It Takes a Worried Man by Brendan Halpin

Author:Brendan Halpin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

Nobody Likes a Smartass

One day I bring in and hang up Christmas lights in Kirsten’s hospital room. I do such a crappy job that they all fall down in the night, and Kirsten’s dad does it right the following day. He also brings in a sign that Kirsten and I have been talking about since day one. She has this window that faces the corridor, and she can never really leave the room, so we decide that she needs a sign that says, “Please Do Not Tap on the Glass. It Disturbs the Animals.” She gets her dad to make it because he is the master of clip art, and she wants little pictures of zoo animals surrounding the words. One day I go in and it is hanging up. I think this may be the only positive thing about this whole experience–who’s going to tell her to take it down? Who would dare? They may or may not find it funny (not, in most cases–as I have noted, irreverence just doesn’t seem to play very well with medical types), but they damn sure aren’t going to take it down. A few days later, in a similar spirit, I steal a bunch of stickers from her room. They are safety orange and say CHEMOTHERAPY in big black letters, and I have seen them stuck on the bags of crap they are pumping into her, but I stick one on my shirt, and I offer them around at work, and some people politely decline, some people give this nervous sort of “heh-heh” and say “uhhhh…I guess it’s great that you’re keeping your sense of humor, heh-heh” and sort of edge away from me uneasily. I think maybe only one or two people have any idea why I think this is a funny thing to do. I’m not really sure I do, but I think it’s all about changing the power dynamic–not just between us and the medical people, but also between us and the treatment, us and the disease. In the hospital they take these stickers very seriously, as they have to, and I am glad they do because it helps everybody be damn sure which of the five bags hanging on Kirsten’s incredibly heavy IV pole have the toxic substances in them, but the beautiful thing is that we don’t have to take them seriously at all. Kirsten is planning to smuggle out a roll and then surreptitiously stick them on my teacups and stuff.

My mom used to tell me, “nobody likes a smartass,” and while it certainly seems true that the people where Kirsten is don’t know what to make of her and the people where I am don’t know what to make of me, we are completely on each other’s wavelength. and I think I can presume to speak for her when I say we both like at least one smartass.

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