Just Take Another Step

At the hospital emergency unit, we identified ourselves at reception and were asked to wait. A nurse came out in scrubs and looked at us when the receptionist told her we were Mark’s family. The nurse then looked at me with a grave face and quickly averted her eyes before returning to the Accident and Emergency department. The receptionist asked us to wait a little longer, that they were just getting someone to escort us in. She spoke quietly and more politely than she had on my first request for information. She too averted her eyes quickly, but I caught her looking at us as we took a seat when I was explaining to the kids that we had to wait. I didn’t like her look. At about this time, my heart lost beats and it felt as if it had started to beat in a different sphere, outside of myself. My brain too seemed to separate, or at least my mind. My sense of wholeness went away. I was outside of myself, leaving the ‘body’ part of me on its own to go through the motions of what was expected of me. However, the ‘awareness’ part was somehow not at all the same as it was before. It sat at my shoulder and watched the proceedings. It was not consciousness that left me, but more the knowingness of me. What does that mean? It seems so hippy. I cannot describe the reality I felt at that time in the same way that I might feel reality at any other time. I felt separated and outside of myself for months, from that moment in hospital. My heart seemed to have become a throat organ and my breathing was shallow. Breathe, Breathe. Keep it together. Get something from the vending machine for the kids to keep our minds somewhere else. I wonder if that’s why they have vending machines in hospital emergency units. Is it just to distract? Finally, someone came and called us in. With her head down, she ushered us through a maelstrom of ambulance officers, nurses and doctors, trollies holding patients, and a few police officers. I saw her hand come out to guide us somewhere. I saw it moving slowly, so slowly. It was going to point to that room. The Quiet Room. The sign on the door blasted its letters at me as if they were drilling into my eyes. The minute they ushered us in into the Quiet Room, I knew there was no hope. The quiet room is where they take families when the loved one in the emergency unit has died or is very near to death. It is quiet, not only because it’s important for the family to hear the news clearly but also for the rest of the department. They cannot hear you scream when you hear the news. “NO!” said my head. “No! Not the quiet room.” My head was filled with screaming. No, not the quiet room, we can’t go to the quiet room, our family can’t go to the quiet room, other people go to the quiet room, no, I don’t want to go to the quiet room. I said, “Thank you,” and we entered and sat quietly. My son said, “So this is nice, Quiet room. Is this just a room for waiting that isn’t as noisy as the big waiting room?” “Yes,” I said, “just a bit more comfortable when we’re waiting for someone who needs a lot of tests.” I had been in that quiet room before, as a twenty-year-old when I was finishing my training and doing my stint in A&E. The officious sister who gave me the job, wearing her crisp white dress with perfect white shoes, impatient with young student nurses, said, “Take his wife to the quiet room. That way, if she breaks down we can handle it better.” The patient was in the resuscitation room and I had to ask his wife for his details. The wife did break down, in fact she screamed at me for being so stupid as to ask such questions when her husband was in there, and maybe dying. He did die, and she screamed some more, and I never wanted to go into that quiet room again. So we sat. For a long time. My son asked me about next year’s subject choices at school and my daughter chatted about a holiday that Mark had planned for January. Sometimes they asked what was taking so long and other times they read or looked at their homework. We were all calm, on the outside, but my head was screaming.