My Glory Was I Had Such Friends by Amy Silverstein

Author:Amy Silverstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-06-27T04:00:00+00:00

The first hint of sun grazes the windowsill, and I wake to the clickity-squeak of metal wheels approaching my door. Lauren jumps from her cot and bolts to the entryway like a mother to a crying newborn, all instinct and protective drive. “No, no . . . not today,” she whispers, and I hear the wheels retreat into the hallway. Lauren has just spared me this morning’s weigh-in. She shuffles back to bed, gets under the covers, and settles in for a little more sleep. In two hours, she will head to the airport.

“I don’t want to leave you,” she said last night, a few minutes after coaching me through a particularly rough pacemaker firing.

“Yeah,” was all I could get out before emotion grabbed my throat.

“We did good, though,” she added, sitting herself down beside me on the bed and taking my hands in hers. “We work well together.”

She’s right. During Lauren’s four-day visit, she finagled a few helpful changes—from the nighttime Go Away sign on my door to the easing up on daily weigh-ins and hourly urine measures. We’d also come up with a sleep plan, as she called it (a euphemism, because the increasing number of pacemaker episodes kept us both up most of the night). According to the plan, at ten o’clock we are each to be in our separate beds. I am to watch some mindless show downloaded to my laptop (Scandal, in honor of Joy) and then go to sleep. No talking allowed, just quiet calm. I am supposed to wake Lauren the minute I feel pain; she’ll sit on my hospital bed and try to soothe me with light fingernail strokes up and down my back. And then it’s bonus time: a test we’ve come up with to help move me through the duration of pacing. Without looking at the heart monitor screen, we see if I can pinpoint the precise moment when the pacemaker stops firing—this way, we can look forward to relief in just a minute or so.

“And . . . now!” is how I call it out, marking the instant at which I feel my heartbeat climb above eighty. Lauren watches the monitor: she’s learned not only how to identify the pulse number in blue, but also how to read the particular line of the EKG that spikes exaggeratedly when my heart is pacing—and she tells me if I am correct.

“You got it! Exactly to the second. It’s amazing how well you know your body!”

“It’s easy to feel, actually. My heart’s inside my chest, you know. Just underneath some skin and bone.”

“Give yourself some credit, would you? The way you breathe through that awful pain is incredibly brave. It’s like labor, only you have it every night and you’re not cursing at your husband,” she says with a laugh. “And then you manage somehow to feel exactly when your pulse starts to go up. I’m in awe.”

“Stop it.”

“I will not. What you do is incredible.”

I pause, savoring her words. “I have to say, no one ever tells me that.

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