In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 0,63
ambulance with Anna’s inert body has stirred things up for Caroline, things that have nothing to do with where we are now.
I’m sorry, she says in a low voice, but I think your friend is dying.
She means I must prepare myself, but how do you prepare for this. When I go into the ward I have to walk through a crowd of horizontal patients in crisis before I find Anna. She’s an alarming blue colour and sucking air from an oxygen canister with a hoarse, noisy effort. An arrogant doctor is strutting about, dispensing opinions like favours, and when I ask him what her chances are he waves his hand airily. She must go to ICU, he says, then we will see.
Soon afterwards she’s admitted to the ICU ward upstairs and suddenly all the commotion comes to a stop, converted into the painful stillness of waiting. Anna is behind a closed door, out of sight, and the rest of us must sit outside, in a dirty room full of plastic chairs. The attention is all on that door, which hardly ever opens. When it does it’s usually to allow a nurse or doctor out, who will call the name of a patient aloud. When Anna’s name is called, which it often is on that first day, I must run with the script in hand to a separate wing of the hospital, to the familiar scene of clamour and struggle in the pharmacy, and return with whatever drugs or emergency equipment are required, and these missions are a relief from the waiting.
It dawns on me very quickly that, without anybody to help, I can never leave this room. Every hour of every day somebody must be on hand. My dismay at this prospect is tempered when I start speaking to a few of the other people around me, the stories in that room put my own plight into perspective. One family has been taking it in turns, relieving each other in six hour shifts, for months. One woman, who has nobody to assist her, has been literally living there with a bag of clothes and a toothbrush, for five weeks and no end in sight.
Caroline has gone back to the village with the hotel owner and the night yawns away in front of me like a black and empty space. But not long afterwards a Dutch tourist by the name of Sjef arrives, whom I know a little from the past two seasons. He’s come to take over for the night, he says, so that I can go home and sleep. His kindness makes me cry, but I can’t bring myself to leave. It’s my expectation, though I don’t say it aloud, that my friend will die tonight and I want to be here when it happens.
So Sjef and I undertake this first vigil together. At eight o’clock, to my surprise, there’s a stirring in the room, everybody gathering around the door of the ward. What’s going on, I ask, and somebody explains that twice a day, in the night and the morning, the friends and family of patients are allowed inside for five minutes. So we pass into the inner sanctum, with its two rows of beds and its atmosphere of spectral suspension. Anna is on a heart-lung machine, with all kinds of tubes and wires pushed into her. Her face has returned to its normal colour, but in the midst of so much humming technology she herself seems lifeless, a form wrapped around emptiness, a version of the corpse she wants so badly to be.
I touch her hand and whisper to her. You have to fight, I tell her, you have to come back to us. There’s no response at all, and then a nurse walks briskly through, ushering us out.
That first night is very long and almost sleepless. Aside from the missions to the pharmacy, the hours pass in a tedium under the fluorescent lights. The bathroom which everyone must share is filthy, and has two bins overflowing with hospital refuse from which rats scatter in all directions every time the door is opened. When he eventually lies down on the floor to sleep, he puts screws of newspaper into his ears to stop the ubiquitous cockroaches from crawling in.
But morning returns eventually and the door is opened again. Anna is lying exactly as she was last night, a princess frozen by a witch’s spell. For her there is no dirty floor to endure, no passing time, no