Patients are confined to their rooms except for procedures that have to be done elsewhere (surgery, MRI, CT scan, etc.), so the only people we see around the unit are staff and people that I presume are patients' family. We've never actually met anybody*, however, so we know nothing of the other patients except that they have recently undergone or are about to undergo a transplant procedure intended to cure/relieve/address some kind of blood- or cancer-related condition. We acknowledge one another in the halls, but only briefly and in an obligatory sort of way that suggests courtesy and empathy if not genuine interest. Anything more than that is more than we have the energy to muster. I've got my own horror show to watch. I don't need to know anything about yours.
It has not been unusual for us to hear crying or screaming through the walls, but since we've never seen any of the other patients, we can't visualize who's making the sounds, or why. (In one case, we learned that the patient had an ostomy that required regular and, apparently, extremely painful attention.)
A couple of days ago we heard noises (cries? shrieks? wails? I haven't found the right word) that were unusually anguished and emotional, and occasionally punctuated by the sounds of impact--a body against a wall? fists on a table? After a few moments I realized that the sounds were coming not from the patient (a little girl, I think, based on the voice we've heard before), but from someone else--someone who soon began to scream "Oh my god. Oh my god."
Within a few seconds, staff were flying down the halls from every direction into their room. Something was going--or had already gone--horribly, horribly wrong. We--Alyson, me, Alyson's mom, our social worker--traded alarmed glances but didn't speak. The nurse seemed to try to carry on as usual, but it was impossible to ignore the anguish and the commotion 10 feet away even though we could see nothing but flashes of humanity rushing past our door.
Within a few seconds, staff were flying down the halls from every direction into their room. Something was going--or had already gone--horribly, horribly wrong. We--Alyson, me, Alyson's mom, our social worker--traded alarmed glances but didn't speak. The nurse seemed to try to carry on as usual, but it was impossible to ignore the anguish and the commotion 10 feet away even though we could see nothing but flashes of humanity rushing past our door.
When I realized that Alyson and I were both starting to tremble and wither emotionally from the sounds--sounds that I imagined were coming from the mother of a child who was either dead or dying in front of her mother's eyes--I grabbed her and fled down the hall. We eventually made our way to a quiet exam room and closed the door until we received word that it was safe to return. There we sat in a long, quiet embrace, trying very hard to stop hearing that voice, and to stop imagining what might have been happening.
It sounds--and certainly felt--selfish to think about our own well-being when it was abundantly clear that our neighbor was actually experiencing something horrible; we simply wanted not to observe the horror. But under the circumstances, where we spend all day every day trying not to obsess over the possible significance of every vital sign, symptom, and test result, it was hard not to wonder if whatever was happening next door could also happen to us. Could Sam's condition turn south in a single moment like that? And if it did, how we'd react. Is that what I will sound like if Sam dies?**
We have since learned that the patient had a seizure--presumably unexpectedly--but is fine. She has been moved to the ICU, her old room now occupied by another patient. We've recovered from the shock and alarm, though we won't soon forget it. There's no question that the mother won't either.
Sam slept through it.
* You might expect people to want to bond with one another, to commiserate and empathize. After all, we spend hours, days, and weeks here enduring very similar kinds of hell. The hospital does arrange social gatherings for families, presumably for that very purpose (Sunday night pizza in the Ronald McDonald Family Room), but we've never attended. And if our own observations are worth anything, not many parents do.
** I no longer spend much time wondering if Sam will die. I don't know if we will escape from this entirely unscathed, but death now seems pretty unlikely. I used to, however, and I did sometimes fixate on what my precise reaction, both emotional and physical, would look like. Would I cry out? Run? Grab Alyson and collapse into a sobbing heap? I suppose there's no way to know what I will do, but if that little girl dies, I have a pretty good idea what her mother will do.
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