What Makes a Family by Colleen Faulkner

Author:Colleen Faulkner [Faulkner, Colleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2016-11-16T05:00:00+00:00

21

Abby

“Has she been restless?” Gail, the hospice nurse, gently wraps the blood pressure cuff around my grandmother’s bird-like arm.

Gail looks nothing like what I expected a hospice nurse to look like. I was expecting . . . I don’t know. Someone more grandmotherly-like? Or maybe nun-like? She’s neither. Gail is a six-foot-tall, curvaceous-leaning-toward-chubby brunette with almost as many tattoos as my brother. She’s got bumblebees circling one arm leading to a Star Wars rebel symbol and something that looks like Sanskrit on the other forearm. She wears jeans and a white, short-sleeved T-shirt with a badge identifying that she works for Coastal Hospice and Palliative Care. Her hair is super long and piled on top of her head the way Sarah wears hers. Gail can’t be thirty.

“Not restless at all,” I respond. “I don’t think she’s moved of her own volition since I arrived Thursday afternoon. Birdie . . . my mom . . . said she was restless Tuesday, after the ambulance brought her here, but . . . she just seems to be sleeping now.”

Gail nods and lifts her purple stethoscope ear tips to her ears. She presses the drum to the crook of my grandmother’s elbow. I know she’s listening, so I’m quiet. When she’s done, she pulls her stethoscope down to hang around her neck and removes the blood pressure cuff. “Seventy over forty-four.”

I cross my arms over my chest. I thought I was ready for this, but I . . . It’s harder than I thought it would be. To sit here and watch Mom Brodie die. “That’s low, right? For blood pressure? And it’s lower than yesterday.”

“It is lower, but that’s to be expected. All part of the process.” She checks my grandmother’s pulse. Again I wait. “Is she in any pain?”

I’m just standing there by the bed, looking down at my grandmother. I’m in the same clothes I wore yesterday. We’re going to pick crabs. Why would I put on clean clothes? I did, however, shower to get the smell of The Gull off me. Celeste sprayed beer in my hair last night while telling a story about a guy trying to pick her up on the subway. “I don’t think so.” I shake my head, thinking. “No, she’s not in any pain, which is kind of weird because she was in the hospital. She was getting pain meds through her IV.”

Gail nods and opens Mom Brodie’s medical file on the nightstand next to the bottles of pills Mom Brodie won’t be taking, and the teacup my mother put there, and Sarah’s little blue scroll. “It happens sometimes. Patients get home, in familiar surroundings, and they settle down.” She looks at me and smiles. She has a gorgeous smile, one that makes you think everything is going to be all right. Which of course it isn’t. It never is, in her line of work. Or at least all right has to be reinterpreted.

“I’m glad she’s comfortable and pain free, but should she become restless, there’s medication in the comfort pack in the refrigerator.

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