Growing Up Quick
Tubes. They winded everywhere and I’m reminded of the game of I used to play as a child. The toys I used to play with called Mr. Sunshine and Mr. Grumpy with limbs twisting and turning everywhere. A spaghetti look, one that's in front of me surrounding my mother. How is she in the hospital? Let me tell you.
Three hours earlier she was sitting there in our lounge room chair, shaking like a leaf but watching the TV. I honestly wasn’t focused on the show at all. I was too busy making my sisters lunch and keeping the thermometer close by in case my stubborn mother decided to crash.
“I think you have an infection.” I knew it was pointless trying to tell her, but still I tried.
“No dear, I’m just cold.” She tells me.
My eyes wander to the thermometer sitting on our bench and roll my eyes at the 27 degrees blinking back at me. Well shit.
She had just come out of a double mastectomy operation to fix the cancer that was hollowing its way into her chest.
“But weren’t your tubes all discolored this morning? You said the liquid changed color and consistency.” The tubes are connected to drains, ones that are lead back to her body. Taking waste out of her system, hopefully keeping her healthier than she looked.
“Yeah, I know. I wasn’t sure if there was something wrong with that or not.”
I stare down at her over the kitchen bench. Flat chested as a 12-year-old boy, with a slight wince on her face. I go to call for my father and remember he’d gone. Bastard. Off on a fishing trip the day after his wife had come out of a surgery. Sounds like my family. Taking the thermometer, I walk over and recheck her temperature with it sitting at a scary 38 degrees. She was brimming at a fever.
“Fuck! Mum, please let me take you back to the hospital. I’m supposed to take you after you hit anything over 35.” I yell at her. I knew I shouldn’t have sworn at her.
“Can you stop worrying, I’m fine. I’ll know when I’m not fucking fine I promise.” She responds in kind.
My mother never swears. She would rather embody a saint that even say a slight inkling of a bad word, I’ve honestly never heard her say that word. I decide I wasn’t going to take that sort of crap from a sick person. Taking the phone, I dial the number I know so well – the hospital.
“Hi, my name is Kate and I was wondering if I could be connected with Dr. Delway please, from oncology.”
“Just one moment please.” Was the only reply I got.
“Okay, thank you very much.”
Hanging up the phone after a brief talk with the doctor I hold my ground and get ready to be argued with.
“Mum I need to take you to the hospital now. They told me to bring you immediately, please don’t argue with me.” She nods, surprising me, shakily getting up and packing a bag – knowing she will be there overnight at least.
In hindsight I hated that car ride. With the music on and worried looks between my rear-view mirror and the person that brought me into this world, it was utterly gut-wrenching. Pulling up at the hospital was the easy bit, getting her up the hill and into the hospital was the hard part. Knowing I was probably going to have to catch her in case she falls, I wrap my arm around her and begin the trek up.
Trying to keep her straight and steady was like trying to stop all traffic in Manhattan with a sign at a single intersection. Difficult. After a few stumbles up the hill I get her inside and that’s when the real world settles back on my shoulders. Looking around we were greeted by coughing people spreading germs like there’s no tomorrow, and the looks – oh, the looks could have killed us.
So many curious and soul-searching gazes spanning from me to the woman on my arm, currently bawling her eyes out. She had started crying as soon as we had entered the building. It seemed as though crying was like a universal language, a vocabulary from different cultures, as soon as she started everyone stopped staring and started pitying.
“Can I help you, dear?” I get asked at the front counter and I’m left wondering how I should answer that question. I could always ask to be locked in a room with a psychologist and some tissues, yeah that could be helpful. But she’s not looking at me, she’s looking at mum.
“Yeah.”, I stumble through my words and proceed to tell the nurse what’s wrong with my mum. The medication she’s had in the last 4 hours, what her temperature was the last time I checked. They place her on a bed, her crying now quietened to a soft whimper. This wasn’t the first-time I’d seen my mum cry, but damn I wanted it to stop. It made my heart hurt and I swear she’d never cried like that before. They hook her up to too many machines, the continues beeping starting.
“Hello. My name’s Claire and I’m going to take some blood tests and figure out what’s going on here”. The nurse had a worried look on her face and I’m left standing there with my hands full of mum’s medications and bags, secretly hoping it wasn’t what I thought it was.
Please not something to do with her heart.
I knew I didn’t want to look at the needle going into her arm, but I watched anyway. Then there was blood. I watched it drip down her arm and onto the floor, like the pitter-patter of rain drops on a tin roof.
“It’s ok this always happens with blood tests there’s nothing to worry about dear.” The nurse is talking to me while I just nod, knowing she’s lying. The multitude of blood tests I’ve witnessed and felt in my life never having looked like the waterfall in front of me. I just hope it stops soon.
“Hey, would I be able to talk to you for a second Hun?”, a nurse asks me through the curtain. Nodding I smile at mum, I walk through the curtain to see this nurse holding a clipboard filled with forms. I was just going to start naming them nurse #1, nurse #2, and so on.
“Would you be able to fill these out? We need some details and a next of kin please.” She asks me.
“Next of kin?”, I ask in shock. “Do you know how old I am?!”
I’m 17. She just looks at me blankly and asks where my father is. I’m left to tell the nurse that he’s on a fishing trip in the middle of nowhere, no service and no reception. I feel myself becoming more scared as I’m handed the paperwork and told to fill it out and hand it back to the front desk when I’m ready. There’s nothing but for me to do it, or wait for a father that wasn’t coming.
Heading back into the room, I call home to check and see if my sister is doing okay on her own. I only get a quick reply stating she’s sitting on the bed watching TV and that everything is fine. Typical 13-year-old. Sitting in the grey discolored chair in the corner, pressed up against machines, I’m forced to revaluate my life.
This is by far one of the scariest things I’ve had to do by myself so far. I thought I had passed that when I was told my mum had cancer. I’m given the job of pressing the off button on the machine when her heart rate gets too high, every two minutes I’d be forced to silence it. An endless cycle, a rhythm I never wanted. As it turns out, after a couple hundred times it would start to get annoying, so I go for a walk as they hook her up to more machines. Soon after they took her for a ECG, a recording of the electrical activity of the heart. The electrodes were placed on the scarred and red stained skin of her chest. They were methodically connected in a specific order to a machine, and when turned on, measures electrical activity all over the heart. I felt as though my heart would light up like los angels on a cold clear night, lights seen from a thousand miles away if they had tested mine.
Walking through the halls I can feel my phone going off in my pocket from mum’s friends offering to help but I ignore it after the fifth call. There’s only so many times you can tell someone your mums in a hospital and your dads MIA without feeling crap about your life.
After a couple of hours, they had her transferred to our normal private hospital and were getting cultures of her blood for testing. Apparently, her surgery had given her a nasty infection which transferred into a blood infection. Looking down at her laying in the bed, days before my graduation, I’m forced to grow up – quick.
I’m not worried about if she was coming to my graduation, what she was wearing, or even how I was going to do my exams for my final year the week following. I just needed her to be alright.
A redness in her skin had spread across her chest to her ribcage and she looked like a young child had taken a paint brush to her skin and gone crazy. The scars were showing through, puckered and sore. I knew I would never unsee this, feeling it being burned into my memories.
Turning away I went home and grabbed my sister so she could see mum as well. Seeing her eyes scrunch up into little tears was another heart wrenching moment but I knew I had to be strong, so I grabbed her other hand and held on tight. We’ve been holding on tight ever since. Loading her into the car and taking her home after the sun dipped behind the horizon, I realized I learnt a lot about myself.
One: I was a lot more scared than I thought I would be in a situation like that.
Two: I’m a lot stronger than I give myself credit for.
Before bed my sister checked the locks three times before admitting she was safe and nothing else bad was going to happen to her. It’s funny how you take these things for granted when an adult is around.
Looking back at this event and writing it all down on paper feels as though I'm honoring a memory, even though its mine. It still doesn’t feel real though, the kind of situation you know just isn't real until you read the byline saying its fiction. Well I guess that’s just life isn't it.