Hospital

He didn’t know what time it was, but he really didn’t care.  It was nighttime; that was close enough.  He could tell because of the very strange mix of light in his dim hospital room.  The blinking reddish neon glow of the city intruded through the dirty window, making dull red blinking stripes on the wall, mixing with the incandescent night-light his mother had brought and the fluorescence of the hallway through the glass panel in the door of his room.  There were also small green and yellow lights on one of the boxes that hung near his bed – the one with the tubes that were somehow connected to his ankle.  As far as he could tell, there were no lights at the other end of the tube that came out of his chest, or the ones from his arm.  He didn’t know what the chest or the ankle things were for, but he could see the blood in the other one.  He wondered if he bled a lot during the operation.  Next to the blood there was another jar with something that was almost clear, but a little yellow – like pee, but that didn’t make sense.

It was all those tubes that finally made him realize the operation was already over.  The last thing he remembered was counting backward from one hundred.  He was already very sleepy because they had given him something in the room.  He remembered being lifted from the bed onto a table they wheeled into the room.  He thought this was quite unnecessary because it was right next to the bed.  Right before they made him count, Dr. Koop came up to him with his green hospital stuff on and said, “All ready, sport?”  He supposed he answered, but he didn’t remember.  Dr. Koop was very cool.

He didn’t really mind all the tubes and stuff, since they took the one out of his nose, but he wanted to roll over and he couldn’t.  A few times a nurse came in and made him roll a little bit so she could give him a shot in his butt.  His mom said it was penicillin and would keep him from getting infected.  How could you get infected in a hospital?  Then the nurse raised the shiny metal bed rail with a clunk.  He had mixed feelings about that bed rail.  He didn’t know why he needed it since he couldn’t even roll over, and it made his bed seem like a crib.  He wasn’t a baby.  But he liked the feel of it.  It was cold and smooth and sometimes he held onto it until it warmed up in his hand, then he’d move on to a cooler spot and warm that up.

He reached out for it now and somehow it was reassuring.  He clenched it as tight as he could.  He wouldn’t do that if his mother were here in the room because she’d worry or think that something hurt.  She had a bed in a room down the hall and he could always tell when she was coming or going because of the noise of her heels on the tile floor.  She sounded different from anyone else.  She really did.  He had made a game of it, and by now he was never wrong.  He thought she was in his room most of the time, but he remembered her telling him that she was going to the lounge for a smoke.  She said they wouldn’t let her smoke in the room because of the oxygen tent.  He was always glad when she came back.

He supposed he was going to live.  Dr. Koop told him this was a new kind of procedure and was very complicated.  He said it would take about four hours. He wasn’t very scared.  Well he hoped it worked.  The operation he had a year ago hadn’t, and he was tired of all the tests and X-rays.  They had actually stuck a light on a stick down his throat to look at his esophagus.  Talk about gag!  And he had drunk way too much of that stuff that tasted like liquid chalk even if they did color it pink.  That was for the X-rays; it made things show up.

It wasn’t all bad.  When they came to Philadelphia, his mom and dad would take him to places like the Franklin Institute and the Liberty Bell.  And once they had come down so late at night that they stopped on the turnpike at the Horrid Johnsons for a snack and it was after midnight.  He hadn’t been up that late before and there he as, having a bite at Horrid Johnsons!

But he liked going home better.  They would always wake him up when the red Miners Bank sign came into view on the way down the hill.  That meant, “Almost home.”

Yeah, it had better work this time.  He hated the pain in his throat when he ate and throwin’ up all the time.  And he knew he was a lot skinnier than most of the rest of the kids in second grade.  He liked sports and was pretty good for his size, but he would have liked to be better.  Maybe some day he would be.

He was pretty sure he would live, but he remembered being waked up by a lot of noise and a bunch of people in his room and he heard words like “stable” and “blood pressure.”  He heard someone say, “Tell his mother he’s okey now.  She can come back in soon; we’ll get her.”  He didn’t know what it was all about, but he felt dizzy and sweaty at the same time.  He wondered if he had almost died.

When was that?  He couldn’t remember.  He wondered if his sisters were worried about him.  He thought they probably were.  And his mom said the kids in Mrs. Reese’s class had sent a whole box of cards and stuff.  He could see them all when they let him sit up, maybe tomorrow.  There was even one from the headmaster.

He was so tired though.  He felt like crying, but for some reason, he couldn’t. He was glad, at least, that he was in the hospital in January.  He hated January because it was so cold and his fingers and toes got numb and hurt.  December was cool because of Christmas, and February was his birthday, but January had no redeeming features. He liked playing in the snow and especially ice-skating, but he couldn’t stay out very long because of the cold.  Last year for his birthday, he had a bunch of kids over and his dad took everyone on a long hike through the woods.  The first hour was great, but then his fingers and toes started to hurt and by the time they got near home he was crying it hurt so much.  He didn’t think the other kids noticed because everyone had red faces and runny noses, and he had pulled the scarf right up over his face, but he was still mad.

Normally, he loved going on hikes up on the hill with his dad.  It didn’t happen very often, because his dad worked six days a week running the store, but it was fine when it did.  He was beginning to know his way around the hill better than his dad.  He could tell you three different routes to the pond, about two miles from the house as the crow flies, but as the crow flies definitely wasn’t the best way to get there.  It was a very neat pond – miles from anywhere, and it had big red carp and huge frogs and two snapping turtles.

So it was good that it was January.  He wondered if, when it started to warm up, he would be well enough to climb the hill again.