Vertical Slice
by Carol Fischbach
Soumya Netrabile, Torso Mountain Series No. 5, oil on canvas, 11 x 14 inches, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
Vertical Slice
Carol Fischbach | DEC 2021 | ISSUE 12
The cot creaked when I rolled over on my left side, faced the wall. I wanted the bland taste of an off-white wall. A taste of sleep, an umami of escape, rest I hadn’t had in almost three weeks.
That third week, John was between his second and third abdominal surgeries. Surgeries from an arterial bleed caused by an ulcer. Eight ibuprofen (carefully counted out and stowed in his pants pocket) taken every four hours for headaches and bad knees and probably some leftover oral fixation after he quit smoking, those pills eventually ate through his gut into an artery and blood erupted from his mouth in the ER after he told his assistant at work, I don’t feel so good.
Soon his blood pressure tanked and his pulse was thready and red spots dotted his white shirt, suit jacket abandoned, tie along with it. He wouldn’t be leaving the ER and going back to work this time.
I had no idea John took that many pills, no idea he ignored directions on labels, no idea how he expected doctors to fix everything, not until he teetered on that sharp edge of life and death, the razor edge that slashed me, the observer, instead of him, the perpetrator of much of his own bad health.
Blood pressure 40/20. Razor slice in my gut.
Doctor dilemmas—pump blood to the organs, don’t damage the already compromised heart, stop the bleeding, don’t cause blood clots, have his wife wait in the waiting room, leave her there for hours while the battle to keep him alive raged on.
Starving for answers, was John okay, what was going on, how much longer did I have to wait, I swallowed an anti-anxiety pill, one of three an ER doctor finally prescribed because I was choking on uncertainty. Eventually,one of the doctors (he had three of them) invited me into John’s ICU room where he’d been transferred at some point during the night.
John was asleep, resting comfortably, no longer standing with one foot in life, one in not life, bleeding stopped, maybe slowed, okay for now. Go home, one of the doctors said, he’s stable, we’ll call you if anything changes.
By the time I got there the next morning, the doctors had already cauterized the ulcer. If he stays stable, he can go home tomorrow, another doctor said.
I brought him home the next morning, saw him off to bed, sat with him, unwilling to leave, I’ll be fine, he kept saying. Somewhat reassured, my breath still not reaching my belly, I decided to believe him and go into work for a couple of hours.
When I got home, I called John as soon as I opened the door. No answer. John, I said again, louder, walking faster to the other side of the house, towards the bedroom. In here, barely a whisper came from the bathroom.
John was kneeling next to the bathtub, blood dripping down his chin, dripping down the side of the tub, a narrow stream headed to the drain. His face was a pale background to spots of bright red, he looked at me, big eyes that said I don’t want to go back to the hospital. He knew what my answer was.
I sat in the front seat of the ambulance, breath catching on the shelf in my chest where hope clashed with doom. I took the second anti-anxiety pill.
He’s going to be okay, the driver said, See? He pointed up to the top of the ambulance. I don’t even have the lights on.
I wanted to scream, He’s bleeding again. Turn on the fucking lights. But I didn’t.
He’s stable, the ER doctor said. We’ll keep him overnight and do surgery in the morning. He’ll be fine.
I went home and cleaned the bathtub.
The second surgery stitched the ulcer closed—it had reopened after cauterization. It must have been a big hole because he stayed in the ICU for nearly a week.
Just before being transferred from ICU to the general ward, paranoia leaked through the cracks of his I’m-fine armor. Instead: They’re all against me. His whispers flew like wayward darts in the dark, their sharp points made craters in the walls of my heart. Help me, his voice frantic while he twisted and turned on the bed, he tried to rip out the tubes connecting him to life. He wouldn’t let me out of his sight. Nothing calmed him, not even all the milligrams of sedatives. I couldn’t leave.
They brought me a cot, tucked it against the off-white wall where I snatched at sleep in between his bouts of delirium. Diagnosis: ICU psychosis.
Carol, help me. I followed the trail of his whispers through the not-quite dark, to the side of his bed, touched his arm, lowered my voice. It’s okay, honey. I spoke slowly on long exhales, You’re okay. Words as much for me as him. Rest, John, you need sleep.
His eyes closed. I watched the rise and fall of his chest slow to a ripple. Become steady.
I went back to the cot, sat on the edge. Watched him. I’d never seen him delusional. Looked down at the cot. Maybe. Looked back at his face. Maybe I could lay down. His eyes were still closed. Maybe I could close my eyes.
Sleep. I needed sleep. Even fifteen minutes. I laid on my right side until I thought maybe there was a chance he’d stay asleep this time.
I rolled over, faced the off-white wall. Imagined putting my tongue on it, feeling the cold textured surface, a tongue stuck, frozen in terror. The hours in the ER waiting room, the surgery waiting rooms. So many hours in ICU listening to the beeps of monitors and whirs and grinds of equipment measuring his life force, hearing nurses cry when a sixteen-year-old girl died from head injuries sustained in a car crash, the smells of alcohol and grief and disinfectants and fear, hearing family members congregated outside the room of a man in critical condition from a car accident that took the life of his wife, I knew that man, knew his wife. While my life force froze in place, my eyes stuck on an off-white wall, I imagined warm water spilling over me. Releasing my frozen tongue. Frigid muscles beginning a descent into fitful sleep. The edge of consciousness. The savory taste of sleep on the tip of my tongue. Teetering on the in-between of sour exhaustion and the sweet taste of hope that he might finally stay asleep. End this nightmare. Just one more breath into escape. It’s right there. The meatiness of deep sleep. I can taste it.
Carol. His whisper was full of fear. He moaned. Breathed fast and heavy. Help me.
The pungent taste of wakefulness. The salt of angry burning tears. Why couldn’t he have taken better care of himself?
The doctors decided he needed a third surgery.
I just wanted him to be okay again.
I took the third pill.
After the third surgery, after the waiting room, back in ICU with more beeps and monitors, finally he slept. Necrotic section in the small intestine removed. Psychosis gone.
Still, I stayed most nights at the hospital.
Watched the holidays come and go that November and December.
I broke out in shingles.
I’d spent more time with him during his ten weeks in the hospital than the last few years of our marriage. Alone. Together. He didn’t remember any of it. I would never forget any of it.
I didn’t plan on having an affair.
Maybe I wanted to leave John before he left me through overworking, overeating, congestive heart failure, lack of exercise, all the ways people kill themselves by ignoring the needs of their bodies.
Maybe my body hungered for a taste of touch. Attention. Conversation that satiated, didn’t leave me wanting more besides what’s on tv tonight.
Maybe it was by chance I met someone who held me, someone who sat next to me on the couch instead of across the room in a recliner. Watched movies with me. Put his arm around me. Had conversations about the movies, about my cats, about so many things. Made me feel full instead of hungry.
After I told John I was having an affair, after we separated, after he got a new job, after he packed up all his things, half our things, had movers take away all those things, that last night, that was the hardest night, harder than those nights when I didn’t know if he’d live or die. John’s doe eyes flooded in tears. Please come with me, he begged on his way out of town to a new job in Arizona.
Those eyes that sought me through the not-quite-dark of all those nights in the hospital.
I wanted a new beginning.
Those doe eyes gutted me.
I had to leave.
During the next several years John was the foundation I used to build a new life. I decided to become a nurse. He paid for nursing school. Paid all the bills. Periodically he had a girlfriend. Periodically we discussed mediation and divorce. Periodically he asked me to come back to him.
Neither of us were ready to finalize the divorce.
In my fifth semester of nursing school, the hardest semester, the MedSurg semester—medical surgical nursing classes and internships at the local hospital, I got a call from John, the night before my birthday. February 15, 2013. I would be sixty-four years old the next day. The oldest student in my class. I saw John’s name on the phone, ignored the call. Then, a text, call me. Irritation boiled in my belly. After weeks of not seeing my boyfriend, I’d finally convinced him to come over. I didn’t want to talk to John. Then, another call. I ignored it again. Then another text, please call me. Then another call. Irritation turned to anger. The final text, Jack is dead. My gut crashed off a cliff. John’s son was dead. Jack wasn’t even forty years old. I called John.
Aging has a process, unconscious, random, often unwanted, a review of decades of life, an opportunity for new perspectives of the not-so-bad and not-so-good. Achievements. Regrets. Feasts and famines. If my life were a buffet of moments, there would be a few sweet desserts and a lot of spoiled stinky meat dishes moldy, slimed in regret.
That night saying goodbye to John before he left for Arizona, that night his son died—I thought those moments were the worst. But there was more.
Two weeks after Jack’s death, John needed open heart surgery. He was over a thousand miles away in Arizona. His second heart surgery. The first had been eighteen years earlier—two weeks after we got married. He’d needed five bypasses. This time he needed a valve replacement. Three days after the valve replacement there was some sort of bowel obstruction and he needed abdominal surgery.
I wanted to be there. I couldn’t be there.
That same week we were set to close on the sale of the marital home. I had to find a new place to live. I felt at a loss, unsure of where to go, what to do, panic nipping at the edges of responsibility I didn’t want. John had managed all our moves. I had to pack up all the things I had, all the things John left behind, find someone to move everything to someplace I didn’t have yet because I was studying for final exams, barely sleeping, barely eating, trying to tamp down all the PTSD that volcanoed out of me when I pictured John laying in the hospital alone. His girlfriend had broken up with him. My boyfriend had cheated. Again.
And Jack was dead.
The sweetness of a new boyfriend was not a new beginning.
The real new beginning was becoming an RN.
When Jack died I had called John’s friends to let them know so they could support him. I found a rental house closer to school. Hired a moving company. I closely monitored John’s condition by staying in touch with the hospital and his family members. Worked with his family to sign the closing papers on the house. I left study groups to take calls with John’s health updates. I studied my ass off. I passed my final exams.
My nursing school attrition rate was about 20%. I was not one of those who failed. I didn’t drop out. I graduated from the ADN program. Passed the NCLEX exam—the national licensing exam. I ended the boyfriend, got two jobs working in memory care, one part time and one full time. I went back to school for my bachelor’s in nursing.
One day at work, at the start of my shift, a patient fell backwards in her chair. I ran to help and tripped, put my hand out to break the fall, and broke my wrist.
I laid on the floor, knew the angle of my right hand to my arm was all wrong, held back the scream when I twisted it back to a semblance of the right position, leaned against the off-white wall and waited for a coworker to bring something to stabilize the broken bones before I drove myself to the ER, used my left hand to get the phone out of the pocket of my scrubs, the phone we weren’t supposed to carry while working. I called the one person I’d always been able to rely on. My husband. John, who had left Arizona and came back, John who kept asking me to come back, I called John and asked if he would come back. Help me, I whispered.
There is a cross on my wrist. White, thickened lines of fibrous scar tissue that intersect at old wounds.
The horizontal line can barely be seen anymore. A short line that runs across the junction of vessels on the underside of my wrist where blood leaked from a razor slice when my heart was broken in my early twenties. All those long-ago days of feeling empty followed by years of drinking and drugs and relationships.
John and I met when we got sober. The first new beginning.
The vertical slice on my wrist, long and vivid, is from a surgeon who snapped the broken almost-healed bone, the bone that wasn’t put in the right place in the first place when a previous doctor slapped on a cast, bones not realigned, she was willing to let it heal wrong, but I knew it wasn’t right. I found a surgeon who re-broke the radius bone, corrected the wrong position, added cadaver bone and a metal plate to give it strength until it could heal and be strong on its own.
Carol Fischbach is a writer, nurse, and student archetype—a collector of degrees. At age sixty-four, she became an RN and was the oldest person in her class. She then went on to earn an MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Now at seventy-two, she isn’t done yet but limits herself to lifting words instead of people. Writing is the portal through which she remembers, reframes, and releases memories. She continues to challenge herself by taking workshops that defy writing norms so she can find new ways to appear on the page.
Carol continues to add to her writing workshop portfolio with Lidia Yuknavitch and many other writers. She writes with a group of badass women writers and is also a member of Pinewood Table. Most recently, she stretched her creative muscles to include monologue performances in company with other writers and performers directed by Beth Bornstein Dunnington. Carol has been published in Propeller, Nailed Magazine, Oregon East, Tide Pools, the Port Townsend Leader, and has done past performances at ROAR, a platform for fierce feminine storytelling. She lives in Vancouver, WA with her husband, brother, and two kitties.
Soumya Netrabile (American, b. 1966 in Bangalore, India) lives and works in Chicago, IL. Netrabile received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BSEE in engineering from Rutgers University. Her current and recent solo exhibitions include Andrew Rafacz Gallery (Chicago, IL); Pt.2 Gallery (Oakland, CA); and Terra Incognito (Oak Park, IL). Recent group exhibitions include Anat Ebgi (Los Angeles, CA); Trinta Gallery (Santiago de Compostela, Spain); PRACTISE (Oak Park, IL); and KARMA (New York, NY). Her work is included in both public and private collections.