Chapter 2: Laundry
Friday, May 21 - 3:42am
Olivia’s head was heavy in her hands. The chair next to Betsy’s bed in the ER was just a standard waiting room chair, and there was no way to rest comfortably in it. Ever since Nico and their pastors had left the hospital, things had gone downhill. Nurses and med students had been in and out at regular intervals, adding to the many beeps and buzzes that kept Olivia teetering on the edge of sleep but never quite making it to the other side. Each intruder assured her that they would be moving to a more comfortable room soon.
At one point, just after midnight, Olivia had tried crawling into the narrow hospital bed with Betsy, but after ten minutes, her daughter, in a sleepy haze, had said, “Mama? Could you get out, please?”
“Of course, sweetheart,” Olivia had whispered softly, kissing Betsy on the head before shimmying out of the bed—more thankful than ever for the yoga habit she’d started and kept for three years. Mastering pigeon pose wasn’t, however, going to help her get through the night on this chair.
Worse than the discomfort and interruptions were the guilt and shame Olivia felt as she watched her daughter sleep. Not tossing and turning, not bored, but entirely dormant. Olivia thought back over the previous week. The girls had come home from school with a cold, which was nothing new, but Betsy hadn’t gotten better. She had continued to lay around whenever she could, barely making it to her bed after school for a nap, and then first to go to bed each night.
For the last two days, she had eaten little, which had prickled Olivia’s maternal spidey-sense. Why didn’t I act sooner? She moaned outwardly and cupped her eyes with her hands, as if doing so could calm the swirling fears roiling within her, as though her hands could push away every “what if” that flitted across her mind.
There was a soft knock on the door, and one of the doctors—the attending, maybe?—poked his head in. “Hi, Mrs. Rodriguez. Dr. Groth again. We’re ready to move Betsy upstairs.” He looked down at her chair and smiled sympathetically. “You’ll both be more comfortable up there.”
She nodded and thanked him. He turned on dim lights, and a nurse and two medical students followed him in. A woman pushing a computer on a rolling cart followed them both, and the tiny room felt comically full. Dr. Groth and the nurse pulled their elbows in tight, explaining what they were doing as they went: moving Betsy’s IV fluids from a standard pole to one on her bed, checking her stats one more time, pulling this and that from one place to another.
Betsy stirred while they worked. Dr. Groth smiled down at her. “We’re moving you to a new room, Betsy. It’ll be a lot less beeping up there, I promise.”
The woman with the cart—Barbara, according to her nametag—started asking Olivia all of the questions she had already answered at least twice: when did symptoms start, was Betsy on any medication, who was their insurance through, and so on.
When Barbara had finished her interrogation, long nails still clack-clacking against the keyboard, yet another person walked into the room. “Hi, I’m Jim, transport services. I’ll be taking you and Betsy up to 5C.”
He started unlocking the bed’s wheels; Betsy was definitely awake now. The prospect of moving woke up her curious side, and Olivia realized with a jerk that she hadn’t seen her girl look that excited since before she caught cold. “Where’s 5C?”
Jim the transport man hesitated. “It’s up on the fifth floor. Nice place, I promise. All right, looks good, let’s go. Mom, I’ll let you go out first and hang a right down the hall.”
Three badge-only checkpoints, two elevators, and several windowless hallways later, they entered an open atrium, the ceiling above them high and covered with metallic bird statues, ready to take flight. There was a wall of windows to their right; to their left, the walkway was open to the third floor below them, a maze of tables and greenery that made the whole thing feel more like a garden than a hospital.
They passed through the atrium and onto the 5C unit. They turned down the hallway, stopping at the last door on the right. Room 13. How helpful, Olivia thought. She wasn’t superstitious, but 13 didn’t feel like an auspicious number, given their circumstances.
“Hi, Mrs. Rodriguez. I’m Shanna, and I’ll be Betsy’s nurse.” The woman was petite, wearing blue scrubs, and had her hair pulled into a tight, low bun. “My friends are going to get Betsy situated, so I thought I’d take a minute to show you around.”
Exhausted and struggling against the bright lights after such a long, dark ER stint, Olivia was desperate to sink into the soft chair she had noticed in Betsy’s room, but she was also too tired to argue with the nurse.
When they stepped into the hallway, Olivia realized she had not even noticed the wall opposite them: it was covered in bright blue vinyl siding, with a roof overhand at the ceiling and exterior windowsills, like a cheerful cottage out of a fairy tale had been plopped in the middle of a hospital.
“This is our family house,” Shanna explained as she pushed through the door. It was less cheery on the inside: yellow paint felt dated rather than warm, and the furniture was clearly commercial, despite the effort to make it feel like a normal, open-concept living space. The industrial ice machine and coffee maker also screamed “hospital waiting room.”
“This is where visitors come when they can’t be in the room for some reason or want to make a meal or something.” Shanna pointed to her left. “And through there is the laundry.”
Olivia blinked. “Laundry. Why would I need to do laundry?”
Shanna looked at her blankly and didn’t say a word. “Oh, just some people need to. Sometimes.” She gestured back toward the door. “I’ll take you up by the nurse’s station and then we’ll go back to Betsy’s room.”
She followed Shanna down the hall, nodded dumbly as they looked into the “nutrition room,” a glorified closet with crackers and baby formula and popsicles. “We’re real generous with the popsicles around here,” Shanna chuckled, trying to push some levity at Olivia, but there was no room for it.
Laundry. Why would we need to do laundry? She couldn’t think of anything else.
“Umm, Mrs. Rodriguez? Are you with me?” Shanna’s voice was saying from far away. “Have you eaten recently? Do you think Betsy would want something?”
The spell of her thoughts broke and she could see the nurse standing before her, cautious but not surprised. Why was no one surprised by any of this? Why did they act like this was normal?
She wet her lips with her tongue. “I think I ate dinner before we came in. Betsy didn’t eat much…”
When her voice trailed off, Shanna squeezed into the nutrition room/closet and opened a refrigerator. “It’s not name brand, but we have some soda, if you’d like. Or juice. And there are plenty of crackers—graham or saltine, your choice.”
At that moment, Olivia’s stomach rumbled. The nurse’s choice of “soda” instead of “pop” registered, but she couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge it or ask where she was from or make a we-say-pop-here-in-Minnesota joke. “Yeah, maybe. I guess a soda would be a good idea. Maybe two?”
“Of course,” Shanna said and handed her two mini cans. “And I’ll grab an orange juice for Betsy, just in case, okay?”
“Yeah, good idea,” she whispered and followed Shanna back down the hallway. Betsy was already asleep in her new bed, and whoever arranged the room had pulled a soft chair up next to it for Olivia. A lump rose in her throat at the kindness of it.
“...and I’ll be back in a little bit to check on you guys, okay?” Shanna was saying.
Olivia gave her a nod and sat down in the chair. The arms were wooden, but there was plenty of room, and the back and seat were soft and comfortable—at least compared to the waiting room chair. She popped the top on her discount soda, the squeal loud in the quiet that had enveloped them.
She took a sip. “Why would we need laundry?” she whispered into the dark. Despite her exhaustion, she sat there for a long while, nursing her drink and her questions.
*Disclaimer: This series is a fictionalized account of when our eldest daughter battled a life-threatening leukemia. (She’s healthy now, praise God!) The medical parts of the story mirror real events that happened; the rest, including the characters, are entirely fiction.
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