Whatever Held

The thing I remember is the doctor’s face above me.
The alarms were going off. My heart had been racing with fever for several hours, and my blood pressure was dropping, and I looked up at him and said, I feel weird. Which is such a small, stupid, insufficient thing to say when your body is quitting. It was the only language I had left.
And he looked down at me and he was clearly frightened.

That’s the part that stayed. That, and the alarms. I still have those. The sound of them didn’t leave when I did. It’s the face of the man whose entire job was to be the calm one, the one who knows what to do, the one you’re supposed to be able to hand your terror to, looking down at me with his own terror plain on him, while everything in that room screamed.

In that moment nobody was holding the floor. There was just a scared doctor and a scared woman and all that noise.

I was alone. No one had come with me. No one was waiting outside.
I thought I was dying. I want to be honest about that. I was certain, lying there, that this was the end of me.

And what I thought about, the thing that came up out of me and would not leave, was that I couldn’t go yet. Not because I wasn’t ready. Not because I was afraid. Because my kids needed money and support, and there was nobody else to provide it. That’s what surfaced in a woman who believed she was dying, the accounting of who would take care of her children if she did.

I didn’t die, (obviously).

And then, almost immediately, someone from the hospital came in to talk to me about my advance directives. I had just been sure I was leaving this world. The alarms had barely stopped. And here came a person with paperwork about what should happen if I couldn’t speak for myself, what to do with my body, what to do with my life, who decides. Alone. Nobody’s hand to hold while I read it. Nobody in the chair beside the bed. Just me, still shaking from the certainty that I was dying, being handed the forms for exactly that.

When they wheeled me out, the nurse walked alongside me and told me how scared they had been. She meant it kindly. I know she did. That’s the thing, nobody in that hospital was cruel to me. She was telling me something true, something she probably thought was a compliment- you gave us a scare. It was bad. We were frightened for you. But nobody said you’re safe now. Nobody said you were strong, and you made it. Nobody said let me call someone for you. They told me how scared they were.
And I took it. I sat in that wheelchair and received their fear, on my way out the door, and carried it home along with everything else I was already carrying. Because home was where I went. Home was a ghost of a woman and three children who still needed a mother.

I was so weak. Hollowed out, wrung, barely a person. And there was no version of the next morning in which somebody else got the kids up. There was no version where a meal appeared without me making it. There was no one to take a shift, because there was no one. Not one person offered to help. I don’t say that with bitterness anymore. I say it because it’s the fact of that time, and because I think people imagine that when something like this happens to a woman with three young kids, somebody comes.

Someone brings a casserole. Someone takes the children for a weekend. Someone sits with her.

Nobody came. I got up, and I did it, because the alternative was that it didn’t get done.

Here’s what I understand now that I couldn’t have said then. The sepsis nearly killed me, and that isn’t the part I carry. What I carry is that in the
worst hour of my life, in a room full of professionals, every single person showed me their fear and not one of them held mine. The doctor was frightened. The paperwork was about dying. The nurse told me how scared they’d been.

And I was the only adult in the room carrying it. Same as I’ve been carrying it in every room since.