A story of a hawk and a snake

There is a terrifying limbo that occurs and entraps when bad news is received. My mother has this voice she uses on messages when she is delivering News with a capital N, that usually means I will have to climb onto a plane and face down hours of misery because something terrible has happened.  The voice is the smallest voice of doom.

Little did I know when I posted that last post about sleep that I would spend the next several days with little to no sleep thanks to that terrible voice.

The message is usually along the lines of, "I'm going to need you to give me a call back as soon as you get this message." Early into it my stomach has plummeted to my feet, midway I'm in a cold sweat and can barely hold the phone, and by the end I'm fighting off the little dancing lights in my periphery and the ringing in the ears that means I may throw up or pass out. The trembles when I call her back are enough to shake the phone loose from my hands.

This time, though, she didn't answer when I called back. Either time. So I called my dad and was met with a rather chipper hello. The tremors calmed. If he was calm and sounded happy, then things couldn't have happened. Also, it meant he wasn't the one her call was about.

That proved to be false, though, as he explained that he was in hospital because he fainted at dinner the night before. He and I have been known to do that if our blood sugar gets too low, but this appeared not to have been that. The faint followed on an illness and indigestion, some pain. It had all the classic symptoms of a heart attack, minus the heart attack. He was expected to be released in two to three days, no worries, and we joked about the possible valve replacement years down the road:

Me: So you'd have either a pig or a 3D printed heart part?"
Him: I'm hoping for pig if it happens.

The quick release was a false hope. I got another voice of doom call on Friday. Things were bad. EKGs and a catheter revealed severe blockage of a main artery and a valve that was no longer functioning properly.  It meant bypass surgery and valve replacement, which meant open heart surgery. This sent the world tilting a bit. The surgery date, though, was uncertain; I didn't want to make a move until I knew what was going on. I had to tie up some loose ends and take care of some business before I could go. Things aren't real until you're actually there, right? So if I delayed, then it wasn't real. I hoped for Tuesday. I got on a flight on Saturday and raced across the country for a Sunday surgery instead. He could have gone back at any time, and I didn't know if I would see him before the surgery (procedure just doesn't work here; it's innocuous. This was not that).

I caught the flight at 11:59pm Oregon time and landed at 10:20am Oklahoma time. I slept (the only sleep I got) for the duration of the flight from Houston to Oklahoma City. He had not been taken back, and would not, in fact, for several hours. And so we waited in pauses of laughter, somber, silent tears that escaped despite our best efforts, and jokes and stories.  It was a small, rather private affair.  We texted, messaged, talked to the concerned few who knew.

At 4:30 or 5:00pm, they came for him.  At 10:30pm, we were able to see him. He was ventilated, tubed, wired, and beeping, but he was there and responsive, squeezing hands, blinking at us, and even winking at my mother only an hour or so after being stitched up.

The time expands and contracts weirdly in hospitals and times like these. Minutes manage to fly and trudge along simultaneously. There are strange tensions and shredded emotions as we wait for every scrap of news that comes to us through the old land line phone in the Courtyard Marriott-esque waiting room. Our jokes are dark (the body is not frozen during heart surgery nor is it the stuff of unicorns and fancies like that; the doctor is not a magician coming to whisk you away on your adventure with the magical hand wave and phrase, "Come with me"), and we dance and parry against anything that isn't hopeful.

At some point, my sister and I went home to let the dogs out and take care of house things. I can't remember when this happened, though, because it disappears into the miasma that is this species of waiting. When we were driving, we saw a hawk, large and grand, swooping and diving, to come up with a snake in its mouth. We slowed the car and paused overly long at the stop sign to watch, and I realized that it was something my dad had always done--that pause to witness nature's spectacles, brutality and wonder. It struck me enough to put a note in my phone:

A family friend stopped to chat with me while I was sitting in the waiting room yesterday. Our conversation was a two-step as we spoke about the day before (he sat with us the entire day, arriving before I did and going home just before we did).

"You know, you're dad is strong. It was never a question, for me..."
"Me either."
"I mean, I just knew...it would be okay...that he was strong enough."
"Yeah, me too. There was...nothing else it could have been."

And it was the truth.

photo courtesy of Abby Coyle Photo Artistry

Waking dreams

We have these weeks every now and then that really do us in; we trade off who gets to sleep and we revert back to an early college diet (yesterday was donuts and pizza with beer). This is one of those weeks.

I have seen the sun come up three times this week, and it's only Wednesday. No, Thursday now. I have not seen the sun rise because I am an early riser; quite the opposite, actually. I have watched, as that cold, clammy chill just before dawn creeps over my skin and makes my already strung tight body convulse with the shivers, the dark night fade, turning from shadows and depth to a foggy gray and then into a fully blush. The sun, damn him, wakes up shining. I am usually whimpering by this point, frantically and madly dashing out words and letters and numbers, hoping it's coherent enough to hide how close I'm clipping my deadlines.

I know I have at least one, perhaps two, more days of this. I am fighting down all that threatens to flood into my mind because there is not enough room or time to deal with it at the moment. Anxiety? I'm so sorry, but you'll have to take a number and hang out behind crazy, despair, uncertainty and fully coherent back there.

My Kindle is lonely, my own writing quietly huddling in the corner, lurking and teasing little snippets of guilt here and there. Scott and I keep teasing that we really just need to give up sleep to maximize the time in the day. Think of all that time given to dreaming. While I find my dreams to often be exciting, if quite confusing, I could make do without them in lieu of more time. They are often pretty epic:

And then there was an ambulance, and we got into the ambulance because this plane just tumbled out of the sky, end over end. Somersaulted down the field/runway (it was just a field but then it became a runway) and there was destruction. THINGS WERE JUST FALLING OUT OF THE SKY! So we stole an ambulance, but we only stole the ambulance after these giant blue beams of light came shining down from the sky. AND THEN PEOPLE WERE OBLITERATED. THEY JUST DIED. The ambulance we stole because it was better than a Hummer; it was a beast, and it could go anywhere, plus it had medical supplies. We had to drive around collecting people, and some were going to meet us at the safe house....[a lot more happened here but it gets confusing and really hard to explain--you try justifying why do you what you do in dreams]

Eventually there were some dinosaur-like creatures (aliens?) hunting us, and the safe house was compromised.  Everything was in tones of brown and sepia inside the safe house. 

The trouble with these dreams, though, is they leave me exhausted. I'm never sure if I would have been better off just staying up and watching the sun rise and then falling into that deep, dark sleep of the utterly exhausted for just two hours or going on to bed and wrestling with whatever my brain decides to throw at me for a full eight hours. For the moment, I suppose it doesn't really matter; eight hours of sleep this week (and possibly next week, too) is only a dream.