Two Funeals and a Wedding: Chap 19

My first morning in the hospital meant my first hospital meal. Helen and I were both put on a clear liquid diet, so for breakfast we each got some kind of broth. Yummm.
After eating our gruel, Helen got of out of bed and started walking around our room rolling her IV pole with her everywhere she went. I was jealous and amazed at her agility. After all, her surgery was only a few days ago, and she was up and about while I could barely move.
Visiting hours began a little after breakfast and Helen’s entourage started to show up, thus beginning the day’s activities. About mid-morning the flowers started arriving. Lots of them, I figured that maybe my father or sisters might send something, and they did, but I also received flowers from other people as well. There were flowers from an Aunt and Uncle, and flowers from some of my friends and Mark’s boss too. My side of the room was bursting with color and scent. My love of fresh flowers is widely known because of a story that I like to tell. It is about an event that happened when Mark and I were first engaged.
Before I tell the story I have to say something about my husband. There are women who complain that the man in their life is not romantic, this is a complaint that you will never hear from me. Because my story will show that not only is Mark a romantic, but he is very resourceful was well.
When Mark and I met he was working as a sexton in a church. Among his duties were to set up and clean up the sanctuary for Weddings and Funerals.
At weddings and funerals tradition dictates that the church sanctuary be decorated with flowers. Once the event is over, there are usually more flowers than people who want to take them home. The brides and grooms are off on their honeymoon so they don’t want them, and half of their families had come from out of town so they can not take the flowers home. The same thing happens at funerals. If there are a lot of flowers, the family will take some of the arrangements to the burial site and some other arrangements home, frequently leaving the rest at the church saying something like:
"Why don't you give the flowers to avcharity." Most of the time the flowers are left in the church to decorate the sanctuary for Sunday service, then thrown out.
One weekend, Mark's church, it's minister, the organist and the sexton were very busy because there were two funerals and a wedding, a big wedding. There were a half a dozen large flower arrangements left behind and a few smaller ones too. Mark asked the minister if he could take them home and the minister was glad to get rid of them.
Using a key that I had given Mark, he brought the flowers into my apartment. When I came home my living room looked like a scene from a Fred Astair movie. The room was filled with six large gorgeous flower arrangements, some white and others bursting with color. There was a note that read:
"Any jerk can send a dozen roses." How can you not love a guy like that? So now for the second time in my life I found myself in a room surrounded by beautiful flowers.
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Mark came bursting into my hospital room excited:
“You will never believe who I just ran into at the hospital lobby!” I gave a few guesses that were wrong, then he continued,
“I ran into Beth from our first church, she was with her mother…ummm…”
“Doris” I state, I have always been better at remembering names then he has.
“That’s right, Doris.” Mark said. I remembered both women. It seemed so many years ago that Mark was assigned his first Church, and
we moved into our first home.
The first church that Mark was worked at was a small part-time Church whose minister was usually a student or a semi-retired minister. It was perfect place to start or end a career. We were there for four years and both of our daughters were born there. I have happy memories of the town and our time there. But no place was perfect and Beth had one of the ugliest divorces that I had ever seen. Beth left her husband of twenty years and he didn't want her to leave. The custody battle for their teenage daughter lasted until her 18th birthday when the daughter promptly told her father that she never wanted to see him again.
Later Beth met very nice man named Teddy, and his ex-wife made Beth's ex-husband look looked a saint. Eventually everything worked out ok. Beth and Teddy got married and lived happily ever after. That was until last year when Beth was diagnosed with “Breast Cancer”. Beth was a few steps ahead of me, so when Mark saw her and her mother in the hospital lobby he was updated on his old parishioners, and they had a long talk about her and my cancer and she wished me well.
So, Mark came into my hospital room with news of our old Church and friends. He told me about Beth's experience with a double mastectomy and reconstruction and how she was doing very well. It made both of us feel better. I introduced Mark to Helen and her guest. After a little while I told Mark that I was tired and I wanted to sleep for awhile. He told me that he would be back at dinnertime. I drifted in and out of sleep for the rest of the day. I only woke up when a nurse needed to check my vitals.
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I want to take a minute here a talk about the nurses. I have had many friends who were nurses, I just never really thought about what they did. I remember my old friend May-ling who worked with senior citizens. She told me that her job was to keep her patients as conformable as possible. And that is exactly what my nurses were doing for me. Trying to keep me conformable-in between the torture that is. The nurses worked in three shifts: day, night and overnight. Each group had its own personality. The day shift was mostly female, mostly white and mostly over forty, it looked like the mom and grandma shift. I called my day shift head nurse, Nurse Patton. She is best describe as a tough old broad. She was in her late fifties or early sixties, gray hair and a strong as an ox. She was a woman who ran a tight ship. Her movements were brisk and precise. She barged into a room, performed her duties, then moved on to the next patient.
Every two or three hours a nurse came in, took my blood pressure, my temperature, checked my hook-up to my IV and empty three drainage bags and my catheter bag and measured the contents. I sure that this was important, but I found it very weird.
At three in the afternoon the night shift came on. This shift was filled with younger people. Most of these nurses were in their twenties or early thirties. There was a greater racial mix, and this shift had the highest number of male nurses. Nurse Motorcycle Max (remember him?) worked this shift and he was in charge of my case at night.
The overnight shift I vaguely remember because I slept through most of their shift. A nurse did come into my room every few hours the check Helen’s and my vital signs. This shift seemed to be filled with woman, I’d say between the ages of thirty and sixty. The thing that struck me as odd was that most of these women were African American. I have no idea why, it just was.
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Back to my day, Motorcycle Max came into the room to check vital signs. This time his shirt was a solid color, but not the subtle blue or white that the other nurses wore, no Max had on a bright blue shirt that suited his personality. He was outgoing and very funny. The only problem was that my body hurt whenever he made me laugh. He did his job expertly, yet he always seemed to be having fun. I was feeling a little better by the time his shift started. That was until he told me that I had to sit in a chair for one hour after dinner. I asked him very politely:
“ARE YOU CRAZY!!!!???” He laughed, then said that he would be seeing me later.
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Mark came by at dinnertime, around 5:00 o’clock. He brought something for himself to eat and I had more clear broth. It wasn't exactly romantic, but it was nice to spend a little time alone with my husband, no kids, just us. Oh yea, and Helen and four or five of her closest friends.
I discovered that the combination of people, air freshener and flowers was to be too much for me, so I asked Mark to take some of the flowers home with him. He stayed for about an hour or so then left, flowers in tow.
Except for the fact that still I couldn't breath as well as I would have liked, I was feeling a little better. Then Max came by and told me it was time for me to sit in a chair. He stood on the left side of my bed, had me put my arm around his shoulders and helped me get out of bed. It was a s-l-o-w and painful process. He helped me get into a comfortable position, handed me one of my books called, Victory's Daughters, and left. At first I was in a lot of pain and I was very angry.
“How dare they treat me like this, these nurses are so cruel.” But as the hour progressed, I started feeling better. At the end of the hour, Max returned. He got me back in to the bed, another s-l-o-w and painful process. He made sure that I was ok, and checked on Helen. Strange, but I felt better after all the moving around. It was kind-of the feeling you get after a good workout, slightly in pain, tired, yet stronger.
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I drifted in and out of sleep for a few hours. When Max returned, he was carrying a container of blood, my blood. He told me that my surgery went so well that the surgeons did not need to use any of the blood that I had donated for the surgery. One of my doctors told Max to give me one of the containers of blood to help me help me feel better. Another nurse came into the room. At first I didn't know why.
I start thinking that I hadn’t gone though the surgery just to die of tainted blood. So I said in a joking way I told Max that I wanted to check the container to make sure that it was my blood they were planning to give me and not someone else's. I expected rolled eyes or a smug comment when I said that. Instead Max walked closer to me holding the container so that I could read it. He showed me where my name was and where content information was written on the container. Then said:
“More patients should ask to see what we are giving them, most don’t.” He walked back to the other nurse and I learned why she was in the room. The two of them had some kind of standard form that made them double check any blood before if was hooked up to a patient. Max read the information off the container and the other nurse checked it against the chart. I saw this procedure again when they gave me the second pint of my blood. It was a smart system. I am sure the double and triple checking has stopped what could have been mistakes.
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Finally visiting hours were over, and it would be two or three hours until a nurse would stop by the room. Time to relax, I turned on the TV. Remember there were TV's all over the hospital? They seemed to multiply like rabbits, and they were driving me crazy. But this time I had the control, I could turn on or off the television at will. I could control the channel and the volume.
It was strange how madding I found being trapped in a room where someone else controlled what I watched. I am not the only one who found watching someone else's choice of entertainment annoying. In his book “The Ayatollah in the Cathedral-Reflections of a hostage", former Iranian hostage Morehead Kennedy wrote about how the hostages were forced to watch bad American movies and pre-recorded TV shows over and over again. The person in charge of the hostage's entertainment never let them choose what show they could watch:
"…like the most saccharine Walt Disney films-most objectionable of all, Fantasy Island. And however tactfully we tried, we never did manage to turn his attention to some of the more interesting film cassettes piled up on the floor."
Loss of control about what was being shown on the waiting room TV's was what drove me crazy, not TV's in general. Now I was in control. The sound came from speakers in the hospital bed, so unless your roommate played their TV real loud, you only heard your own TV. I was afraid that Helen and I might have dueling TV’s but that didn't happen. First we both kept the sound of our TV's very low, when we realized that we were watching the same show we opened the curtains, watched TV, talked and started getting to know each other. She was really an interesting person.
I liked Helen, even though she was a needy person, she asked very little of me, until it was time to go to sleep. With exceptions (like major surgery) I have a difficult time falling asleep. I sleep mother-sleep. If you have children you know what I mean. If a convoy of trucks drives through my bedroom, Mark will sleep through it. If one of the children has a nightmare and started yelling, Mark would sleep through that too. If one of my kids has a slight cough I am wide-awake in a heart beat. I like my bedroom door closed and the room dark. Even so I hear everything.
So, when the show Law and Order was over Helen and I agreed to shut of the TV's and go to sleep. Since Helen could walk around, and I could not get out of bed by myself, I politely ask Helen to close the door. The light coming from the hallway was shinning right into my eyes. That was when I discovered that she was also a claustrophobic.
“No, no, no. The door must stay open.” She said. Well that’s ok for her, but my bed was on the side of the room that was next to the door and hall. Even at 11:00 p.m. there was plenty of activity in the hall. Helen closed the curtain that surrounded my bed which helped, but there was still too much light and too much noise for me too sleep. Helen closed the door-for about one minutes, then hobbled to the door and told me that
“The door HAS to be open.”
“All right, I’ll try to sleep.” I said, but I couldn't. This made Helen feel bad. We talked it out until we found a solution. She took some paper towel from the bathroom, got it a little wet, the placed the paper towel over my eyes. The dampness not only made the paper towel feel nice, but it made the towel stay in place. The wet paper towel blocked out just enough light so that I was finally able to fall asleep.