Umbilical
by Amra Brooks
Sui Park, Wiggling III-2, cable ties, 25 x 16.5 x 12 inches, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.
Umbilical
Amra Brooks | AUG 2022 | Issue 17
We are all packed into a small brown and white room and my eyes keep closing when I try to open them. I am flat on my back under the white sheet. No cancer. I make the doctor say it twice as I come to. I can hear one of the nurses saying that their hand is covered in bodily fluid from a patient. “Wash it! You don’t want to get C. Diff!” another says. There are too many people talking. Sam, who has a button that says “Don’t worry I watched a video on YouTube,” brings me ginger ale. When I can sit up he brings me a clear plastic bag with my clothes and I slowly dress myself. I take his arm as he walks me outside into the blinding sunlight. My husband is there. He is always there. I am grateful for this and the relief that it is over. I get into the passenger seat of our silver station wagon.
When I get home, I take a shower to cleanse myself. To get rid of the medical smell, other people’s hands, to wash away the experience of feeling like a body in an assembly line, and the sticky tape and cotton balls on all the places where they couldn’t find a vein. Wrist, hand, inner arm. The blood pools blue and purple under the skin. I know it will change to green and yellowish brown in the coming days. I remember the names of everyone who touched my body today—Sam, Wendy, Laurie, Amit, Sunil. I hear the voices of people hidden by blue curtains; a man who was sent home because he had put creamer in his coffee. The instructions said no solids. Creamer counts as food. The woman next to me had to explain that her Tourette's syndrome presented in bodily jerks and vocal outbursts. On my other side was a woman who grew up in Denmark and flew over the handlebars of her bike as a child. She thought she’d end up living on a farm in the country, not in Boston, and I feel sad about this.
My son is at school. I haven't seen him since yesterday. When I’m out of the shower, I use the clean white towel to very gently dry the droplets of water from my shoulders. I think of the way I have always dried my son’s body when he’s out of the tub. How I want someone to do the same for me. I touch my arms and legs and imagine I am touching him. He is the conduit that allows me to treat myself with care. His presence continues to be my teacher. When he’s home from school a friend texts me about the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. All the relief at those two words, “no cancer” is replaced with grief, horror, anxiety and the exhaustion starts to multiply. I don’t want to tell my child tonight. When I put him to bed I sing two songs, rub his back, and spoon him until he falls asleep watching his eyes close, the impossible softness of the skin on his jaw, the sprinkling of freckles across his nose. I want his body close to mine, closing the gap that makes us two, our body memory of when we were one. In holding him I am also being held in the way that I need tonight. Big me Little you. Little you Little me. Little me Big me. We’re all here. In this black bed, under the twinkle lights, listening to the dog softly chew his bone.
A week later my son is limping. He can’t straighten his right leg. Every night for a week he wakes up and says it hurts. We get an x-ray on a Friday and are on our way when the doctor calls and tells us we need to go to the ER for an MRI. I have had enough of hospitals. “It looks like it could be an infection in the bone. I don’t want you to wait the weekend.” When they put the IV into my son’s arm he screams at the top of his lungs. Over the kid with the broken arm, the vomiting child, the COVID patient, the puffy fever dreamers with sweat matted curls. Then they put us in a room painted dirty blue with fish decals for eight hours until they take us to a loud magnetic tube for images. “Pretend you’re in a spaceship!” they say to him. I have earplugs jammed deep into my ears so I can stay in the room with him. The sound is still loud enough to make me feel claustrophobic. Every few minutes while he’s in the tube he waves me over and squeezes my hand. Sometimes he gives me a thumbs up. Seeing your kid be brave in the face of something that scares you to death will break your heart. Later I whisper-scream and kick and punch the air when the short thin bespectacled male emergency room doctor says they will have to take a small piece of my son’s bone for testing. I want to punch him for downplaying bone stealing.
After eighteen hours, I go home alone and leave my husband and son in the hospital. One of us needs to sleep. It is now light out and I howl as I drive. The animal part comes up guttural, dry and round. It is the only sound that seems to make sense. Words disappear like gray morning vapor. The house is loud with emptiness when I arrive. The ghost of our busy buzzing life. I let the needy dogs jump on me and lick my face.
My son was born in another building at the same hospital campus where I left him with his dad. After eighteen hours of pushing they placed his wet and milky body on my belly. He was still attached. The placenta still inside me. We had made the decision to do delayed cord clamping because it was supposed to prevent anemia and give more oxygen and stem cells to our baby. My husband and I planned that he would be the one to cut the cord, a way to bring him into the corporeal process of birth. They gave him surgical scissors. The sensation of slicing through a body part that wasn’t quite mine or our son’s, yet somehow both of ours, made him woozy. The tissue was tough and while he struggled, I held our baby on my belly and guided him to my breast, attaching him to a new part of me.
I go upstairs and wash the hospital off in the hot shower for the second time this month. I think about the film Silkwood and the decontamination shower scene. I want to scrub it all off of me. Only my baby is still there. There is no way I can sleep. So I get in bed and play a yoga nidra for sleep meditation two times and toss and turn and let the dogs pee in the mudroom and check my phone every few minutes to be sure I’m not missing a call.
When I don't get a call, I call. Infectious disease says he could be discharged if he comes back Monday for a bone biopsy. I know there is a group of them with clipboards and white coats comparing notes and making decisions about our child’s body. A gaggle. Which is what my son called puking when he was a toddler, “Mama, I gaggled.”
Last night, my son kept saying, “This is terrible, this is the worst day ever, you don’t understand!” And then I told him that I had a very similar experience once. “Yeah, but I am just a kid. I’m only nine.” Fair enough. When it is finally time to go, he won’t let them touch him. He is wild from lack of sleep and adrenaline. His long curls matted. His face mask damp. The young blonde nurse kneels down in front of him and walks him through removing his own IV, which he does in long slow steps. His anxiety is a different creature than mine.
When the three of us are finally home, my husband goes to bed and I pan fry frozen potstickers. I bathe our son in our shallow tub and leave the sticky tape residue on the crook of his arm. We get into bed together. No stranger will be touching his body for 36 more hours and this comforts me.
Because of Covid only one parent can go in with a child for a procedure and I am the chosen parent. I am the one that has to hold him down for the two shots of ketamine when the oral sedation doesn’t work. “I feel so weird” as his head rolls back and around, “I can't breathe,” and then he is gone. I rub his back and then walk behind the stretcher as they wheel him into the OR. They move his heavy limp body onto the table and roll him onto his belly. These are the images I want to erase by writing them. I hand the carved jasper rabbit my father had given me while pregnant that I brought to the hospital when I gave birth. I have the doctor place the brown stone animal next to my child’s unconscious head. “I don’t want you to tell me about what you are doing to him.” The doctor looks like he is just out of high school. I am tired of small young men holding the power. “Legally, I have to.” “OK,” I say, in the hallway. And then I don’t listen as he names everything that could go wrong, including that they might not get a sample that will be enough. I stop him, “You're not going to let that happen,” I say, looking at his new and thorough face. His mother must be proud.
I almost run across the hospital to the waiting room where my husband is seated under a large mobile made of translucent colored circles. It is meant to look modern and impressive, like an exaggerated cartoonish pastel Calder mobile. He is near a fish tank that houses a small white lobster. He is journaling with his headphones on. I want to kill him for not seeing anything I have. I don’t want to be the keeper of those images.
I don't sit down until they come to tell me it is over and that he has done fine. I wait in the hallway and they wheel him out. Asleep. I see blood on his blue gown and have to look away. Tubes in his nose. My light sleeper dreaming more deeply than natural. The anesthesiologist tells me they kept having to up his meds. “He’s very strong.”
I sit next to him for forty five minutes before he begins to stir. His body begins to shake, his head up and then down. Three warmed blankets and me rubbing him down whispering his name. He couldn’t believe it was over when he finally woke. “I had a dream about a thousand dogs.” And then, “the last thing I remember was being on the ceiling.” “You weren’t on the ceiling,” the nurse says, “I can assure you.” I felt like I was having a glimpse into the teenage world of him experimenting with drugs and I didn’t like this window. “I like that medicine,” he declares. And then asks me what time it is every minute for the next hour. When we are all in the car, away from the hospital, he plays the series of events and the timeline out loud the whole drive home. “We got to the hospital at ten, and then they gave me the shots at eleven?” He wants every minute accounted for, to own the hours that were missing. I want them erased.
Amra Brooks was born and raised in Santa Cruz and Los Angeles, California. Her autobiographical novella California was published by Teenage Teardrops in 2008. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Inventory, Printeresting, Ping Pong: A Literary Journal of the Henry Miller Library, Entropy, This Long Century, index, the LA Weekly, The Encyclopedia Project, and other publications. She is the director of The Raymo Literary Series and co-produces and edits The Electro-Library Podcast. She has taught at the University of California in Santa Cruz and San Diego, and Muhlenberg College. She now directs the Creative Writing Program at Stonehill College in Easton, MA where she is an Associate Professor. She holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She is currently working on a book of creative nonfiction called Your Beginning and Your End and early excerpts can be found in Entropy Magazine and on This Long Century. Currently she lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her family and spends New England winters dreaming of warm afternoons at the ocean, the color green, and ripe tomatoes.
Sui Park is a New York-based artist born in Seoul, Korea. Her work involves creating 3-dimensional flexible organic forms of a comfortable ambiance that are yet dynamic and possibly mystical or illusionary. Park has had several solo exhibitions and public art commissions including Immersion in Black and White at Sapar Contemporary in 2021. She has participated in over 130 exhibitions internationally. Park’s artwork has been acquired by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Oregon and the Saks Fifth Avenue Flagship Store in New York. Numerous mentions of her work and projects have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Hyperallergic, Artnet, Vice and Colossal, as well as other publications. She is represented by Sapar Contemporary in New York City. Sui Park’s education includes an MDes in Interior Architecture at Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA in Environmental Design at Maryland Institute College of Art. Sui Park also holds an MFA and BFA in Fiber Arts at Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea.