The bright, white lights overhead began to spin, and the room swirled pieces of Greg, real estate agent, and unfamiliar house as I lost consciousness. I was sitting on the kitchen counter of a rent house we were inspecting, when I blacked out. Greg caught me just in time to save me from a head-first collision with the hard, gray tiles underfoot. I came to, in a cold sweat, on the floor, feeling disoriented and wondering what in the world had happened. When I looked up, I saw Greg's kind eyes filled with worry, and I tried, for his sake, to answer his first aid questions coherently.
Greg sped the kids to our friends' house and rushed me to the big public hospital close to his work. I spent the next two days on painkillers, recovering from a mystery illness. Greg stayed with me as much as he could, but he had three little girls and work to balance with my hospital stay, so I mainly rested while he ran himself ragged taking care of both his responsibilities and mine. Doctors came and went from my curtain with puzzled faces until finally, a young female doctor and her supervisor pegged my diagnosis, and, after my sixth round of antibiotics, the pain and infection in my kidneys started to subside. After the mystery was solved, "Froggie" the nurse (yes, he did look like a big frog) wheeled me to the long-stay emergency unit. As the pain in my body abated, my mind cleared enough for me to hear the conversations around me in my new, shared room.
The nurse walked in and I heard him address the elderly Indian man in the bed next to me, "Good morning. It's time for a bath!" "No," the man calmly answered in a thick accent. Apparently, judging by the aroma of the man, he was not used to morning baths, or maybe regular baths at all. He was in pain, and being sent home anyway, but not before he scented his sheets and the room he shared with me and two other patients with the pungent smell of curry and body odor.
The Indian man was old and frail, and I liked him at once. He didn't speak much English, not enough to really describe his pains adequately, but certainly enough to evade a bath. When the social worker came to see about how to get him home, she discovered that he had no one to pick him up, so she offered him bus fare. He wasn't satisfied with the offer and began to bargain with her, third-world style. I think she was caught completely off-guard by eastern bartering techniques, so eventually, the little Indian man went home in just the cab that he wanted. ( I think his bargaining chip was the threat of staying long enough to scent not just the long-stay emergency ward, but the whole first floor.) I wondered why he had no one to pick him up, and what kind of home received him from his cab.
After the Indian man left, and after the linens were changed and disinfected, a woman came to stay for a few hours. The middle-aged, soft-spoken woman had been battered by her husband after she drank too much the night before. The kind staff at the hospital had bandaged her cuts, but nothing they could do in the emergency room could heal a heart damaged by 18 years of marriage to an abusive bully, or a mind distressed by the alcohol she used to escape from him. She laid in the bed, weighing, out-loud with the social worker on duty, her options upon leaving. She didn't want to go home to her husband, but the prospect of starting again at a women's shelter, without the help of the family who had disowned years before, frightened her. She was trapped between two terrible options, and she didn't know where to go when she went "home". I fell asleep before she left, so I don't know what option she chose, whether she decided that home would be the terror she knew, or the fright of the unfamiliar.
After the Indian man and the battered woman left, it was my turn. I didn't feel completely well, but I was going home anyway. I called Greg from the hospital phone and twenty minutes later, our white Prado bounced into the drive as and he and a carload of little girls excitedly awaited "mommy". I stiffly walked down the sterile, still, green halls to the fresh, windy air of the circle drive and slowly climbed into the car while the noise of elation and the smell of crackers and lip gloss enveloped me.
I sometimes I take for granted what I have in Greg and in my girls, but I shouldn't. I have a man who will catch me before I hit the floor, a man who can carry both his responsibilities and mine, a man with kind eyes who would never hurt me. I have a home filled with estrogen and drama, with costumes and crumbs, with three little glittery girls that missed me desperately while I was gone. I was still pretty sick when I left; I was still in a lot of pain; but unlike some of my roommates at the hospital, I had family to meet me in the windy circle drive and love to welcome me back to my life. Let me never forget the blessings of my home.
