for Eddie's mom

Yesterday, our transplant friend, Eddie, returned to 6 West. The transplant floor. The "isolation floor." He is sick again, sick with seizures and trying for four long years to recover from the same transplant that turned by son free in one year. Last night, I sat with Eddie's mom in a too-familiar room, talking about the number of Mother's Days we've spent in hospitals (me: one, her: 4). She reminded me of an essay I had written after Orilus' transplant, when he was re-admitted to the floor. I wrote the essay for her, and our other friend, Crystal, whose little girl didn't survive the transplant after all. So much sadness, so much history, so much suffering.

Kori, my friend, I looked up the essay in my files for you this morning. Here it is again, friend, to make you laugh, to remind you how far you have come, and mostly to say, what other mothers cannot possibly understand, I do. Happy Mother's Day to the most courageous mom I know. Sending love to your room on 6 West today.

On Taking Out the Trash
Written for Kori and Crystal
June 14, 2006
Melissa N. Winchell

I left my house Tuesday for Jimmy Fund Clinic and haven’t been back. We ran out the door—running later than I had planned, because as I was tying my Adidases Orilüs informed me that he wouldn’t eat the free Clinic food. And so I had spent precious minutes scooping out a lunch of mac-and-cheese, digging out the cooler from the basement, scrounging up freezer packs and Cheez-Its, finding Gladware in the mess underneath my kitchen sink.
The last thing I did, as we rushed out the door, juggling three heavy bags—a backpack for Clinic, half-full with meds, a gym bag for overnight “just in case,” and the cooler—was to empty the kitchen trash.
Soon after being re-admitted to 6 West later that same night, I stood outside another mother’s room, recounting the story of bagging up the kitchen trash with nostalgia. This surprised me. But suddenly that single act—glaring accusingly at the trash can, which seemed suddenly too-small for all our weekend laziness—that momentary pause (should I leave it for Jason to discover after work, or empty it myself?), seemed precious. The usually obnoxious bending down below the kitchen sink for a trash bag (why is it that I always seem too tall for things?) seemed painfully usual. And overwhelmingly, I wanted nothing more than to be back in my kitchen, squeaking open the closet door and reaching for a too-full bag of garbage. To be that carefree about throwing out the tangible evidence of being home, of a life-almost-normal.
Instead, I am here at Children’s Hospital again. I don’t have to take out the trash here—the two huge gray receptacles in our room get emptied three times a day, my favorite trash-emptier being a man from Port-au-Prince named Gin. I make a home here as best as I can, but nothing is really mine. I make beds with linens foraged from two linen carts in the back hallway (I will choose nothing but the yellow-edged sheets, because they are the only ones that fit easily, despite the nurse’s insistence that the teal and navy threaded sheets are all the same size). I walk to the laundry room—five floors away—wearing flip-flops while others walk the same halls in business suits and uniform. I feel about the hospital like those who haven’t lived like this can possibly understand—it is one large dormitory to me now, a big place around which I wear my pajamas and messy hair, the Au Bon Pain staff smiling at me in familiarity.
My friends here, women on 6 West, are friends of the strangest sort—when we talk, we sound half insane, laughing too loudly at the craziness of our isolated rooms (one friend’s window gapes only at a brick wall all day, without sky), of the housekeeper that sits in our family room for hours every night watching Spanish soaps instead of doing her job. We lament the babies and children who have already passed. We gossip about the nurses who wake our children too early in the morning to weigh them, or who loudly throw open our doors at night and disrupt our sleep and invade any sense of privacy we still have left. We swear more than any of us ever have, and declare to each other, in our darkest moments, that this place is hell, a place of great suffering. We don’t usually cry about the big stuff, the scary things the doctors tell us before they return to their Starbucks and gleaming white computers, or the undertow of fear and cynicism that bites at our proverbial ankles. We cry, instead, over the littlest of things. The smallest of procedures, after having survived chemotherapy or radiation or surgeries. The afternoon emesis, after days of having watched our children endure tens (is it hundreds now?) of such sickness. The blood counts that crawl forward only to fall back again the following day.
This is life here on 6 West. We don’t take out the trash here. We envy the moms “on the outside” (as if our stay here is some kind of incarceration) who probably took their kids to school this morning (did they even appreciate it, we ask?). We wonder if we can still remember to cook and long for homemade meals, treating ourselves to Bertuccis only when the Resource Manager comes by to offer us a gift card as if we are the hospital’s version of parents on welfare (and, considering what we’re here for, we are). We scoff sometimes at the “stressed out” lives we used to lead and question if we will ever be that worked up about such pettiness again.
On 6 West, we realize what we are no longer free to do on our own, what suffering has surrounded us for so long without our attention, and we begin to pray in earnest for relief. We want to be mindless again. We want to rush out the door, carelessly throw all evidence of time-lived into the backyard, and go about our day. Just like we used to do ourselves, back before we picked through minutes like homeless women hoping to redeem a life for a price we cannot name.