There are doctors and students and nurses in the recovery room, a little army of light-blue scrubs and latex gloves just for me. They busy themselves with tasks I don’t understand, checking levels of things, writing words on big hanging bags of fluid and urine that look like what we used to hang on the porch to keep the mosquitoes away back home. They work, work, work all around me, testing my reflexes with a hammer the size of a toothbrush and shining a light in my eyes. Miraculously, I can move, but every movement is excruciating. Even breathing, inhaling and exhaling, hot air is a two-man saw pushing and pulling against my throat.
The more awake I am, the more awake I am to pain, to fear, to the loneliness of another sterile room full of strangers, and to my daddy being gone. My wild-animal eyes flick from side to side in my neck brace and I wonder if anybody will even try to meet them or if they’ll just keep darting from task to task. I make an actual scream after a while, which I can barely get out. They just removed my breathing tube and the flesh is raw and swollen. The sound that comes from me is hoarse and not very loud, but it is impactful. The doctors move quicker, they juggle the bags, they try to fix it, fix me, but they can’t. There is more quiet screaming. I’m a horror movie with the volume down.
“It’s okay, hang on. Just hang on,” they say, fumbling with the drip, adjusting the meds, checking the vitals, and wondering how much is too much and how much is just enough.
They up the morphine again but after years and years of “managing it,” my body is bored with painkillers. There is no relief. There is no “enough.”
“Just hang on, Ruthie,” they say again. They’re just a fuzzy talking cloud of people.
Hanging on is all I can do. I try, but I start to slip; my fingers uncurl from the edges of sanity, of safety, one at a time. I want my daddy so badly I can hardly bear it.
The surgery took more than eight hours. It lasted from about 7:45 a.m. to 4:30 in the afternoon. The doctors removed the parts of the wire that were sticking into my brain and left the rest. The other strands, which had welded themselves deep into the vertebrae, were too dangerous to fuss with. They re-fused C1, C2, and C3 with bone from my right hip, a little beam, and a bunch of titanium screws. I’m part skyscraper now. My family has been waiting all day in a little room with reclining chairs, bad geometric carpet, and free snacks. When you pay six figures for experimental spinal surgery, your family gets their Nutter Butters on the house. It’s just shy of the anniversary of my daddy’s death and none of us wants to be in a hospital again, no matter how many free Twinkies there are.
It is dark outside when they move me to recovery and my family can see me. They pumped me full of sedatives to keep me calm and I’m still sleepy, so I don’t really see them back. Jack is the first one to come in. He walks from the door across the room to me and it takes a long time.
Left, stop. Right, stop. I make a little smile when I think it and my new neck brace creaks.
For the second time in my life, my head is half-shaved. It doesn’t look any better now than it did the first time. My cheeks are swollen from the drugs; they puff out like Pillsbury crescent rolls and my eyes are glassy and bloodshot.
“Hey, babe,” he says so softly.
I’ve been his patient for so long that seeing me sick and sore doesn’t really faze him anymore. His brownie-batter eyes are gentle and teary; he hasn’t had good sleep in far too long. He slips his hand under mine, slowly and carefully, nudging my fingers like Jenga blocks. He brings his lips down to my hand and kisses it; he doesn’t want to hurt me. I don’t want to hurt him either. Everything hinges on today, on a few screws, some doctors, and a bit of metal. I wonder if it worked, if I’m all better now. I wonder if we’ve been delivered back to our happy, hopeful dreams.
The others follow him in. I hear Lile before I see him, and he tries to make me laugh straightaway. Tim can’t find his way out of doctor mode and politely needles the nurse about spinal fluid leakage and vital signs. Aunt Raven brings my mom to me. She’s here, but she really isn’t. There are two smears of blush on her cheeks and she’s smiling, but even in my stupor I know how sad she is, to be back here in a place like this, to see another part of her soul in a diamond-print gown, hooked up to monitors and machines. If she could, she would travel into the darkness with me, I know it. She can’t, though. She could barely make it through the wintry sludge in the hospital parking lot to the front door. There are too many memories, too many shadows in her own world for her to find a way into mine.
Lile finds Benjamin Button on the TV in the corner of the room and they all watch me eat a glob of green Jell-O that I can hardly control on my spoon. When a nurse comes in to check my incision, my brothers and Raven go to the Marriott Courtyard across the street for the night. Jack and my mom fall asleep on a pair of foam-stuffed couches. I stay half-awake, kind of stoned, enviously watching Brad Pitt go from an old aching man to a little boy.
In the morning, the sedation wears off completely. The screams are so loud that Lile hears me first for once, all the way from the elevator. My mom and Jack are white-faced and waiting in the hall while the doctor checks me. Lile bursts by them and through the door. The safety of his face is the only respite.
“What’s wrong?” he asks the doctor, and the two of them talk while I concentrate on breathing and beg my body to pass out.
Before the surgery, I told the doctors that my pain was at a ten, but there’s always something that can hurt more. This is immeasurable.
Lile’s phone rings. It rings again.
“Sorry,” he says, as the doctor continues talking.
A 911 text from his mother-in-law comes through. Then another one. He wants to throw his phone out the window, but instead he disappears into the hall.
When he returns, the doctor has finished and gone on to peek behind other bandages. My mom and Jack are on either side of me, holding on to my hands.
“Baby, Libby’s daddy was in an accident.”
Lile is still stoic but the words are a struggle.
“Libby!”
It’s one of the first words I can say clearly. I try to sit up. They all tell me to rest.
“I need to go back home but everything’s going to be okay.”
He has to go home, I want him to, but I also need him so badly. He feels like the only shelter I have left.
Everything’s going to be okay, everything’s going to be okay. I put it on repeat.
* * *
Three days in, my sight goes black and blotchy, my brain feels like it’s being rolled over again and again like dough. It’s the worst headache of my life. I’m screaming and writhing as much as I can in the big creaky brace. Jack runs out of the room to find the doctor and comes back with a light-blue army for me. The doctor checks my bandage while I make my sad-coyote sounds.
“Shit,” somebody says.
I’m leaking spinal fluid; my neck brace is soaked with it. They need to reroute the fluid to control the migraines, so they schedule a lumbar drain at 2 p.m. Jack doesn’t know what that is but he nods up and down furiously like he’s been thinking it all along. I will be awake for the procedure, which is my worst nightmare brought to life. They’re going to puncture my spinal column.
* * *
A resident comes into my room that afternoon carrying a metal tray just like the one they carry my lunch on. Instead of turkey sandwiches and apples, there are tools wrapped in plastic, lidocaine gel, and a needle the size of a Bic pen. I give my consent; our eyes meet for just a second. It seems like we’re both terrified of what’s about to happen. A team of sturdy-looking nurses come in to help move me. It feels violent, like a beating, when they curl me onto my side and ask me to arch my back like a cat. I scream and cry and try to claw my skin off.