Free The Blue Cotton Gown by Patricia Harman Page B

comatose. If I can’t see them, maybe they won’t see me.

    *
    Late in the afternoon, when the sun slants in through the window, Dr. Jamison comes by to tell me that the X-ray showed I have an ileus. “It’s unfortunate, but as you know it’s not uncommon in prolonged or difficult surgeries. Your bowels have stopped moving and the gas in them is compressing your lungs, that’s why you’re short of breath and your oxygen saturation is so low.” He looks rumpled and tired but takes time to ask about the huge bouquet of daisies and irises on the bedside table. “My sons,” I explain, smiling fondly through the pain.
    “If you can walk more,” Jamison says, “you might increase the peristalsis of the bowels and get the gas moving. Otherwise, I can have the nurses put in a rectal tube.” That sounds delightful.
    I’m determined to get my paralyzed bowels in motion. After countless trips up and down the hall, pushing my IV pole and an

    oxygen tank, there are actual gas pains, spasms that almost double me over, and finally a fart. I stand in the carpeted corridor and let one rip, don’t hold it back, and don’t care if anyone hears. I fart some more, laughing.
    That afternoon, since I’m feeling better, I decide to see what America’s watching on TV. On Oprah, a couple discuss their history of domestic violence. The man is a cop. He got counseling.
    I think of all the patients I’ve known who have lived with violent men. I think of my father and mother; their passion, their fights. A foreman at a trucking depot in the California Bay Area, my father commuted to Oakland from our subdivision in Walnut Creek. Every other Friday was payday, and that meant a stop at the pub. He came home five hours late, loaded and jolly, smelling of booze and cheap perfume. He sat at the piano with me, played “Chop-sticks,” and laughed. My mom, a substitute schoolteacher, as jealous as a cat, didn’t say a word.
    As soon as my brother and I were tucked in bed, the fight would begin. That’s when I learned to be on guard, waiting for something bad to happen. The voices would rise and then something would smash against the wall: a piece of furniture, a dish, or sometimes my mother. I pulled a pillow over my head so I couldn’t hear the swear-ing and the crying and things shattering. It didn’t work. I could still hear.
    In my hospital bed, flicking through the channels, I stop at a country-western video. It’s about the passing of time and the short-ness of life. I lie with tears running down my face. I’m weary of working so hard, of always worrying about patients and finances. How long have we been on this not-so-merry-go-round? The illness and the pain have burned a hole through me and cleaned something out. In the emptiness is hope. All day I am quiet inside myself. My life is a handful of sand. Whatever I have, however much sand is in there, it’s all I’ve got left, all I’ll ever have and it’s leaking away, grain by grain, minute by minute.

    *
    On the sixth day after admission, I’m finally discharged from the hospital. At home, I sit on the porch with a pink quilt tucked around me, thinking about my remaining grains of sand and what I’m going to do with them. All my thoughts about the IRS, the practice’s debt, and my patients’ problems have been washed away.
    As I look out across our garden, I see that the beans are now four inches high. Below in the woods, redbud are blooming, pink against the dark trunks of maple. The intense West Virginia green almost hurts. Something catches my eye and I turn slowly, aware of my incisions.
    Over the lake, a red-tailed hawk soars, and it seems that it’s there for me personally, a sort of message. We are all here for one another, it says, winding through the tops of the trees. Gifts to one another. The green beans shooting through the soft earth, the redbuds, and the raptor soaring through the high branches, just glad to be here.
    We are all here for one another and