Home Free (19 page)

“Losing a child is the worst,” she said softly. “That beats everything.” Gwen couldn't read or watch TV, but had enough peripheral vision to get around. She lived alone, and preferred to. She seemed content.

I, on the other hand, had fallen off my bike on my way to a yoga class and would soon be Om-ing again.

Perspective is good.

I called Casey in Montreal and filled him in.

“Ouch,” he said. “That's bad.”We didn't discuss the fact that he was working as a bike courier in the downtown core of Montreal, a city not known for cautious drivers.

“Wear your helmet,” I reminded him. “And don't swerve.”

I came to enjoy Gwen's loquacious company. It seemed half the hospital knew and liked her too. And after unavoidably eavesdropping on her phone calls, I decided that her story was true and that she was the real thing: a survivor of the worst possible calamities— the Holocaust, and the loss of a child—who hadn't lost her kindness or optimism.

Late that night, they wheeled me down for surgery, which took place in the chilly bowels of the hospital, like something illegal. My surgeon was tall and patrician-looking, with blue eyes. Maitre d'-ish. When I came out of the anesthetic, Brian was there, smiling at me, holding my hand. Not worried. Then it was back up to my room and Gwen.

The next night I felt an odd new pain in my back, under the left shoulder blade. Gwen was talking again, on the other side of the curtain. My lungs felt funny, raw. Finally, Gwen registered my silence and fell quiet. She sat on the edge of her bed, softly saying “oh dear” once in a while. Then she put on her yellow robe, inserted her injured foot into a giant surgical boot, and wheeled her walker out of the room. Going for a salubrious amble down the hall, I guessed. I was glad for the silence.

Much later, Gwen rolled back in with two large teas and a bag of cranberry scones on her walker tray. This had required a long, long journey from our Dickensian ward to another wing of the hospital, on another floor.

“I thought we needed a bit of change,” she said, popping the lids off the teas.

There are times when a good cup of tea is the best possible medicine. As we sat eating our scones, a breathless man in a uniform dashed into the room. “Oh you made it, thank God!” he said to Gwen. He was a worker from the Second Cup who had seen her set off at an odd angle, bumping into walls, and worried that she might not make it back safely.

So many Samaritans. All kinder to me than my own thoughts.

The next day, I took a walk down the hall and felt short of breath. Well, I've just had surgery, I thought. But when two friends came to drive me home from the hospital, I couldn't manage the three blocks to their car.

“I'll just wait here,” I said, hanging onto a fence. Back home, I settled in on the couch. My right arm was in a plaster cast and a sling. The hand sticking out of it was glossy and bluish, but the fingers worked. I could still type. I'll be back in action soon, I thought.

In the year of broken things, Casey had stayed on in Montreal to continue his graduate studies in Tortured Romance. The on-and-offness with Rebecca was now heading into its second winter. After graduating, he had set up a new apartment in untrendy Park Extension, on a street of Armenian and African and East Indian immigrants. It was a bright, cheap place with front and back balconies, across from a minuscule park. We gave him our shredded old leather couch and other bits of furniture. His best friend and roommate would be moving in when he got back from Japan. Casey advertised for a third person to share the apartment and a pixieish young woman responded. An aspiring writer, she lined her exotic teas up on the counter and seemed like the perfect fit.

In the meantime, every weekday morning, Casey biked off to his job in the rigging department of a company that supplied sound and light equipment for big stage events or concerts by Celine Dion and Springsteen when they came through town.

“It's the kind of job people take because they think it will make them part of show business,”Casey noted wryly, including himself in this category.

He liked the physical side of the job—the lifting and lugging, and the camaraderie too. As the only Anglo in the Francophone company, he got to brush up on his
joual
and learn the finer points of wasting company time. Then on many evenings he would bike from work to Rebecca's apartment for more late-night wrestling with the relationship. I didn't hear the details, but I heard the exhaustion in his voice. They'd make new rules about spending time apart or texting.

Then break them.

When I got home from the hospital, the flow of soups, flowers, and good wishes began. Fractures are so unambiguous, I thought; if only anxiety required a plaster cast or a head halo. I was beginning to enjoy my invalid status, but the strange pain in my back was still there. As a well-read hypochondriac, I knew about the risk of blood clots after surgery and their potentially fatal journey through the lungs and into the heart or brain. But as usual, I decided I was over-thinking matters.

Still, when some friends arrived with dinner, I could scarcely sit at the table with them. I was very weak. My lungs ached. I was even more anxious than usual, if such a thing was possible.

I hobbled to the laptop to Google “embolisms.” Intriguingly, anxiety is listed as an official symptom—the body sounding the alarm. It was a Saturday, of course. I phoned my doctor's office, and the physician on call got back to me.

“Well, I tend to tell anyone with shortness of breath after surgery to go to Emerg, just to be on the safe side,” she said.

“But I feel too bad to go to the hospital,” I whined. I'd had had enough of ER and waiting rooms.

The next morning, Brian drove me to my doctor. Walking up to her office felt like being at 26,000 feet. I dissolved in tears as I described my symptoms. Take her across the street to the hospital, she said.

“Might as well check this out,”I said to Brian, sending him back to work to meet his deadline. “It's probably just post-traumatic crap. I'll phone you when I'm done.”

An hour later I was having dye injected into my veins for a test revealing that I had two “rather large” pulmonary embolisms, one in each lung. The demeanour of the ER nurses subtly changed. They didn't meet my eye. The pace of things picked up. Someone came in and stuck a cartoonishly long needle in my stomach (Heparin, a clot buster). A young resident appeared with a clipboard and told me what to expect: home care, Heparin injections for a week, plus a regime of Coumadin, a blood thinner and former rat poison, to prevent new clots from forming. I would need weekly tests to measure the clotting rate of my blood and the level of Coumadin required. Too much of the drug caused internal bleeding (the secret to killing rats). Many people, I learned, take this drug every day.

And what happens to the clots in my lungs, I asked. I almost thought of them as pets. Or rats.

They will resolve on their own, in time.

Resolve, dissolve? How long does that take?

It depends. A few weeks or a couple months.

So this is serious, I said wonderingly, trying to catch up. The doctor was leaning against a gurney, hands folded over his clipboard. Oh very serious, he said,with a slight air of chagrin.

“You could die,” he said. “But that usually happens within the first hour.”He looked at his watch.

My first thought, apart from dull alarm, was that I hadn't been overreacting to my symptoms after all. A lesson: honour your instincts.

They wanted to keep me in ER overnight, to “monitor things.” I was in Women's College Hospital, where the ER is small and curiously peaceful. I had my own curtained cubicle. The doctor left. I sat on the edge of my gurney, by myself, and thought about whether I was ready to die.

I went down the list: my robust and youthful husband would miss me, but survive (if not move on to an immature, demanding, over-talkative trophy wife. Then he'd
really
miss me . . .). And despite his current dilemmas, I realized that my son was resourceful, strong, and on his way. In fact, the world would spin on quite nicely without me. Perhaps . . .my sense of being indispensable to everyone was up for revision?

Then I scanned my conscience; there were a few shadowy corners in the old hard drive but nothing to panic about. When I called Brian at work with the news, I lowballed the implications of the diagnosis but suggested he get on over. I punched in Janet's number again—“It's a much smaller ER this time”—and made light of the situation. My arm's doing really well, I said, but there was a tiny, tiny possibility that I could also die in the next few hours, and so I needed something decent to read and a pair of slippers. I heard her voice quaver, and that's when mine did too.

I decided not to phone Casey just yet. He'd be at work anyway. I'd give it another day. Presuming I had one. (He later rebuked us for this decision.)

Then calmly, calmly, I looked at my life, and thought: okay. If necessary I could wrap it up right now.

That fall, tired of working nine-hour days for minimum wage, Casey had switched to bike couriering and driving for a French meals-on-wheels organization. Staying in various sorts of motion. We are, I keep forgetting, a family of cyclists, skiers, and restless people. The love trouble with its attendant angst continued.

Then, in February of the broken year, Brian racked up a bike accident himself. (I suspected a competitive element at first but he was sideswiped by a car.) This left him with a mild concussion that made him act weird for several days and caused his groin,where it had been impaled on his handlebars, to turn an awesome shade of eggplant. He had to take a cellphone photo of his purple genitals for insurance purposes, and for months this image kept randomly popping up in our slideshows.

As for me, the embolisms “resolved” but the fallout continued, with a case of shingles over Christmas followed by news from the dentist that I had also broken a small bone in my jaw during the accident. Well, that would explain the constant headaches. I had to keep taking Coumadin. I was convinced that it jacked up my anxiety, but my hard-assed hematologist claimed there were absolutely no side effects from Coumadin—apart from the risks of internal bleeding and fetal defects in pregnant women. What other side effects does a drug need to invite skepticism, I wondered.

All I know is that for nearly a year, I felt as if I was operating inside my own electrically charged enclosure. I expected blue sparks to leap from my fingers when people shook my hand. I realized that the post-traumatic fallout from the whole life-and-death drama could account for my anxiety, if not my entire personality. But I preferred to blame the drug.

Nevertheless, I functioned and cooked dinner. I drove to therapy and did yoga, drank red wine, called my son, saw my friends. Everything felt like a mild ordeal.

Brian's mother was also in and out of hospital that winter,with alarming collapses. I became a connoisseur of different emergency rooms around the city, the ones with the best triage nurses or the worst coin machines for snacks. I learned that being 91 doesn't make a bit of difference but “Shortness of breath” (SOB) as a presenting symptom will sometimes help you jump the queue.

Meanwhile, the hard times were piling up for Casey, in fiendish new ways. When his friend moved in with him, Casey said to him, half-jokingly, because there was a history of this, “There's only one rule in this household—no sleeping with the roommate.”Not unreasonable, in a three-person situation.

Need I drag this out?
Of course
the friend slept with the pixieish new roommate. In a twinkling they fell in love and became inseparable, doing everything as a couple. No more bocce ball outings for the boys.

Casey was under no illusions that he was the perfect roommate, given the craziness he was going through. But the irony of coming home from one obsessive romance to watch another one unfold was not lost on him.

“It's like Dante's description of Purgatory,” he said on the phone one day, revealing that he had in fact read some books at McGill. “The punishment fits the nature of the crime. You're doomed to witness your own behaviour, enacted in front of your eyes, over and over.”

I did think that Casey should cut his friend some slack—the guy didn't mean to fall in love, and roommates aren't forever. But he was irked by the way men can let their friendships languish as soon as a girlfriend comes along to take care of all their emotional needs. Women do that too, as I recalled. Courtship will dominate the whole agenda, if you let it.

As winter deepened, the new couple went into domestic high gear. There were doilies for the drinks, discussions about the state of the bathtub, and much folding of tea towels. The two of them were in bed by 10 p.m.

“It's a glass coffee table,” Casey would report to us, wearily, “you don't need a doily on a glass coffee table.”

“I put so much into making this work,” he complained. He'd found the flat, furnished it, supplied the roommate, and now he was eating his dinners most nights down the street at the Vietnamese café rather than being the third wheel.

Homes don't usually last at your age, I sometimes said. Or just thought.

He had tried hard to get his life up and running this first year after college. To get work and love and friends in place around him. Instead, everything had fallen apart.

That Christmas Rebecca finished school, and they agreed to finally let it go. She moved back to Toronto and her family, with a plan to travel and do volunteer work in Chile. Five thousand miles of separation might do the trick.

In the New Year,his roommates announced that they had found an apartment in Little Italy but they had to move right away, in two weeks. They felt badly about the whole situation and not giving more notice, especially since it was the middle of January. But the new place was really perfect.

Casey began scrolling through Craigslist again.