Various bags with different colored liquids covered the stand next to my bed and turned it into a primeval forest. Each bag sprouted a root of translucent plastic, which ended in a contraption that would put the best engineering efforts to shame. From there a single tube ran into the needle permanently imbedded in my arm. I loved to watch the light playing on the opposite wall when the sun refracted through the colorful leaves of my high-tech tree.
I was the cranky patient in room 27-C that all the nurses avoided like the plague but, since hospital policy required that I be attended to, they sent me Nurse Laura. She had a strong, sturdy build and the tight golden curls reigned over her colorful hospital scrubs. Poor kid had just finished university and she was still bright and cheery with a friendly chatter and warm smiles, even for a cantankerous old man dying of cancer.
She came in with a new bag for my tree and proceeded to fix it in place with its own tube joining the others in the concentrator. She had a small frown between her eyes and I saw a pink tongue sticking out coyly as she concentrated on the task. She had not learned yet how to appear to know everything, to have seen everything, and to be an expert in everything. She explained to me that the doctor had decided, as a special favor, to allow me to have a morphine drip permanently attached so that I can take the painkiller whenever I needed it. Something to do with “late stage cancer”, she explained.
“Don’t open it too much,” she explained as she showed me how to control the flow with the little thumb wheel, “we don’t want you to become addicted now, do we?” I was about to tell her that I didn’t have enough time left to get addicted to morphine but her serious demeanor made me swallow my words. She reminded me too much of my daughter.
I had never had a daughter, but I still saw her in my dreams quite frequently. She was about four years old with a sturdy build and a blonde mop of curly hair. Although she was tall for her age, she still had to crane her neck skywards to look me in the eyes six feet off the ground. The freckles and twinkling eyes would put a lie to the serious expression that she would habitually wear. Only those that she felt most comfortable and safe with would ever get the chance to see the vibrant and cheerful side of her character, and then only infrequently.
The cancer wrapped itself around my bowls like a snake. It normally just laid there like a weight, just heavy enough to ensure I never forgot it, and big enough so that my whole abdomen felt full and solid. I could never understand those people that felt they had to take ownership of their illnesses or hardships. It was always “my headache”, or “my ulcer”, or “my doctor”; it seemed like an obscene indulgence to be so self-absorbed and constantly gazing at your navel. Now that I had my own demon, however, it changed everything. I even had a name for it. I called my cancer Big C. Mister Big C, to acknowledge the devastating power it had assumed over my body.
I felt Mister Big C starting to move. Like a snake, he started to stretch himself this way, and to tighten his grip that way. The pain grew in my bowls and started to raise its head. I turned the little control wheel that I had been playing with to open it up a bit. I left it at about one drop every five seconds as Nurse Laura had instructed me. After a while, the pain settled back down and Mister Big C started to relax and to loosen its grip on my bowls.
When I woke up the sun was shining through the window and Nurse Laura was straightening the bedding out. She gave me a sad hello smile and continued with her work. I decided to enjoy the day and ignored the drumming in my head that felt like a rumbling just beneath the very surface of my consciousness.
“You look sad this morning,” I told Laura, “what’s going on?”
She did not answer but glanced in the direction of the chart hanging off the end of my bed. The chart contained every single medical mystery about my condition; medication, tests, observations, and lord knew what else. The doctor kept his face nonchalantly blank while looking at the chart or updating it with more spidery scribbles. Laura, on the other hand, had not yet learned to wear her professional face at work. Her face got longer the longer my chart got. When Laura glanced at the chart, her face was long and sad. It did not bode well for my health.
The drumming picked up some speed but luckily, Mister Big C seemed fast asleep. No doubt, he was still feeling the effect of my nightcap from the night before. The flowers in my window were doing very badly so Laura left with them to fix them somehow, I hoped. I loved flowers and having them in my windows was important, but only as long as they looked good.
I lay flat on my back staring at the ceiling. It was smooth and painted white without a single mark in site. I played an old game of mine, imaging myself shrinking down further and further until I was smaller than an atom. In that state, I could get right into the ceiling and travel around its atoms to study them in detail. The drumming called me back to reality. It had assumed its normal level of cacophony and the dancers were in place doing their stuff. It was time for things to get back to normal and for the mind games to end.
Laura came in with a fresh vase and a new flower for my window. “You have a visitor,” she said and stood aside to make way for Pastor Jensen to come in.
When I came to the hospital, they asked me which religion I wanted to have on my registration card. I was afraid they were going to send me a chaplain so I wrote down Unitarianism as my religion, since I was convinced there would be no pastor for such a religion in our region of the country. They found me Pastor Jensen instead. He was quite happy to visit anybody in the hospital, even if it was one of the lost sheep.
Pastor Jensen had been visiting me regularly twice a week for some time and I could tell that he had been working his way through one of his comforting books. Every visit lasted exactly one hour and he sounded like he was repeating the daily devotionals from memory. He must have run out of devotionals since he had less and less to say with every visit. That day he was especially quiet with a painful look on his face.
I started telling him about my daughter. Pastor Jensen started paging furiously through his notebook. I enjoyed the look of confused panic on his face when he could not find any reference to a daughter. He lifted a fat fountain pen out of his pocket and, with a deft twist of the cap, exposed the golden nib to the late afternoon light. I watched the graceful movement of his wrist as he started making new notes in his book. He seemed relieved when I asked him to cut his visit short because I was getting very tired.
Nurse Laura came in and fluffed up the pillows. She adjusted the bed so that I could sit upright and pulled the cart with supper closer. I had trouble controlling the spoon so she took it and started feeding the thin porridge to me. It was not much but that was all my body could still tolerate.
“This gruel will kill me,” I told her. “I want you to get me a thick steak covered in mushroom sauce, or a smoked country sausage with mashed potatoes and sauerkraut!” She just clucked her tongue at me while wiping some spill from my chin.
On the way out, she left me with a courageous smile that could not quite reach her eyes.
I lay back and watched the stars through my window. Orion drifted into view, leading with that mighty searchlight on his shoulder. Orion; called the mighty warrior, the cunning hunter, the lord of the sky. I hoped he could go down in glorious flames, letting go of life with a thunderous roar, a glorious end to a glorious life, instead of being babied in his final days by young women with smooth skins and sadness in their eyes.
The pain started to spread up into my bowls and the contractions gripped my stomach with a steely fist. I groped the control of the morphine drip and started playing with it. I turned the little wheel and counted the rate as about one every five seconds. The pain continued to spread and I felt bile rising in my throat.
I opened the control a bit more, and then more again.
Through the window, Orion slowly started to spin like a Ferris wheel. A cascade of stars spun round and round and then started leaking out the edges and fell to the earth. The last one left was the fiery Betelgeuse that slowly expanded until the red eye seemed to fill the whole sky. I felt the eye staring intently into my eyes as if it could see the smoke-filled cavern in my head where wild figures were dancing ancient gyrations to the beat of incessant drumming. After a while, the eye faded into darkness and I could hear a lone Canada goose belatedly honking towards the south.
Laura Anderson stood at the entrance to the private room. Her hands covered her mouth and mournful tears clung to her cheeks. A grizzled old man lay in the bed. His body looked like it had deflated and his skin stretched tight over his bones. A wonderful smile softened the stubble on his cheeks.