I can feel my molecules.
At least, that’s how it seems.
The two plastic prongs in my nostrils smell, inexplicably, like cold lo mein. Thick oxygen, carried on water, tunnels into the crevices of my skull, down my throat, blowing into the little Fibonacci flowers inside my lungs.
I can’t tell if I am sleepy or unconscious.
They — men, women. Scrubs, clogs, masks. They come in and out. Plug me into things, unplug me from things. Ask how I am feeling.
When I first arrived they were sharp — their lines, their faces, their stories. This is Caroline, her daughter has ADHD and we talk medication and the absurdities of children who honest to God have no way of knowing whether their shoes are tied or not.
This is Junio, who has two kids in college and has taken up watercolors.
Joanne is a pain in the ass. When she pokes at my IV it hurts and I don’t think she cares much.
But as the urgent care center comes to life — sunshine, shift change, people in the hallways — bustle — I am fading. The lines are melting into each other.
“You had a good long sleep,” they tell me. Three hours. I don’t remember forgetting whether I slept. Maybe I was unconscious.
They need to move me to a hospital with an intensive care unit.
Paramedics and a stretcher, like an old out-of-focus home movie playing in another room.
Cogitate, Dad would say.
My brain is my instrument, my tool, my safeguard.
“Your ambulance can’t do the heavy oxygen?” I manage.
“Right. It’s a twenty minute drive to the other hospital.”
Risk assessment. My brain is my weapon and my shield.
“How long to wait for an ambulance that can transport with heavy oxygen?”
Glances.
There’s the problem.
I do not want to be intubated here, where there is no ICU.
“Let’s go,” I say.
The tube hugging my face is pulled off, a lighter one looped over my ears.
The difference is immediate. My molecules; they’re screaming.
In the ambulance. “I’m here behind you,” the paramedic says. “I’m watching your vitals.”
Cogitate. It is my weapon and my shield. Bring air in. Send air out to make room for more air in. I am now just me, and my windpipes, and my lungs, manufactured in my mother’s body in the winter of 1975.
I am in a room.
“We’re going to roll you, Elizabeth.”
A great tug and the sheet beneath my body lifts and I am airborne in a sling like a giant whale swinging below a helicopter. I consider what it would be like to be dropped, but then I am on a bed.
Hands, manufactured in their mothers’ bodies. They’re on my body, turning my body, flitting over my body the way my hands flit over a keypad. Another roll and I am naked, my middle-aged woman’s body, with the sags and the split-skin stretch marks.
I am growing attachments — electrodes, wires, tubes.
“Sharp pinch,” they say.
The pinch hurts like a motherfucker. I don’t move.
They bring back the oxygen that hugs my face. I think that it will recharge me like in a video game, the little lines going up, up, up, boom! Energized.
No. I can tell the oxygen is helping me keep myself alive. But there is no relief.
Paperwork. Advance directives. Yes to intubation. No to resuscitation if I am brain dead. If I die, call my mother.
I have two IVs and still they stick me with more needles.
“What is your criteria for intubation?” I say to the room.
They do not answer me.
They leave me with my weapon and my shield.
I am hypoxic, on the highest possible dose of oxygen. When I breathe, a thousand needles try to burst my Fibonacci blooms. For 24 hours I have been getting worse.
I sit inside myself, at the intersection of my windpipe and the joining of my lungs. It hurts so much.
They think I am unconscious for the CT scan. I have not spoken for hours. They stick things into my IVs and into the flesh of my wrists and I become like a hand-shy puppy, flinching. I don’t know where the next shock of pain will land.
“Please walk me through what you are doing,” I ask the man, the CT-scan man who is fiddling with the back end of a needle that is snuggled into my vein like a kid in a sleeping bag.
“What do you mean?” he says.
“Tell me what you are going to do before you do it.”
He ignores me. The needle sticks keep coming and I use all the strength of my ears and my brain to predict them but I can’t.
I cry to the nurse. Please get me home to my babies, I say. I love them so much.
I am alone with my body in the dark, my body and me, and I think how strange it is that we have never talked. I apologize to my body. I thank my body. She has been with me all along and I never noticed her much except to yell at her for being fat. She has been running Survival Instinct as a subroutine in the background for many, many years.
If my body dies tonight, I will be sad about my book. About my cream-yellow office with the cats and the plants and the dreams.
I will be so sad for the kids, who deserve to be cared for and loved for the remaining years of their childhoods and beyond.
Maybe I will see my dad tonight.
I guess that is OK. Either I will go back to Coven House and the world I am building, or it will fade and the lines of it blur into oblivion, but I might see Dad.
I can feel my molecules.
I settle into them — hello molecules — and tell them we’ll be camping together tonight, breath by breath, sitting vigil over our very selves, pulling together to bring in the oxygen, softening together to let it out, pulling together to bring it in again.
We sit in the darkness, and the beeping and the agony; broken. And whole.