by Lara Murnik
Boarding:
The Woman was already dying when she was diagnosed with another lethal illness, bad news coming in as waves. She sat in the hospital bed, skin yellowed like the fingertips of a smoker, stretched and wishing to burst with the excess fluid in her system; she had been taking on water for many years. There was only so much she could hold. A horrible string of personal disasters, ranging from divorce, menopause, and addiction broke the Woman. That level of stress would probably drive anyone to drink. What better way to kill your sorrows than to drown them? People say that drowning is peaceful anyways. Everything catches up to you, and her choices reduced her down to a living, bloated corpse.
The Woman lay in this hospital bed, thinking that she would die here, finally figuring out that she too, not just her incessant pain, would be engulfed by the ocean of her own making. The Woman, seeing the end and realizing she was not prepared, begin to write a “Last Will and Testament” on a crumpled-up envelope from a bill long overdue, hastily planning out where her few material objects would go once she was officially gone. She sat alone in this cold and sterile room, desperately struggling between wanting to be with her children, to have companionship in her final moments, and not wanting her children to see her disfigured and dying. She chose the latter. She’d put them through enough already.
The Visit:
A friend came into her room –she was a doctor– and the Woman was not her patient, but the Doctor stopped by to make sure the Woman was being adequately treated. The Woman had known the Doctor since she moved to New Hampshire. The Doctor had birthed both the Woman’s children, but she had not seen her in many years. The Doctor snatched the Woman’s medical records, with only the kind of confidence a doctor could muster and started reading her files. The Doctor, after a quick scan, looked up with a quizzical brow, scanning over the Woman with equal skepticism.
The Woman was too weak to say anything to the Doctor and just laid there as she watched the Doctor immediately plop onto the ground, and frantically flip through the pages of the Woman’s file while she mumbled to herself, “This doesn’t make sense…”
The Doctor, as quick as she came in was gone in a flash, brandishing the Woman’s file, ready for war. The Woman was not interested in her quirky friend, and instead, wished for the inevitable to finally finish her off.
“You have stage 4 liver failure…” a wispy male doctor, the Woman’s real doctor, had said in a strange tone, shifting his weight back and forth, clearly uncomfortable with the diagnosis.
The Woman stopped breathing, her throat instantly raw with emotion and her stomach rigid as if it was hit with a formative blow, but the Woman was expecting this. She had seen this same illness progress in her close friend and after looking in the mirror, seeing tired yellow eyes staring back at her once more, she knew her fate was sealed.
The Woman held back the tears in her eyes, cleared her throat and asked, “How long do I have?”
“Four days.”
The Hurricane:
The Woman watched as a small parade of doctors marched into her cramped hospital room. The Woman was too tired and waterlogged from her treatment to greet the party as they arrived, and watched silently as they all started talking as if the Woman wasn’t even there.
“Look at her!” the Doctor began as she pointed ardently towards the Woman, now only one day away from her proposed expiration date, “These symptoms do not match the diagnosis!”
“W-well I made the diagnosis from the ultrasound,” her mousy male doctor stuttered. “That’s a better marker anyways…”
“Perhaps that is true,” the Doctor began, like a spider weaving her web, “if it’s for the right patient.” The male doctor was furious, his face becoming hot and red as he tried to defend himself, shifting his weight back and force, uncomfortable.
“That’s a rather serious accusation to be making,” started the Administrator calmly, cutting off the rambling defense of the male doctor, “What is your proof?”
“Aside from the obvious lack of correlation between her symptoms and her diagnosis,” the Doctor said firmly, “the patient in this ultrasound is missing a kidney. She is not.” All the doctors then examined the ultrasound, looking back and forth between the image and the Woman, the male doctor becoming more and more pale. He realized the gravity of his error.
As quickly as this group stormed in, they all rushed off, in a hope to find the dying man who was wrongfully told he would live. The Woman, exhausted from this strange encounter, closed her eyes for what felt like a second but was awakened by the Doctor hours later, who was squatting next to her bed, their faces inches apart. The Doctor was stroking the Woman’s thin, golden hair.
“Your old doctor mixed your file up with another patient,” the Doctor said in a low, soothing, motherly voice. “I’m taking over your case. What you’re suffering from is completely curable. You’re going to live…”
O’ Captain My Captain:
The Woman woke up the next morning instantly feeling much better, even though three days earlier she was told that today would be her last. She looked down at her yellow hands to find them two sizes smaller than the day before, the uncomfortable pressure finally subsiding as she slowly deflated. Each passing hour the Woman noticed an improvement, feeling the crushing weight, which pulled her down, keeping her tethered to the hospital bed, slowly lightening up.
The Woman felt cool tears streaming down her warm, pink cheeks, the only place on her body that wasn’t yellow. She had begged God to save her, despite their tumultuous relationship over the years. Growing up Catholic in the 1960’s was riddled with scandal. The Woman’s brother, an altar boy in the heart of all the scandal, still is not able to speak of the transgressions that occurred against him, causing their whole family to turn their back on the church altogether. During her divorce, she cried to God to save her marriage, to protect her children, and prevent her family from ruin, but her cries were unanswered. She begged God to help her with her growing addiction to alcohol, reaching her hand out to him, desperately pleading to be pulled back as she walked off the curb into the unknown. Since that fateful moment many years ago, she has been falling deeper and deeper into this void, forsaken and forgotten.
Finally arriving at the third stage of death and dying, bargaining, she turned to God one last time, offering all that she could to save her life. The Woman promised to go to church again, to stop drinking, to volunteer her remaining time to helping others; she promised anything that she could think of, fully aware that this selfish God would likely continue to ignore her.
Yet, the day that was meant to be her last, her prayers were finally answered. “Better late than never…” she thought to herself with a laugh. The Woman glowed with the thought of all the life she had left to live, and was grateful for the second chance she had been given.
Eventually, with time, she began to regain her strength and could walk again, no longer collapsing to the ground, clutching her abdomen in pain. After a few more days, she went home to all her children, two humans, and one dog, feeling as if she had been rebirthed, like a phoenix rising from the ashes.
It wasn’t until several weeks that she noticed the numbness in her fingers and toes. She had been no stranger to numbness. She turned to alcohol to help numb her pain for many years. However, having been sober for the last several weeks, upholding her end of the bargain, she naively expected this numbness to leave. She had no idea what was next to come.
Titanic:
The Woman sat in the neurological office, anxiously bouncing her leg and chewing on her fingernails, fingers numb now to the knuckles. Her numbness was slow to progress, but it was persistent. Each day, the changes occurred imperceivably. Yet, each passing week, the difference was alarming. It was like watching the sunset on the horizon. Before you know it, the sun has set and you’re in the dark.
This was the Woman’s third specialist she had seen regarding her current issue and was desperately hoping that the third doctor would be the charm. She was sitting on the crunching, paper exam table, the only seat that over the last 50 years of her life that never failed to make her feel like the scared child that she was. She had undergone a battery of neurological testing over the last several weeks, each one producing more questions than answers, and leading her farther down this rabbit hole. For now, she was waiting, as patiently as any patient can be, for the neurologist to come in and explain that she needed more tests like they always did.
The Neurologist, sporting a receding hairline and a crooked smile, popped his balding head in her room after a long while. He closed the door slowly behind him and stood awkwardly against the wall, collecting himself.
“I know we have been searching for answers for several weeks at this point…” the Neurologist started as he sat down in his swivel stool, “and although it is not very clear what is happening, your worsening symptoms point to Multiple Sclerosis, MS.”
The Woman nodded, not really understanding what that meant. The Neurologist, sensing this, continued, “MS is an autoimmune disease, basically your immune system is attacking your nerve cells and we don’t know why.”
“What does this mean for me?” the Woman screeched out, fully realizing the gravity of the situation, “So I’m just going to lose feeling altogether eventually?”
“MS presents differently in everyone. It could creep farther up your limbs or it could stop for years. We don’t really know,” the Neurologist explained plainly, “but that’s not our major worry with this disease.” The tone of the Neurologist changed, like a fortune teller stumbling upon some horrible news. “Our biggest concern with this disease is the cognitive decline that could happen, and what that would mean for you going forward.”
The Neurologist quickly turned to his computer. “This is a normal brain,” the Neurologist said, pointing to the plump and full side view of a brain on the monitor, “and this is your brain,” he said, switching to a much smaller, wrinkled brain that looked too small for the big cavity that it was in. “You already have a significant amount of atrophy for your age, and we worry that cognitive decline is imminent.”
The Woman was frozen to her chair. She wanted more tests, more opinions. She’d been mistaken for another patient before, surely this was another mistake. The Woman was smart. She read at least a book a week and graduated from Harvard. She could handle the physical debilitation. She was already adapting to life with numb hands and feet, but to lose her mind too? That life would be unbearable and she wouldn’t want to continue living like that.
“Is there anything we can do to stop it?” the Woman pleaded, a tear slowly rolling down her face despite her best efforts.
“We will prescribe medications, which should slow the progression, but aside from that, all we can do is watch and wait.” The Neurologist reached out, giving a reassuring squeeze of the Woman’s hand before quickly retreating.
The Neurologist stood up and the Woman knew that she had outstayed her welcome and began collecting her things to go.
“And don’t forget,” the Neurologist called out to the Woman as she walked down the long, white hallway to the exit, “avoid stress, stress will only make your symptoms progress!” The Neurologist flashed a quick smile and dashed off the opposite direction to the next patient.
“Yeah right…” the Woman mumbled underneath her breath.
Treading Water:
Over ten years later, the Woman sits on a blue leather couch in her daughter’s apartment. The Woman’s hair still blonde, defying nature through chemistry, and her facial wrinkles a little deeper than the last time her daughter saw her. The stress of both parents passing pressing those lines deeper into the Woman’s tissue. The Woman was tearing up, but pretending that she was fine, her English heritage shining through.
“I used to be smart,” the Woman said collecting herself, “and now I can’t even keep my thoughts straight. I’m losing my mind like my father!” The Woman started to sob, the deep cries rolling through her body like waves crashing on the shore.
“This is all my fault,” she said in between sobs. “This is my penance for being such a horrible mother, for being nothing more than a lousy drunk!” The Daughter tried to comfort her, but the Woman recoiled away, her pride protecting her from any further vulnerability.
“But I will never get to the point my father was when he died, where I don’t recognize my own children anymore,” the Woman began with an ominous laugh. “I’d kill myself long before that point…”
The Woman is resigned to her fate, marching like a soldier into a battle that was lost before it even begun. She has tried to go to support groups, for people that are in the same boat as her, trying to live with MS, but she does not gravitate towards these ‘pity parties.’ Seeing people, horribly ravaged by the disease, barely able to move or speak, only scares her, reminding her of what hell is to come.
“I jumped ship a long time ago,” the Woman said blankly. “What is the point in staying on a sinking ship anyways?”
The Woman started drinking again, in both an effort to drown her sorrow and herself before her disease progressed too far, before she was too gone to do anything about it. There was no longer a point in upholding her end of the bargain she made years ago if her savior was more like a cruel Genie than a merciful God- be careful what you wish for! So here she is, treading water despite her best efforts, knowing fully well that doing so is not sustainable, knowing fully well that she will eventually drown. At least this way though, she will control her destiny rather than stand by and let it take her.
