Nightingale has been stranded in hospital for 8 days. We called an ambulance when her pain, which has been worsening daily for 6 months, finally reached 10/10.
Right now my world is divided into two groups. Those who believe hospitals are safe places, and those who know otherwise.
So today when we were in a stand off with the doctors who had no handover, had read no notes, and were adamant than none of the carefully planned and negotiated trauma informed arrangements would be implemented, I held her hand very tight. I made them give her time to speak. I backed her when she withdrew consent.
When a doctor chased her withdrawing hand across her body, grabbing at her to put a line in for anaesthesia I removed his hand from her body. And when I requested trauma informed care protocols for her after they would make me leave – that if she withdrew consent by voice or by raising her hand they would stop, and I was sneered at impatiently and told – “of course that’s always how it’s done”, I felt in my body a rushing tide, waves of every time that’s ever failed. Every touch we ever tried to escape roared through me without sound, without a ripple on my skin, in the blackest night within me.
When they wheeled her away from me sedated, and closed the door between us, I found myself stranded there in the corridor. I felt like a dog at a train station who’s beloved person had been conscripted away to war, far from protection and likely to be harmed. I stood with my back to the wall, involuntarily listening for the sound of her voice, the sound of her cry. I stood there knowing they had said they would care for her, and knowing they lie. I stood there knowing what power looks like when it stands at the bedside of a woman naked and trembling. I could do nothing but commend her body into their hands.
The nurse, the other person I had to tell to stop touching her without consent, walked past and looked at me with impatience and something like disgust. “There’s no point waiting here, you know they’re not going to let you into recovery.” I very quietly and carefully agreed that I knew that, my bones screaming down in the deeps.
There’s a terrifying defensiveness when trauma is mentioned, it’s taken as a kind of slur, an insult to their trustworthiness. Without any comprehension of what it is or what is needed they puff themselves up and demand “you can’t possibly need protecting from us, how dare you! we are the good ones.” They are all the good ones, even the ones our nightmares are made out of.
I went back to her room to wait. The lights were unbearable. The TV running a children’s show that shrieked in my brain. I went and quietly asked a nurse if there was a chapel or quiet room I could sit in. She led me out of our ward, into the ward adjacent, down a long corridor and around to the “sacred space” that I went and sobbed in when I first confirmed that Hummingbird was dying and no one had been brave enough to tell her, instead pretending she was recovering and going home, stealing her hopes for hospice, for a last drive home to her garden, for any of the palliative care resources, for the letters she had hoped to write and the goodbyes she had planned to say.
Ah, I say. Perhaps you could show me where the patient or family kitchen is? She walks me back to a room with a lock on the door. We both look at the lock. “You’re not allowed in”. she tells me. Only the staff are. Ah I say. Well in that case I guess I don’t really need to know where it is. She goes back to her station.
I go back to the room. I darn a sock for Little Bear. I keep my back to the wall and stay as far as I can from anyone who might touch me. I am a fox in a cage, seething and terrified. Exhausted and wired. Desperate and alone. Finally they return her. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. Maybe she’ll be home this week, maybe not. Maybe they’ll do another one in a different spot on her spine. It’s stopped raining out the window, but it takes hours for the sense of threat to ease. I am held together with love and pain and memory, wired shut.
Nurses and doctors flick in and out of the room like the little birds feeding at the shore line, retreating before the waves. I imagine the notes from today which will say something like “procedure successful, unremarkable”. We walk entirely different worlds here in mirror of each other. They are confident we are safe and we know we are not. They do not understand it, their bones do not scream.
She’s back in the empty, lonely room to wait out the night without us. The sheets show no tear stains. There’s no bruises on her skin. No trace, no evidence, except that flinch everytime the door handle turns. It doesn’t matter. It’s unspeakable. Tomorrow it may well happen all over again. The carousel spins on and the carnival continues and no one is counting the screams. I take her hand and behind my teeth is more rage than I can bear, more heartbreak than I can breathe through. They do not see what they take away. I hold her hand. They do not see. I hold on. We breathe together in the dark.
Sarah K Reece 