Erin's Mack Truck - Chapter 2

Erin Wakes Up

I played my cards right and was there when Erin woke up, feeling a little sneaky for going to the hospital on the day Rob told me the doctors were backing off the drugs. She’d been sedated all week, as long as she needed oxygen, and the requisite tube down her throat, for her lungs and heart to recover. Now her medical team thought Erin had enough strength to handle the shock of waking up. When I arrived, her face was simply her face again. No tube and no tape running across it. I stared for a minute or more. The sight of her made me want to cry and made me want to dance.

“It’s so good to see her whole face.” Rob looked up and smiled his relaxed smile, the one that had been replaced by exhaustion and worry for the past week. We were like two proud parents looking down at our precious person, full of love and wonder. I pulled up a chair and sat with Rob next to Erin’s bed. She felt close, finally. I imagined her just below a thin layer of gauze, listening to us, warming to our voices, wanting to reemerge.

I stayed for several hours, at one point asking Rob if I’ve overstayed my welcome. “Actually, I enjoy the company,” he said. “I’ve spent a lot of time alone in this room this week.” So I stayed and we chatted. By then, Rob had learned what all the monitors had to say about Erin’s condition and he ticked them off for me: Heart rate, blood pressure, kidney function, and on and on. Despite the complete relevance of the information, the details blurred in my brain.

And then it happened. Erin opened her eyes.

These were not woozy, uncomprehending eyes. These were Erin’s eyes. Eyes of recognition and intelligence. The eyes of a person with a functioning brain. We smiled at her, both of us beaming and ecstatic. She smiled back at us with the look of a broken bird. Her teeth were gray, littered with pieces of skin from her dry, flaking lips. Her lips spread painfully away from her teeth and stuck there, baring her teeth. Then she closed her eyes and did a little shrug, pulling her head into her shoulders like a young girl at the end of a dance recital, embarrassed by the applause. My smile felt dopey, outrageous and totally out of my control. The edges of my mouth attached themselves to the sides of my head and my body felt weak with relief.

Erin turned away from us and rolled her head on the pillow from side to side. She pushed herself up with her elbows, as if to stretch or readjust her position. Her movements had a lurchy, uncoordinated quality, the motion of someone who has not been inside her body for almost a week. Then she opened her eyes again and looked at her hands wrapped in bandages. Earlier that day the skin on them had started coming off in sheets, exposing pink, fetal-looking skin so a nurse had wrapped them against infection. Out of the bandages, multiple tubes connected Erin’s veins to bags of fluid behind her. Erin lifted her hands — first the left, then the right, then the left again, the tubes tugged like puppet strings and she the puppet. After a few seconds she drifted back to sleep. Rob and I looked at each other, welled up and amazed by this brief visit after nearly a week of taking things a minute at a time.

Erin repeated the same sequence several times over the next 20 minutes: open eyes, see us smiling, smile back, turn away, roll head from side to side, adjust body in bed, lift hands like puppet, drift back to sleep. Each time, her feet slid off the edge of the bed and Rob and I lifted them back into place, he on one side, me on the other. Though the rest of her body looked a million times better, Erin’s feet looked like hell, purple, bloated, and like they didn't belong to Erin. Seemingly, they took the hit so the rest of her body could recover. Tired of bad news, we made sure Erin’s feet remained on the bed and focused on her re-emerging upper half.

A young doctor in a starched white shirt came in and asked Erin questions. He spoke loudly, jarringly. I wished he would soften his voice but Erin responded, opened her eyes large and nodded her head. Yes, she knew she was in the hospital. Yes, she knew who Rob was. No, she did not know what day it was. No, she was not in pain.

The next time Erin opened her eyes, she grimaced at the sight of our smiles and made no attempt to smile back. I still couldn’t control my exaggerated grin, and whenever she opened her eyes, I said “Hi” in the voice I would use with an infant or small animal. Within a couple of weeks, Erin would tell her side of the story and it would go something like this, “I had no idea where I was and all I could see was you and Rob with these GOOFY smiles on your faces!” This became the story I wanted to hear again and again, the story that made me laugh, bubbling up with the joy of that moment every time I heard it.

But the look on Erin’s face then clearly told me I had become annoying, so I stepped out of her view and watched from the small alcove at the foot of her bed. The next time Erin opened her eyes, she raised her hand toward Rob. He moved to hold it and she pulled it away. She held it out again, again he tried to hold it, again she pulled it away. The next moment he understood she was motioning to the wall, to a poster he’d made with pictures of their family. He pulled it off the wall and brought it over to the bed.

“This is our daughter.” Erin nodded with instant recognition.

“And this is our new baby.” Their friend had taken a photo of Erin and Rob and the new baby within hours of his birth, before things had gone haywire. Erin is holding the baby and Rob is leaning down kissing his head. The photo looked impossibly beautiful and far away. Erin looked at the photo, blank.

“This is our new baby boy. You gave birth to him on Saturday.” Erin rolled her head away and then looked back.

When she fell back asleep, Rob came over and sat in the alcove across from me. We didn’t speak. Rob put his head in his hands and cried, a man cry, a few moments of labored, painful breathing, and then silence. 

We sat together, not speaking, looking at Erin. The Charles River reflected late afternoon light through the window behind her.