Andrea Mauk, Slipping

She didn’t remember the order of occurrences that put her in the hospital twice in one week. The first time, it was for surgery. Having an undesirable growth removed. It was the second time that felt foggy to her. She remembered asking if she could act in the play that weekend, and the doctors assured her it was back to normal life for her, but then – there was the outdoor movie, the unseasonable cold that bore a chill through her bones, the rave she didn’t attend though it thumped through neighborhood upon neighborhood of century-old bungalows surrounding the university. She was pretty sure it was the incessant drone of the trance music that stirred the nausea within her and gathered every iota of her transient pain into a migraine that knifed her above her right eye. 

When her fever shot up like someone had hit the high striker at a carnival, she called 911, but the ambulance didn’t come because there were too many kids at the Monster Massive experimenting with cocktails of street drugs and their parents’ prescriptions, leaving no resources.

As she retraced the details in her mind, she realized none of it mattered because here she was, catheterized and bound to the bed by the pneumatic pump that applied pressure to her calves in sequence. Would somebody ever turn it off? Take all this equipment away? She watched the IV needle working its way out of her swollen arm, the blood beginning to carve a stream across her wrist onto the crumpled white sheets. Then the alarm. Blip, blip, blip. The saline bag was empty. She swore she would memorize the nurse’s sequence of moves when he came in so that she would be able to operate the annoying machine on her own, but then the  lady down the hall began the incomprehensible yelling, and who could concentrate?  “Aagbagbagbagbogboggoggog.”

How did she come to be on the same wing as this yelling woman? She had walked out of the house, up and down the block, a blanket thrown over her flannel nightgown. She wailed like a mourner to get someone’s attention. The young man across the street borrowed his parents’ van and drove her to the emergency room at the hospital where her surgery occurred. That was kind. As soon as he slid the door open, she puked everywhere. In the van, outside the door, on his Adidas. He was probably sorry for volunteering.

Her lunch sat untouched on the rolling tray. Dry chicken breast. Mixed vegetables. Salad with a wedge of lemon instead of dressing. “Your BMI is 33,” the doctor, possibly Jenny Craig’s brother, acted as if it was a death sentence. It had been the same inedible meal three days running. The rumbles of hunger were only outdone by the pain that arrived every evening at dusk. She concentrated on the hum of the wound vac as she watched the bloody fluid her body was producing being sucked through the hose into a cannister but even such hideousness couldn’t numb the pain that had collected in the open wound, the wound that carved a gorge across her formerly perfect abdomen. 

She cried, but her sobs were so close to inaudible that they went unnoticed, especially since the woman down the hall, whom she imagined to be nearly 100 and stricken with rheumatoid arthritis and dementia, kept yelling disorganized syllables in the most grating tone. She wanted to curl into fetal position and hold her wound, sing to it, but it was buried, packed with gauze and cotton strips and tape, and it was prone to infection. 

The sound of the yelling woman was angry, explosive, and ten times worse than the hypnotic techno drone that followed her from the rave to the hospital and into her nightmares. As she began to drift into a light, anguished sleep, she felt the sensation of her body parts slipping towards her feet. The wind kicked up outside, banged on her window like a banshee, and when she looked in that direction, she saw the dead from the morgue, bats with wings folded, hanging upside down, relishing in her suffering. She knew they weren’t really there, but the vision persisted.

The sight shocked her so that she screamed. “The window,” she pointed, but the nurse, when one finally came, straightened her sheets and suggested a morphine drip, “You control the medicine. That way you give yourself only what you need.”

She struggled to turn her body away from the window. She tried to ignore the thumping on the glass as she waited for the nurse to return. As she began to doze, she felt herself become small and crawl inside herself through her open wound. She remembered the feeling of the doctor scraping away the infected tissue during the second surgery, all because Cousin Dolores died from anesthesia during a DNC, and she was scared to come to the same end. Now, inside her body, there were tunnels and shoots and pulleys and conveyor belts and gears that workers, neither male or female or robots, operated in perfect synchronization. She felt herself pulled toward a gear with the intensity of a magnetic attraction. This was the gear that made her stomach churn. She tried to work against the flow, stop the forward movement, but the tiny laborers inside her body simply ran her over and stomped on her one by one as they turned the apparatus. She managed to escape being trampled but she couldn’t find the way out of herself.

The nurse returned with the morphine drip and began asking questions, but she couldn’t answer while so small and deep inside her own body. She thought of trying to make her way towards her ears, but then, “Aagbagbagbagbogboggoggog." The woman down the hall’s yell seemed to expel her from her innards. The nurse was warning her not to push the button unless she couldn’t stand the pain. Who was she kidding? She was already tripping without narcotics involved. “Who is that woman making all that noise down the hall?” The nurse looked at her, puzzled at first. “Oh, you mean 523 B.” Then she answered her walkie-talkie in Tagalog, turned and left the room.

Her pain caused the room to rock like a ship on choppy water. Whoever was banging on the window persisted. The ninth episode of Cops spilled across the TV screen. She had the button in her hand. The morphine drip. She could tap it lightly and relieve some pain, but she was afraid, no, petrified that it would magnify the situation. Then the woman yelled with such force, she jumped, and she felt her insides slipping out through her wound. She held her breath, tried not to move, but the woman continued, “Fub fub rabrabgub. Aagbagbag- bagbogboggoggog,” and every time she did, her insides slipped a little more. It wasn’t her organs and bones slipping. It was her, her essence, her “self.” 

The nurse entered her room again, “I’m sorry for running out. Another nurse needed help lifting a patient.” She stared at the nurse, wondering if she could tell that her soul was slipping out of her body through the wound. “I just want to test the pump and make sure it’s dispensing properly.” The nurse’s index finger tapped the morphine drip gently, daintily, and she felt herself rejoin with her body. Her corpus mundi and animus mundi merged again followed by an immense rush of relief. 

She would spend the hours between midnight and dawn with one thought on her mind that had never been more significant: hold yourself together. The wind moaned tirelessly. The thumping on the windowpane amplified. The horrendous sounds continued to erupt from the woman down the hall’s mouth just as she would begin to drift into slumber. Each time the woman’s vocalizations filled the air, she felt her being slipping from her shell. She held tight to her wound dressing, but it made no difference. With each new “aagaagaagbaggog,” everything that made her “her” slipped, and the more it separated from her body, the less effect a quick tap on the morphine pump had, until finally, all of her intelligence, her emotions, her senses, and her sensuality were lying in a gigantic yet amoebalike blob on the floor. It was useless. The slipping was inevitable. She winced as she gazed at the slithery pink sack of herself on the floor and wondered how she was still able to think… and breathe. 

At 5:15 A.M. according to her cell phone, the yelling woman was drowned out by a code blue announcement that blared through the corridors. The scurry of footsteps could be heard running up and back, and voices infused with a heavy dose of stress. She wondered for whom the code was called. Was it her? Could they see the blob, the puddle of her being writhing helplessly on the linoleum? 

The code wasn’t for her. No one on the floor realized that she had slipped out of herself, and now, to her dismay, she began to feel a lifting sensation in the shell of her body, her abandoned bones and organs. She held so tight to the bedrails, the call button, the IV cord, anything she could get her hands on as she fought gravity in a feeble attempt to remain in the room, or the realm. The banging on the window now reassured her even though she assumed that the dead were there, hanging upside down, coaxing her. 

As the sun spread warm light across the sky, a new nurse entered the room. He erased the names on the whiteboard hanging on the wall and then stepped back to make sure his handwriting was legible. Her eyes widened and locked on the nurse’s feet that were mere centimeters from the pink sack of her core that had slipped onto the floor. He stepped back and pivoted, and as he did, she screamed in anticipation of the pain it would cause her. She began to pant until hyperventilation was assured. “Hit the pump,” he told her. “Here, I’ll do it.” His fingers landed firmly on the button, but the release of morphine didn’t calm her. “What’s wrong?” He followed her eyes to the floor. “What are you staring at? There’s nothing on the floor. Nothing’s there… oh! You’re slipping. I see what’s happening. It’s very common with open wounds.” He yanked the wound vac cord from the wall, and then walked to the window. “Who opened this? It must have been banging all night with how windy it was. What a spooky Halloween,” he pulled the window in and latched it. “Especially in this creepy old hospital.” 

As he spoke, the absence of the whirring wound vac noise calmed her, but the absence of the woman’s babbling disturbed her. “I will send someone in to check the wound and change your dressing. Let me reassure you, you are 100% completely together. No part of you has slipped out. Like I said, it’s a common sensation.”

“Where’s the lady that kept yelling?” she asked Scott. He spun his head around, “Who?” She shifted her gaze. “Never mind.” Scott patted her on the shoulder and tugged her sheets tightly around her. “Try to relax. Everything’s fine.”

“Everything’s fine,” she repeated to herself, rearranging herself to face the window. There, in the chair in the corner sat the lady, even older, more hollow-eyed, craggier and bent by time than she’d imagined. “Hold yourself together, girl,” the woman laughed and then exploded into a boisterous “Aagbagbagbagbogboggoggog."