My mom’s face is held together by a surgeon’s delicate wire. They tell me that her jawbones will heal with time. The same for her broken wrist, resting in a Swiss cheese-shaped wedge, made of Styrofoam. They say it is needed for proper circulation. The cream- and orange-colored walls of the hospital on Madison Avenue sicken me. The smells of fruit cocktail, cold cuts and unchanged bedpans hang in the air.

Death creeps along the hallways of the Intensive Care Unit waiting for something–or rather, someone to snatch from this world and take to another. Staking out an inconspicuous corner, Death simply waits. I suspect on some mornings it tiptoes behind the nurses’ station to hear if Mr. So-and-So, who has liver cancer, or Ms. So-and-So, who suffers from pneumonia, will fully recover. Then their fate, I think, comes down to a simple coin toss.

I have never fancied visits to the hospital no matter if I am watching an episode of ER” or if I am wandering the sterile hallways of one in real life, as I did years ago on a preschool class trip. I don’t know proper hospital etiquette either. You can send get-well cards, balloons and bouquets of flowers. But what do you say to a relative or friend who, after having surgery, is left to ponder his or her own fate during sponge baths and snacks of lime Jell-O and crushed pain medicine? Visiting hospitals always tests my patience and faith in science and medicine. And I usually leave visiting hours thinking about life, death and the gods.

The visits I make to the hospital during the winter of 1992 are not exempt from my feelings about hospitals and emergency rooms. I enter my mom’s room on the ICU floor one afternoon in January and stare at her–at her brown skin–as she sleeps. Her nose is not the same nose that appeared on her “other” face–the one before the plastic surgery. Her old nose is now a memory left in our photo albums, in the years before multiple sclerosis paralyzed the cells of her body, turning them into zombies.

Dried blood stains the gauze sticking out like walrus teeth from her nostrils. Her face is still swollen. They are able to get her teeth back into place, I recall my dad telling me. I do not notice them because I am too busy staring at the tracheotomy the doctors have cut into the center of my mom’s throat so she can breathe on her own. I sit next to her on the hospital bed after a day’s worth of school, staring at the blue button on the side of her forehead. I am told that if she starts to choke, I will have to cut the wire around the button. Somehow I know I will not have to cut it because she is a survivor. Several weeks later, they tell me she is recovering nicely. They say she will soon have to switch hospitals. She will need weeks of occupational and physical therapy.

For most of my life, I have been the resident witness to my mother’s battle with multiple sclerosis, a disease that changed her life as well as my family’s. I am the one who sees her fall over a bag of dog food in the pet supply aisle of a grocery store. “Is she drunk?”, a stranger asks. No one stops to help her. I am there when she cannot control her bladder, and later we pretend we do not notice that she changes clothes. I am there when she hits the floor one Ground Hog’s Day and breaks her shoulder. She can no longer wear high-heel shoes or walk without the aid of a cane, which is later replaced by a walker.

My mom’s eyes are the same. I discover, though, that she is no longer perfect. And on January 20, 1992, I am the lone witness when she loses control of our Buick Le Sabre and sends us head on into a telephone pole. I see her broken face and blood on her long, black winter coat and on the front seat of the car. This time someone stops to help. What overwhelms me that day, more than the car accident, is seeing my dad cry. He is sitting on a bench in the hallway of the emergency room. I can see his face from my spot on the metal table as I wait to have my arm x-rayed. I see him wiping his eyes. He is no longer macho. His tough-guy, truck-driver image is gone, and the tears seem to ooze from him uncontrollably. I cannot hear the words my uncle whispers to my dad.

As I wait for the technician to return, I pray for my mom’s recovery. Meanwhile, she is several rooms and hallways away being worked on by doctors and specialists and nurses. She will live, I reassure myself again and again. She does not have a choice because I need her. And now as an adult, I still need her. I want her to tell me how proud she is when I am honored for my work, how to handle life’s let-downs and how important it is to be spiritually grounded. The woman, who fought for her recovery in a hospital room 10 years ago, has to live. The woman, who read bedtime stories to me and taught me how to pray, must live. If not for herself, she must do it for me. “Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the lord my soul to keep If I should die before I wake…”

The woman, who taught me about English and sentences and words, must survive. Eventually, with our prayers, love and assistance from doctors and physical therapists, my mom does just that and more. And she comes home just in time for Mother’s Day, just in time for summer.”

In The Fray Contributor