Erin's Mack Truck - Chapter 1

I sat in Erin’s driveway and wondered what to do. I went there to make dinner in celebration of Erin and Rob’s new baby. Inside were supposed to be Erin, Rob, their new baby boy and redheaded five-year-old who, if tradition held, would put on a princess outfit and sing songs from Annie. But no one answered the door. Erin’s car was gone. Where would the whole family go four days after Erin gave birth?

A black pickup pulled into the driveway with Rob’s twin sister and older brother in it. We all got out.  Adrienne looked pale and shaken.

“I don’t know how much you know,” she said.

Cars whizzed by as Adrienne told me what had happened in the last 24 hours. Everything around us looked grey, the lawns, the houses, the street.

“They came home with the baby yesterday. Erin felt sick and had the chills. When they got here, she was too weak to nurse so Rob brought her to the emergency room." When Erin and Rob arrived, the doctors couldn’t figure out what was going on and then Erin couldn’t breathe. She was anesthetized, intubated, and rushed by ambulance to Massachusetts General Hospital. Rob followed with the baby in his car. The surgeons at MGH, still not sure what was wrong, performed an emergency hysterectomy. Erin was already in heart failure and kidney failure.

“When they operated, they found a massive amount of infection all over her kidneys,” Adrienne said. “They cleaned up the infection and she’s starting to stabilize. But right now no one knows what’s going to happen.”

“Where is she?”

“Mass General. In the ICU. Rob is with her.”

Adrienne started to shiver. My mind felt like a bag of marbles full of round, hard pieces of information. I suggested we go inside. Rob’s brother, Jeff, reached into his truck’s lockbox and pulled out two brown bottles.

“I don’t know if you drink beer but I’ve got an extra if you want one,” he said to me.

“I’ll take a beer.” I’d never met Rob’s brother but could have hugged him for this one moment of normalcy.

Inside, I asked Adrienne and Jeff to explain the whole thing to me again.

“It doesn’t even look like Erin,” Jeff said. “Last night you could not tell it was her. She was blown up like a balloon.”

The doctors told Rob that if Erin did make it, she might not regain complete brain function. They didn’t know how long her brain had gone without oxygen. She might have to learn how to speak again, how to use her hands. Her personality might change.

When I got home, I told my husband this was Erin’s Mack truck. People like to say, “You never know, I could get hit by a Mack truck tomorrow.” It’s a cavalier nod to the uncertainty of everyday life — sometimes it actually happens. Everything was going fine for Erin and then, POW. Full-speed, head-on collision.

***

The next day, Rob met Chris and me outside the entrance to Blake 7. Erin and Rob started dating while Erin and I were on the same rowing team. She coxed our boat, meaning she coached us over a microphone that carried her voice down the boat’s length. For months after she met Rob, that microphone delivered an unseemly number of sentences that started with, “My boyfriend is sooo cute...” Several members of the rowing team developed crushes on Rob and one woman, at least 20 years his senior, tried to play footsie with him under the table at a team banquet.

Rob had been awake for more than 55 hours, watching Erin nearly die and then start to creep slowly back from that edge. In the antiseptic waiting area, he took time to prepare us for Erin’s current state.

“She looks a lot better than she did. But she’s very swollen and she’s hooked up to a lot of machines.” Rob has a kind face and bright blue eyes. I worried about him. He worried about us. “The nurses say we should talk to Erin and that she might hear us.” He smiled gently. “Are you ready?”

I nodded and made a noise to indicate yes. Chris put his hand on my shoulder and we followed Rob through the doors and down a hallway full of beeps, lights, serious nurses and stunned visitors. I saw Erin’s belly first, looking larger than it had two weeks ago. “But she gave birth,” I thought crazily.

As we got closer, I could see Erin’s arms splayed out to the sides. Tubes ran into tube portals that ran into Erin’s arms. Others went into her in parts of her body hidden by a hospital-white sheet. The top of Erin’s face looked like Erin. Someone had arranged her hair into a silky triangle above her head. Her forehead, eyelids and especially her nose looked adorable. Why had I never before noticed the beauty of her nose? Below her nose, a swath of white medical tape dissected Erin’s face, securing a tube that went down her throat to deliver oxygen to her lungs. In contrast to the top, the lower half of Erin’s face looked swollen and unfamiliar. Her tongue stuck out of her mouth, at least twice its normal size, pushing down on her swollen lower lip.

Rob picked up Erin’s hand, also swollen beyond recognition, and leaned over. “Erin, Joanne and Chris are here.” He spoke tenderly to his unconscious wife who made no move of recognition. Over their heads, screens, buttons and bags monitored Erin’s vital signs and dripped fluids into her veins. The machines beeped rhythmically. A nurse stood on the other side of the bed recording numbers from the screens into a massive three-ring binder, filled almost to bursting in two days.

Rob stepped away and motioned for me to take his place. I picked up Erin’s hand and felt for a connection to my friend. I looked at her engorged tongue and at her cute nose. Looked at the tube, then at her eyelids. Dismay, comfort. Mack truck, my dear friend. It felt like a violation to stare at her like this. I couldn’t stop looking at her tongue. It made her look vulnerable and weirdly inhuman. Chris later said he counted 14 bags of fluids hooked up to the tubes in her arms.

I was supposed to talk to Erin. To give her comfort, possibly make her want to come back, but my mind and vocal chords refused to work. I stood beside her, held her hand and breathed shallow breaths. Rob and Chris stood a few feet away talking.

Her chest rose and fell in unison with a machine that made sucking-exhaling noises nearby. I had no idea if she could sense me there with her. Everything important was going on inside of her. I imagined her heart, kidneys and lungs picking up where they left off. I knew better than to wish for a miracle but I thought of Erin’s organs rallying so they could support her return to life, to us. I felt the urge to make promises or to pray. I’ve attended church only rarely, but now understood the comfort it could bring. Too late. I knew I couldn’t pray with any conviction or credibility so I made a promise. I promised that if Erin got better, I would let her say anything, rage against her situation, against having a hysterectomy without her knowledge or consent, against becoming a ward of the hospital after choosing natural childbirth two times in a row. I would listen and not disagree or try to make it okay. At that point she’d be alive and I would take simple joy in the sound of her voice, in the ability to be in a room with her and have her know I was there.

Eventually I leaned over and whispered, “Erin, I’m here.” I caught my breath, “Take as long as you need.”

A nurse reached down and lifted a clear bag with about half a cup of Erin’s dark yellow urine into full view. She looked at Rob.

“This is a good sign.”