Hospital High by Mimi Thebo

Author:Mimi Thebo [Thebo, Mimi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78535-188-4
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2017-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

Another roommate was young and pretty. She was only thirty-two and had two children and a handsome husband, who took the morning off work to come and settle her in and came back about a half an hour after he had finally left for work to bring her some flowers and a teddy bear. Her name was Janice.

She, too, was in for a biopsy, this time on the back of her mouth, where there was something that looked like it might be a tumour. She’d been smoking since she was fourteen. She’d stopped both times she was pregnant, but started up again once the babies were born. They were eight and six, a boy and a girl, and there was a picture of them looking at her as if she was the whole world and a bag of chips.

The whole smoking thing was really starting to bother me. Doctors walked along looking at charts with a fag in their hands. Nurses leant against the wall for a quick smoke. My mother had lost a lot of weight and to keep it off, she smoked. She smoked ‘Eve’ cigarettes. They were blue with flowers around the filter. ‘You’ve come a long way, baby,’ their jingle ran, ‘to get where you’ve got to today. You’ve got your own cigarettes, now, baby. You’ve come a long, long way.’

It was one of the first times I could tell that advertising was playing with our emotions to sell us stuff. My mom felt like she was more liberated as a woman, because she was smoking poison with flowers around the filter.

But nobody really thought Janice had cancer. She was too bright and bouncy. Her blood counts were good. They were just making sure. So, she had a nice nightie and went without dinner and then was nil by mouth from ten o’clock on. In the morning, she had to change into the hospital gown and they gave her the pill and put in an IV. She had to wear her cap and take off her nail varnish. They were going to make her take off her wedding rings but I talked them into just taping them on and she was grateful. She kept saying it was nice having somebody there who knew the ropes.

She was gone a really, really long time. And right before she came back, a screen was wheeled in, and the stuff they need for big drains and catheters and one of the big IV stands and an oxygen tank.

‘What’s wrong?’ I kept asking. ‘What happened?’ But I knew they couldn’t tell me. They drew my screen around me when they brought Janice back. I could hear her crying. She seemed to be trying to talk but you couldn’t understand anything she said. The nurses said that they’d tell her husband exactly what happened. Then she shouted, ‘No! No husband!’ really loud, but it sounded wrong – very weak consonants and all through her nose.

Mom and I were quiet that evening as Janice slept.

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