Thursday, February 19, 2009

Lifeless

After our discussion with the detective, I needed to be alone. I decided to step into the women's room on the surgical floor.
Upon entering the bathroom, I headed for the far stall with my head hanging down, holding my breath. The bathroom was illuminated with florescent lights attached to an electric strip on the ceiling. It held two stalls on opposite sides of a small, white porcelain sink.
When I entered the stall I caught myself leaning against the cool, pale blue tile. I struggled to catch my breath as I began to shake.

Before leaving the small meeting room the detective had left me with another devastating bit of news. Upon arriving at Mt.Clemens General the day before, the hospital had run a routine drug panel on my father's blood. They do this for all unconscious patients to make sure they are aware of any and all drugs or chemicals that may be in a person's system.
My father's blood alcohol level had been 2.4

My father had always had a drinking problem, his entire life. He spent his life either deep in the throws of addiction or fighting the addiction with all his strength, often with the substitution of pot, cigarettes, exercise or sex...anything...anything to give him a high.
I remember the first two years after my parents divorced being so frightened to be left alone with my father. His drinking had raged out of control after my mother left him and the honest truth was I was afraid of him.
He was unpredictable.
His usual pattern being a happy drunk at the beginning of the evening, than as the alcohol continued to flow he would become sloppier and finally...he would become... scary.

He never beat me, hit me or hurt me physically while he was drunk, but the verbal and emotional abuse I endured for years was almost worse. I remember him screaming at me as if I had crashed his car, simply because I had spilled his beer on the living room floor.
I remember my father pouring his beer into a to-go cup as we left the house, with him behind the wheel. As young as I was I never knew how wrong that was...for me it was normal.
It was only when I became an adult that I realized, my father had endangered my life on a nightly basis for well over two years.
I remember being called fat and being told to shut up...but most importantly I remember feeling angry and inferior. Angry that he couldn't spend one night with me sober. Angry that no matter how much he told me he loved me, he would still drink. Angry that he couldn't see what he was doing to me...to himself. And I felt inferior. No matter how much he loved me, he loved beer more. That is what I spent my adolescence believing...
No matter what I did, it was never enough.

But when the morning would come, and the alcohol would wear off, my father was so different. Still not the most calm, collected and supportive man in the world...none the less, he was far different during the day. He was capable, funny, loving, charismatic and extremely intelligent. He would take me horse-back riding in the mountains. We would drive the two hour stretch to the Horse Ranch singing Motown's greatest hits with the windows rolled down.
We would ride for hours at the ranch enjoying the sound, feel and smell of nature...sharing our equal love for horses. On the way back from the ranch we would always stop at the old A&W drive-in cafe and get foot-long hot dogs and french fries. When he was sober I was no longer fat, but strong. When he was sober I was never annoying, but intelligent and articulate. When he was sober he was my father and I was his daughter.
When he was sober I loved him.

But he was rarely sober.

A blood alcohol level of 2.4. Jesus! And that had been a good hour or so after he had gotten into his car. Even though this news upset me, it did not surprise me. I had been in the car with him after drinking 16 beers, and that was simply on a night I had decided to keep count. This was not unusual for my father and as much as I hate to say it, as much as saying it seems to condone it, the truth was my father was probably more sober that day than most days...
With my face pressed against the cool tile, my body shaking, I began to finally allow the tears to roll down my checks, my body wretched with sobs and I began to pound my fist against the tile wall.
Hard.
Harder.
Until my skin became raw.
I kept pounding, until I thought my hand would break.

I could not explain the emotions coursing through my body. Anger. Sadness. Grief. Remorse. Anger. Love. Hopelessness. Revenge. Fear. Anger...but ultimately, strangely...love.

Its unexplainable how you can love so deeply someone who has hurt you so badly. It is almost as if love it programed into the DNA. Just as my father's curly hair, oval face and muscular build had been programmed into me at birth, so had my love for him. No matter what he had done, no matter what role he had played in this horrible incident, I still loved him and I still wanted him back in my life. I still wanted him alive.

Peeling myself off of the tile wall, I unlatched the silver lock of the stall door and walked to the sink. As I cupped my hands under the cool water I bent down to splash the water over my face. I threw my head back and looked into the mirror.
What I saw staring back at me was a stranger. A gaunt, sunken, tired, lifeless stranger. My eyes look wild and lost. My usually olive complexion had gone fair with grief and my face was held in an almost permanent grimace, as if I had smelled something sour.
I turned away from the mirror and left the bathroom.

As I headed back towards the waiting room I saw my mother at the nurses desk. She was walking towards me, fast.
"We can go back and see him now," she said, "He's out of recovery."
"Ok."
"Honey?" she said catching my arm, "try to forget about what the detective said for a little while and just visit with your father."
I looked at her wanting to say what was in my mind. I wanted to tell her that nothing would ever take those words out of my head. I wanted to tell her that years upon years later I would remember every second of the last two days in gruesome detail, that it would haunt me...forever...and that I would be angry that no matter how supportive my friends, family and lovers were...no one would know what I felt...no one would ever be able to know...no matter how much they tried.
But I didn't.
On some level I knew this accident had affected her deeply. She used to be married to my father, she used to love him, more than anyone. She still loved him on some level, and I knew she always would.
And I knew that there was not a day that goes by that she does not look at my face, as I resemble my father greatly, and see him staring back at her.
"Ok, Mom," I said...more for her than for myself.

____________________________________________________________________

Upon entering my fathers room in Intensive Care I at first could not look at the bed that held him, or the shell of what he used to be.
I found myself looking around the room at all of the machines he was attached to. He was connected to a ventilator that made a steady hissing noise as the equalizing air filter expanded and then fell, expanded and then fell...filing my father's lungs with air.
The heart monitor showed spikes of activity as my father's heart beat within his chest at 59 beats per minute.
The oxygenation sensor displayed a 95, than a 97, than a 93 and back again....it constantly changed with each hiss of the ventilator.
A long yellow cord snaked out from under the sheets filing a large bag with urine as it hung from the bottom of the bed.
A blood pressure cuff automatically filled with air as it wrapped my father's arm and then slowly deflated....130/92....displayed in blue across the monitor.
And finally the bags hung from their IV poles with snake-like fingers reaching into all areas of my father's body...I would soon know all of these medications as if I were a nurse myself.

These figures, these numbers on a monitor, would become my lifeline into my father for the next several weeks. I would watch these numbers and believe that by knowing they were stable, that my father too, was stable and on his way back from the brink.
This of course was what I told myself, no one really knew.

I finally looked up into the hospital bed and saw my father. My eyes filled with tears and a single, slow, wet tear escaped down my check.
"Oh, daddy," I whispered walking to the bed.
He lie lifeless, his body swollen about 20% its normal size. His shaved head lie on a pillow bandaged from the forehead-up. His arms lie on pillows elevated above him chest, which rose and fell with each hiss of the ventilator. A feeding tube protruded from his stomach and ran into one of the containers hanging from one of the IV poles. The ventilator tube was fastened around his neck with a soft collar. His eyes were closed and the skin beneath them black; dried blood was still visible at each nostril. His mouth was shut tightly, and I remembered it had been wired shut.

I reached out and touched one of his swollen, coarse hands.
It was cold.
He did not move.
Without the ventilator and the small, slow drip of the IVs there was no movement.
There was no life.

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