Case in point: her illness required a breathing tube and a ventilator. Her arterial blood gas - ABG for short - was checked daily. The ABG is one indicator of readiness to remove the breathing tube.
By Saturday, her ABG looked good enough for the tube to come out. She'd been unconscious for a week. Was my mom still in there? She's an old critical care nurse - the week before she fell ill, she had been lecturing nurses at a conference. Bizarrely, one of the topics she lectured on was ABG.
The doctor pulled the breathing tube. My dad and I stood on either side of her immobile form, holding her hands and silently hoping for old Mom. Before long, a hoarse whisper burst from her mouth like a line drive. She desperately tried to communicate with us for the first time in 7 days.
"Aaaa!" she croaked.
Well, Sister's name begins with an "A", so my dad asked if she was worried about Sister. Frowning, she violently shook her head. No. "Aaaa!" she said again.
Sister's daughter also has an "A" name. Mom babysits her. I knew she was worried about what had become of Niece while she was sick. My heart seized like an old engine to think of her inside her head, worrying about my niece. I reassured her that Niece was fine.
Again she furrowed her brow and shook her head. What was it, then?
"ABG!" she yelled. "What's my ABG?"
My dad and I laugh-cried with relief. It was the first emotion I'd seen from the old Marine since this all began. He is notoriously quiet. Reticent. He once, when I was a child, caused the overpass at the drive-thru window at the bank to collapse. He came home, told my mom he'd deposited her check, ate dinner with the family, showered, watched some TV, then oh-by-the-way the bank's drive-thru will be closed for awhile.
"Are they doing construction?" my mom asked.
That was when he told her what happened at the bank. He had collapsed the entire roof of the bank's drive-thru with his work truck. It wasn't the first thing he said when he got home, but to be fair, it was the second. Even though he told us 4 hours after he walked in the door.
He hadn't even cried the night before her breathing tube was pulled when we discussed the possibility that she may never come off the ventilator. What would happen? he asked me. I explained that she would need a tracheostomy and a PEG tube. The PEG would feed her since she can't eat if she has a tracheostomy.
"Wait a minute. My brother had a trach and he ate."
I needed clarification as my dad has three brothers. This particular brother is dead. I asked if he'd had the trach at the end of his life.
"No," my dad said. "He had it as a teenager. Played football with it. Joined the Army. He was in the Army two years before they closed it."
Up until that point, this conversation was probably the worst moment of my life. But to get a gem of information like that from my dad, unsolicited, is amazing. I wasn't really on board with the story - the Army took a guy with a big hole in his neck? - but I needed to know more. You know when you're drunk, once you start peeing, you can't stop? Well, that's how my dad is with talking, so I asked why my uncle had a trach.
He gave me a look like I'd asked for the specs on the space shuttle. "I don't know," he said, "but polio was big back then." Right. Like coke was big in the 80's I guess.
The next day, I made the mistake of telling my dad I was curious to know how his brother wound up with a trach. He speculated that the trach had probably been done at Fitzgerald-Mercy Hospital, or possibly even the now-closed Doctor's Hospital. Maybe, he suggested, I could get my uncle's records. I'd have to find out where Doctor's Hospital had archived their material, and where Fitz-Mercy keeps their 65 year old records. My uncle went by two names - long story, but a few people in my family go by two names - so I'd have to look for both names. I'm thinking I can take care of that during the four minutes I have free each day now that my mom is sick. Who really needs to eat anyway?
When we entered my mom's room, she told us that her throat had closed up seven times during the night. She had found that if she yelled "asow, asow, asow!" every 15 minutes - what she called her mantra - her throat didn't close. What we didn't know at the time was that a confusion particular to critical care patients had begun to spread through my mom like fog in the climax of a bad horror movie. "Asow, asow, asow" my mom yelled every quarter of an hour, carefully explaining each time that her mantra was keeping her throat open.
The next day, my mom's confusion was more apparent. She spoke frequently of Rosie Perez. Rosie Perez was going to introduce her. Rosie Perez lied to her. I didn't even know she knew who Rosie Perez was, but Aunt says my mom doesn't like Rosie Perez at all. Well maybe Rosie shouldn't have lied to her. My mom is a good friend until you lie to her. Rosie Perez learned that the hard way.
My dad looked at me from my mom's bedside. "You know," he said, "you could look up what diseases were big in the 50's, and see which ones required trachs."
"Asow asow asow!" my mom bellowed.
"Do you think this was caused by the flu vaccine?" Aunt texts me.
"Rosie Perez is in my office. Wendi, go to my office. We're starting soon. Asow, asow, asow! That's my mantra. It keeps my throat from closing."
Maybe holing up in a defunct hospital isn't such a bad idea after all.
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