Lately, rather than me living my life, I feel like life is living me. Most of the time I utterly hate it: this being blown around by one contingency or another like a dead leaf. Still, when I look back on my life, the one I had before my husband's stroke, I'm embarrassed by its triviality. Did I really blog about zombies for more than a month? (Yes, I did, and very happily.)

While now, plodding to a darkly Beethovanesque soundtrack, everything I do is quite necessary, and a lot of it is hateful. Still, to get my husband functional again, I've had to eradicate a lot of me: the part that whimpers and begs, the part that just wants to blog about zombies, but it's necessary to get the job done. Whatever job shows up.

Three days after my boy got his magic penicillin, he developed so many symptoms, by Friday that week, I started ticking them off on the SIDE EFFECTS sheet the pharmacist includes. Rash? Check. Swollen glands? Check. Fever? Check. Swollen mouth? Check. Swollen tongue? Check. Fissures on the tongue? Check. Persistent sore throat? Check. Swollen lips? Check. Blisters on the mouth? Check. Peeling skin? Check. Racking hiccups that continue for three days? WTF? 

We muddled through the weekend with me treating his various ills like a primitive. My only gris-gris were throat sprays, Cream of Wheat, aspirin, and antibiotic ointment. Glancing over at the twenty-five+ prescription bottles full of pills he was taking plus the empties, I muttered, "We need to see your doctor and have him go through these Christly pills. We''ll go right in on Monday," and my boy nodded miserably. He couldn't eat, he could barely drink, and he hurt like fire. But another uninsured trip to the ER would be $1000 or more. I'd stopped the penicillin on Friday, since it seemed the most  likely bad guy, and now he was only taking aspirin, two types of blood pressure medicine, and his insulin. Hic! He hiccuped hard, looking utterly exhausted. 

I hadn't wanted to do it, since he's diabetic, but now I gave him a teaspoon of sugar. "Hold it in your mouth for five seconds," I told him, "then drink this glass of water." He obeyed and, after two entirely sugar-free months, fell over on his side snoring. But not hiccuping, I thought, bitterly triumphant, hoping he wasn't in a coma.

Early Monday, I heard him calling me and raced in to see his face even more horribly swollen around the lips. He could barely speak. The hairs on my neck bristling, I pulled out everything warm I could find, and stuffed him into his clothes "Do dogdor?" He managed to say. "No doctor," I said grimly."we're going to the fucking ER." I tucked him into his jacket, positioned his cap on his head, helped him into the wheelchair, and raced him down the ramp. There was a fine cold drizzle and the sky was entirely white.

Once in the ER, I rolled him over to the Admittance clerk."Symptoms?" she asked. "What've ya got?" I asked. She looked at me stonily, but then she probably hadn't seen The Wild Ones either. One look from the triage group, though, and he was spirited into an ER room within five minutes.

(And here, what happens is painful enough that my authorial self, the narrative I, must bow out and allow the girl to make her appearance from stage left, in present tense.)

So the boy is slung onto a lumpy but massive automated Stryker bed, while the girl stows his wheelchair in a corner along with his coat, cap, and scarf. Schoolboy clothes, the girl muses, smoothing out a sleeve, and thinks fragmentedly, forever young. And then a med-tech whips into the room and, bang bang bang, grabs six vials of the boy's blood before he knows what's hit him. A nurse whisks in and hooks him up to a machine that eeps, chirps, and whsssts as it counts. The girl notices the boy's temperature is now 103.5F and feels her heart thud with the beginning of a panic.

The boy looks over at her, blue eyes brimming and desperate. His hugely swollen mouth is bleeding now and his tongue is thick as a biscuit. His hiccups still go on and on in their idiot rhythm, shaking him like a rattle. "Id woulda bed bedder if I di'd." He tells her, crying. And the girl cradles him, as best she can, finding him amidst the trailing tubes, the eeps, the cheeps, and the scary readouts.

"It wouldn't be better for me," she says, then kisses his hot, hot face and says the prayer: God, let this man live. Let him live. However he is or will be, I will care for him, but let him live, you mean motherfucker. His temperature is now 103.7F and a nurse practioner comes in. "Can't you do something for him?" the girl asks in a rage, "he's suffering so much, he's so sick."

"After I take a history," the nurse-practioner says a little too calmly, and the girl remembers this is their fourth time to the ER in six weeks, and it's always Groundhog Day here. She goes on auto: a massive mid-brain stroke, left-side is completely paralyzed, his mind is great, still has taste and smell, incontinent, confined to a wheelchair, viral infection, major MRCR staph infection, bacterial infection, Jesus Christ isn't there someplace this is written down? I keep telling you people this stuff over and over... "And the stroke happened when?"interupts the n.p. "September 26," replies the girl, while her boy interjects, "Dey dat'll live id idfaby." 

"He says it's a day that will live in infamy," the girl translates and the n.p. jots down something, and leaves for that rabbit hole where ER medical people escape the filmic hell going on around them. The girl and boy aren't special, not here, and there's a certain raspy comfort in that.

"Diggie jus wogged in," the boy reports, looking pleased that he can see Dickie Lee, their tomcat, prowling the ER.

"You're hallucinating," the girl tells him distractedly, glancing at the readout again. His blood oxygen level is scarily low, while his temperature is now 104F. God, let this man live. Let him live. However he is or will be..."Yeah," her boy agrees and tells her, "I'b wearig co'bat boots doo. Dere he'by. I c'n see dem." He waggles his long bare feet at her and goes hic, shaking all over.

"Combat boots?" the girl asks, "like you wore in New York, looking at galleries?"

"I gezz," he agrees listlessly, "dere berry heby do."

"I bet they are, sweetheart," she says, "I bet they're heavy as shit."

God, let this man live. Let him live. However he is or will be, you old bastard, I will care for him. You can bet your omnipotent ass on it.

Sometime later, the main ER bullgoose doctor appears. He's treated her boy before, a nice man, calm, with a gray buzzcut and pinkly clean hands.

He glances over at her boy: his stretched out bloody mouth, his waxy skin, labored breathing, the galvanizing hiccups, the terrifying fever. "I can do something about this," is what he says for a mercy, and shortly the nurse staggers in under a load of plastic bags containing various kinds of clear to cloudy glop. Some of it she injects right into the line, for some she stabs a port into his hand to drip directly, some of it is hooked into the saline. "He's being admitted," she confides while hanging various bags, "they're just waiting for a bed."

And not too long afterwards, they both hear the shout: "Transport!" The girl walks beside his bed, as she pushes the wheelchair with his clothes, until they get to the elevator. "See you tomorrow," she whispers to him, hoping it will be so, and he's whisked away like magic, like the way death comes.

In the outside world it's 2 AM now, cold, starless, and raining. The girl shoves the wheelchair, and from the corner of her eye, spots a dog trotting near Hall Street. It's a skinny purposeful urban dog. A dog that's going places, sniffing things. A smart dog too, one that checks for cars, waits for lights to change. A survivor: dogs or people, you can always spot them. The very sight cheers the girl momentarily, gives her heart.

It's on the drive home that she hopes she will never feel like this again. Ever. Alone in the black drizzling night, all prayers abandoned, all passions put on a high, high shelf. Out of sight, out of reach.

In her car now, just pushing through bleak weather.

Bereft.