when they are not in pain. When the lawnmower jammed some twenty years ago and Fred reached under to remove whatever was blocking it, he walked calmly to the back door hiding his bloody hand, and said, just like he did today, “We need to go to the emergency room.” The emergency room doctor that time sent us directly to a plastic surgeon, who let me stay to watch him do the skin graft. We left his office with painkillers that Fred wouldn’t take because we had tickets to see Paul McCartney in Las Cruces that night. It was a great concert. The only nod Fred made to his pain was sleeping in the back seat on the long drive home. He never did take the Percocet.

A little more than a year ago Fred slipped on some ice and broke his ankle. Of course, we would never have known he had broken his ankle unless I had insisted, after a few days of watching him walk around almost normally while his ankle kept swelling, that he get an x-ray. He never even filled the prescription that time. He just doesn’t really acknowledge pain. (For the record, I am not that way. I am perfectly happy to be medicated and sleep through the worst of it.)

So, in the middle of the day when Fred’s pain spiked to the point that he was crying out and writhing, I was terrified. His blood pressure was spiking and his blood oxygen, flashing on the monitor above his head, kept dipping below 90% and causing the machine to ping. I felt like people in hospital garb should be running into the room and doing something, anything, to relieve the pain and fix whatever was broken. Unexpended adrenaline was humming in me, gathering my attention to one focal point, Fred’s ragged breathing. Painfully in and painfully out, for what seemed like forever.

Meanwhile Paul the nurse was checking in with the doctor and had gotten an order for morphine. He pumped the syringe into Fred’s IV port. After fifteen minutes (enough time, apparently, for intravenous morphine to take affect), Fred’s pain hadn’t subsided at all. Paul gave him another shot, and then wheeled him off for a CT angiogram. I paced around the room waiting for them to come back. Eventually they rolled in, Fred’s pain still untouched by the morphine. Paul went off to ask the doctor to order another round, and this time Fred’s breathing eased a little, but a half hour later, the pain roared back. The fourth shot seemed to be the charm. Fred finally drifted off, and I waited for the test results while I watched him breathe.

Somewhere lost in a box in a closet I have a picture of my father. He is leaning on a jackhammer, wearing goggles, kneepads, and a sweatshirt, and he is smiling. He had rented the jackhammer when hairline cracks appeared in the garage floor in the house on Marvle Valley. Being my father, he didn’t reach for the yellow pages. He went to the library, did some research, and decided to fix the floor himself.

Apparently, the first step is to make the cracks bigger. My father rented the jackhammer and went to town. He turned all those hairline cracks into little gullies, which grew into empty riverbeds. By the time he stopped, the garage looked like the desert mesa behind my house in Albuquerque, cracked with deep arroyos after a long summer without rain.

It turned out my father got a kick out of jackhammering. “Everyone should try this,” he kept saying. I pictured him riding his jackhammer like a revved up pogo stick while my mother laughed and, at his urging, took a turn.

Fred is resting easier while we wait for the test results. Last night, I was writing a different essay. It was about the end of the school year. We graduated the seniors Friday morning, and I was thinking about how cool it is that as a teacher, I get two New Years reckonings every year. The year ends on December 31 just like it does for my non-teacher friends, but then it ends again in late May. And the thing I really like about the late May ending is that New Years Eve falls on May 27 when the seniors graduate, but New Year’s Day won’t happen until August 17 when the kids come back to school. Instead of a few hours of champagne-tinted reflection about the troubles and glories of the past year, I have months to examine my life, my craft, the state of my relationship with the world.

I wrote that whole essay Friday night, but I decided to let it sit. I was worried that it was too sappy, too self-indulgent. I had started writing it after watching a video of two little girls and a horse dancing in a field. An old friend had posted it on Facebook, and in one of those sappy, sentimental moments that I’m sometimes prone to, I felt like that video held everything I needed to know about the world. (If you’ve ever cried during a Subaru commercial, you know exactly what sort of mood I was in.)

In that essay I told a story about one Friday afternoon when the middle school kids were celebrating Spirit Day. My friend Jinni told me she was going to be singing karaoke with the kids that afternoon in our black box theater. She was going to be singing with a girl I’ll call Hope, although her real name suits her better, and she wanted to know if I wanted to come sing with them.

I met Hope on the day my brother died. I had gone into school that morning feeling sad, of course, and more than a little lost. I found Jinni to tell her what had happened, and Hope was nearby and saw us both begin to cry. She put her hand on my arm, tumbling out of herself into compassion. This little girl exploded into my life that day like the first bird singing in the morning. All day, she kept reaching out to me. The next day she brought me a card. Now when we see each other on campus we run toward each other and exchange hugs.

On this Friday afternoon I’m remembering, I headed into the theater. The middle school kids are bouncing around like popcorn kernels in hot oil. Jinni, Hope, and I are standing at the microphone in front of a friendly crowd. We’re singing “Let it Be,” hamming it up, swaying back and forth. The kids in the risers start swaying, too, and then they take out their cell phones, waving their lights back and forth and singing with us. When the night is cloudy there is still a light that shines on me. It’s a horse dancing with two little girls in a field. It’s a hokey and beautiful moment.

Sometime after Fred’s fourth shot of morphine, Dr. Emmel, a tiny, soft-spoken man, came in with the test results. “Good news,” he said. He’d ruled out a heart attack, blood clots, and a host of other scary sounding problems. “It looks like pleurisy,” he said, which sounded like a disease out of Little House on the Prairie, or something someone’s great Aunt Rose came down with in 1917. It turns out its an inflammation in the lining of the lungs that hurts like hell and just has to run its course. They gave us a prescription for more painkillers, pointed us toward Departure Drive, and sent us out into the late afternoon. The sun was shining and the world had no idea that we’d been there and back again today.

After my father created his desert moonscape in the garage, he swept out the debris and made the furrows clean. Then he mixed up some concrete patch, troweled it in, and smoothed it over. Fred felt well enough by Tuesday morning for me to get on a plane and head to my 30^th college reunion at Notre Dame. On Saturday afternoon, I run into a few old friends whose daughter has spent the last week in the hospital. I recognize their cracked open look, that bewildered way you feel when one foot is standing firmly in the grass in the world you know and the other is resting on nothing more solid than prayer.

I’m just about a week into my second new years eve of the year, and I’m thinking again about how these funny things we call ourselves are bodies, sets of complex interlocking moving parts, mysterious in both their fragility and their resilience. I’m thinking about how love is both the thing that jackhammers you open and the thing that fills the furrows. I’m sitting in my friend Kathy’s kitchen, typing. In a few minutes I’ll head to the airport, start my journey home. Fred will pick me up at the airport in Albuquerque, both of us for the time being standing on solid ground. I’ll walk into his arms, grateful, one more time, that I’ve reached home.

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