room with a view

1 minute read

the vortex

Emerging from the ICU to travel two floors up felt like a ceremonious pilgrimage as nurses and aides gathered tubes and machines and IV’s to ride along-side John’s bed. It felt like I’d been in this room for weeks, a bit of a vortex where time and the world at large was suspended while we waited to learn the fate of our son.

My ex-husband and younger son accompanied John and his medical posse to the new room while I attempted to stuff everything we’d accumulated over the last 4 days into large, green plastic hospital bags to bring to our next destination. I hadn’t been outside the ICU, let alone interacting with the real world since Friday night, so I experienced the emotional equivalent of a bright-light-induced squint as I exited the familiar, dark room and lugged the three big bags with me down the hallway.

I tried to find the various nurses and aides that had literally been lifesavers to us but, as usual in the ICU, they were frantically saving others and I finally gave up, resolving to come back down and say thank you to these incredible people. I left the floor through the door with the “Shhhh” sign on it for the last time and pressed the ‘up’ button for the elevator in the waiting room area where a sad aquarium stood, devoid of fish. But as I waited for the impossibly slow hospital elevator, I looked more closely and saw one lonely fish flitting around the bottom of the tank. I accepted this sighting as a good omen and headed up to the 5th floor- the stroke unit.

We’d told John that he was going to be moving rooms but it didn’t register with him – and of course it wouldn’t because he didn’t remember where he was, or why he was there, from hour to hour. When I got to the new room, he was sleeping, exhausted from the 10 minutes of activity required to move from one floor to the next. The fifth floor was notably more quiet; the first things I noticed were the carpet in the hallways and the rooms were all positioned around a central station that acted as air-traffic control for 20+ rooms full of patients who’d had strokes, or various things that would have a stroke-like impact on the brain.

It didn’t yet occur to me that we were on the stroke unit for a reason – I just knew the room was much larger, triangle in shape and had a peek-a-boo view of downtown Seattle through the thick trees on the hospital campus. I thought about how much John would love that – he’s a kid who loves his city passionately - and I hoped when he woke up and saw the iconic top of the Space Needle it might help him remember, or recover, or whatever it was that he needed to get better.