1. The morning was the middle of the night. Mom and I bundled ourselves out of her condo, she with her red paisley cane, me with my overstuffed backpack. We were quiet as we got on the highway and quiet when we reached the city streets. In a few hours, they would burn little bits of her heart with a tiny electric torch. The knowledge was enough to keep us mute.
2. At the hospital, I didn’t recognize anything. I remembered orange cones and big white arrows. Instead, a new road curved, sleek and grey as an eel. We’d circled the lot twice when a man walked up and motioned me towards the right lane.
“Just park there and leave your car,” he said. “I’ll get it.”
Only then did I see the short signpost on the corner, its lettering tastefully small: Valet.
3. In the pre-op room, Mom wore a dark blue gown. Her lipstick was bright against her otherwise bare face. The electrophysiologist wore light blue scrubs and a fleece jacket, the winter uniform of hospital staff everywhere. He spoke to us with his eyes held fast to his phone, searching for images. He wanted to show us how close the esophagus was to the heart, he said. How easy it was to burn through one tissue into the other.
“It used to be a problem,” he said, “but now we have a temperature gauge going the whole time, and we put you on medicine for at least two weeks afterwards. Any questions?”
But what were we supposed to ask? He seemed to have it all in hand.
After he left, my mother said, “That’s the most he’s spoken to me the entire time I’ve known him.” Her head dropped back against the pillow. Wires snaked from her chest and arms.
“Did you understand what was going to happen today?” I asked.
She closed her eyes. “Not really.”
4. The nurse anesthetist came in next, his scrubs and fleece a different blue than the electrophysiologist had worn. He shuffled from foot to foot, a boxer taking stock.
“Okay, ma’am, what’s your name, and what are we doing here today?” he asked, his words all riding on a single breath.
And Mom was at attention suddenly, a student eager for the pop quiz.
After a second, he too pulled out his phone. “I’m just checking your records here. Looks like you’ve had surgery before.”
He thumbed through the archive of intervention, his eyes on her history as we watched from the bed.
5. In the recovery room, Mom’s lips were chapped and swollen from the intubation. I found a tube of lanolin in my backpack and dabbed some on, careful not to press into the deep purple bruise on her upper lip. The ointment, meant for breastfeeding nipples, was thick and tacky like glue. It made her mouth as glossy as a magazine.
“Oh, she’s got her makeup on,” the nurse chirped the next time she came in. Mom, still caught in anesthetic sleep, gave a small smile.
6. In the early evening, Mom was transported by wheelchair to the hospital entrance. I followed with my backpack and her cane. A clerk stood by the door, and on the wall behind her, keys hung from little hooks in straight rows. Seeing them, I thought I should have gotten a ticket from the valet that morning, that that was how we’d done it before. Out the window, I saw our car, still sitting there at the head of the line.
I walked over to the clerk at her desk. “I don’t have a ticket,” I said, then pointed out the window beside her. “But that’s our car right there.”
She looked at the car, then at me, and her eyebrows rose in two disapproving arcs. “So that was you?”
“He told me to leave the car, and he would get it,” I explained.
“He told me he told you to wait.”
I nodded eagerly then. I would be the good student now. “He probably did. It was early; I was nervous.”
Ten minutes later, the hospital police walked up. They asked my mother’s name and checked my license photo against my face. They’d been notified that morning that a car had been abandoned, its keys on the seat like a theft waiting to happen.
Meg Sniderman lives in East Tennessee and works as a nurse practitioner with people living with HIV. Her work has been published in The American Journal of Nursing and The Journal for Nurse Practitioners.
