Waiting

They've given me a thin white blanket, at least, standard hospital issue, after they've wheeled me into the busy emergency room. Brick walls, linoleum floors. Activity all around. Surprisingly (thankfully) the stabbing pain in my stomach has already started to subside. It's manageable. Most of the discomfort, now, comes from the fact that I haven't moved too far from the doors, and cold air continues to blast into the room.

Correction: I'm not exactly in the emergency room. See, there's all sorts of sick people in emergency rooms. Coughing, sneezing, wiping their hands on door handles or couch cushions or whatever. When your immune system isn't doing much of anything in the way of fighting infections on it's own, it is not a good idea to place yourself into the middle of that environment.

In many ways, we would learn later, a hospital is the absolute worst place to be when you've got leukemia, thanks to all the other patients sharing their infections with you. But a hospital is also the absolute best place to be. Leukemia is pretty f***ed up that way.

So we're up against a far wall in this kind of a wide passageway, probably closer to the curb outside than the front desk inside, with thick brick walls and sliding glass doors on either side of my gurney.

The RAF nurse remains nearby (I'll need to remember her name, later, because she was so helpful early on. She sent me a card a month or so into my treatments that I've saved with many others in two thick manila envelopes upstairs. For now, she'll need to be, simply, the RAF nurse. But before this is done, I at least owe it to her to remember her name, if for no other reason than the comfort she gave in that frozen f***ing London hospital).

Somebody had had my mother paged at the airport as soon as we'd arrived at the hospital. The nurse sat in a chair next to me. She told me that mom would be coming soon. Not to worry.

"They can't move you yet," she explained, "because we've already told them that you've got to have an isolated room."

"Don't they have any temporary rooms? Someplace warmer, maybe?"

"Do you want me to see if I can get another blanket for you? Are you cold?"

"No," I told her. "I mean, yes. If they have one. Can you ask them how much longer it will be?"

She got up to find somebody. "You're not exactly a run-of-the-mill patient, now are you? We've got to make sure they can set aside a room for you, a clean one, disinfected. But I'll ask. I'll be right back with the blanket."

And so we waited. The extra blanket, when she returned, helped, but not much. I was getting sleepy. I rolled onto my side, curled up again. Knees. Chest. Whenever the door behind me would swoosh open, I braced myself for the fresh blast of cold air. I would lift my head to see if Mom was coming through them.

We waited and waited and waited until I eventually woke up in a new bed in a narrow room, Mom sitting next to me, edged forward on a folding chair. My right hand dangled off the edge of the bed, wrapped up within both of hers.