When Life Gives You Pears by Jeannie Gaffigan

Author:Jeannie Gaffigan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2019-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

Time is the longest distance between two places.

—Tennessee Williams

There are no doors or windows in the intensive care unit. When you are in the ICU, you have no sense of time. It’s like Vegas but without the fun. Instead of the colorful whirring lights and the musical dings of the slot machines, there is the methodical beeping of the medical machinery with flashing numbers and graphs that you are tethered to by IVs and tubes, rather than an obsessive desire to win the jackpot.

In my normal life, and even right now, I am amazed at how quickly time passes. As I write this, I look up at the clock and an hour has gone by and I’ve barely written a page. I see my children and think, Where did the years go? on an almost daily basis. Have I spent enough one-on-one time with this child or that child? I’m one of those pain-in-the-butt people who say, “It’s Christmas already? Didn’t we have Christmas a couple of months ago? Where does the time go?” Well, now I know where it goes. It goes into the ICU, where it stands still.

I learned to tell time based on twelve-hour nursing shifts, so when a new name was written on the whiteboard, I knew that half a day had passed. The whiteboard on the wall was my main source of news and information. It was like a real-life Facebook post without the Russian bots. When the whiteboard came into focus, I could see my nurse’s name, and a little bit into the nurse’s personality. If the name was haphazardly scrawled, I knew I had a no-nonsense, couldn’t-be-bothered nurse. If there was a neatly written name with a smiley face and a “Have a nice day” message, I knew I was dealing with a lunatic.

To entertain myself during these excruciatingly long hours, and to keep my mind off worrying about Jim and the kids, I would stare up at the tiny dots on the ceiling, which, after a while, I realized were actual blood flecks. I would create scenarios as if I were a blood spatter analyst at a grisly crime scene.

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