| A reluctant visitor |
| 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. A reluctant visitor |