Anywhere but hERe

Dedicated to those in the thick of it.

We’d picked the worst time to come to the emergency room. The place was packed, the air swampy from the combined fevers of the afflicted. Earlier in the evening, when we’d called Mammaw’s house to invite ourselves over for dinner, we had no idea what the night had in store.

“Your Mammaw’s got the flu,” Mom told Sissy and me, after clicking the END button on our boxy cordless phone. “She’s been sick for days and isn’t getting any better. We need to take her to the ER to get checked out.”

“Why aren’t my uncles doing it?” I asked. Daddy had been one of seven children, and one of six boys. The three of us, though, were clear across town in Karns. Geographically, we were almost as far down on the list of contacts as my relatives who resided in Texas.

“Because both of the ones who live with her are working the late shift,” Mama huffed, “and I promised your daddy a long time ago that I’d take care of Ima Lee if anything ever happened to him. Now hush up and let’s go help your grandmother.”

Mammaw’s house was on Island Home - well, the avenue, anyway. The avenue was the modest section of the neighborhood where everyone had a two-story train trestle in their backyards, not the boulevard part where fancy homes lined the Tennessee River.

“We might be back late,” Mom told Cookie, our dog. “We have to take Baloney Lady to the vet because she doesn’t feel good.”

Mammaw had been bestowed the nickname because she fed Cookie bologna every time we visited, which was often.  

Cookie wagged her tail with interest at the mention of her favorite lunch meat. Ever the optimist, she followed us closely as we gathered our things to leave. She was still wagging when Mom shut the trailer door just millimeters from her elongated snout.

Our drive to South Knoxville took thirty minutes. Once there, we helped Mammaw into the front seat of Mom’s Chevy Corsica and set off for the ER. Baptist Hospital wasn’t the largest in town or the nicest, but it was the closest. Mammaw had retired from St. Mary’s Hospital as a surgical tech, and the fact that she didn’t complain about the location told us everything we needed to know about her condition.

Sissy and I parked the car in the lot facing Chapman Highway after dropping off Mom and Mammaw at the entrance. We walked over to the ER, not prepared for what awaited us on the other side of the automatic doors.

We passed through the threshold, activating the sensor. The doors parted like a theatre curtain, revealing a pitiful tableau of patients stretched across the cheerless waiting area. Several were red-faced from coughing, and a few were bent over in pain or curled up in their hard plastic chairs trying to sleep.

Swapping illnesses during Christmas turned every January in Knoxville into a germ-filled nightmare. I knew that the only reason Tennessee was nicknamed ‘The Volunteer State’ was because ‘Home of the Wet, Productive Smoker’s Cough’ wouldn’t fit on any of the tourism material.

Sitting outside in the freezing car would be better than this. “This is not how I wanted to spend my Saturday night. Do you see Mammaw?” I asked Sissy.

Before she could answer, a man in the far corner of the waiting room began to retch. It wasn’t a normal retch. Nobody sounded good, of course, when they were about to toss their cookies, but this poor fellow was in a class of his own. He started with a guttural vocalization, like many people would. Then, the volume of his reaction somehow increased, as if he were being possessed by a malevolent puke phantom trying to manifest itself into the physical realm. The sound diminished, then once again amplified. After twenty seconds of this, he straightened carefully and balanced his pink plastic sick bucket on one knee.

“Oh my God,” I muttered to Sissy. “After all that, he didn’t even throw up.”

We spotted Mom and Mammaw sitting huddled together. Mammaw was resting her head against Mom’s shoulder with her eyes closed. Sissy and I sat down.

“What did they say?”

“A nurse took her temperature and her blood pressure. She’s got a fever. They’ll move her to a treatment room as soon as possible,” Mom answered.

I wondered where Mammaw ranked in the waiting room’s cavalcade of misery. South Knoxvillians were notoriously unpolished, even more so than our city’s average scruffy citizen, and mostly poor. Everyone seemed equally tormented, for a number of reasons.

“Does anyone want a Coke?” I asked. “There’s a vending machine outside.”

The man in the corner began to retch again.

“Never mind,” I said.

After two hours, a nurse called Mammaw’s name. Mom helped Mammaw to her feet, and the three of them disappeared behind a heavy wooden door.

“We’re praying for you, Mammaw,” I called as they retreated.

Sissy and I continued to sit. The mood in the crowded waiting room was dismal. At least a dozen more people had dragged themselves in to seek care since we’d arrived. Occasionally, a patient, or the healthier family member that had driven them there, would timidly approach the check-in desk to ask how much longer it would be before they could see a doctor. Each time, the staff member would smirk, shrug her shoulders, and send the inquirer back to their comfortless plastic chairs, suitably chastised.

There were no magazines in the emergency room, not even the dumb hospital-branded ones pretending to give health advice. Those magazines were a crock, anyway. They were nothing but thinly disguised advertisements for a hospital’s latest million-dollar MRI machine or stroke prevention center. This was just as well, since I would’ve never picked Baptist unless I was unconscious. The only Level One trauma center in town was UT Medical Center. UT was the preferred choice of ATV enthusiasts, bear petters, and whiskey-scented stuntmen, people who often had complex injuries and needed complex solutions. I figured they’d be a good match for me, too, since I’d also experienced plenty of trauma, albeit the emotional kind.

I was about as much of a risk-taker as a visually impaired nun, but I tried to align myself with any opportunity that allowed me to break free from my poverty-stricken roots. The folks in the Baptist waiting room were so much like the people in my orbit that I was sure I’d already met half of them at a family reunion.

A small TV was bolted to the corner of the room, so far up the wall that anyone attempting to watch for too long would develop neck spasms and end up needing an emergency room examination for that, as well. It was a brilliant plan, one that likely warranted a promotion to the sicko who dreamed it up.

Nothing good was on. We’d endured Wheel of Fortune, a cop drama, another cop drama, and thirty minutes of The Heartland Series. I usually liked The Heartland Series, but Bill Landry’s interview with an ancient grandmother who dried apples outdoors on old bedsheets hit too close to home. Country people were resourceful and decent, but their simple ways of doing things sometimes made my brain go tilt. I wondered if the retching fellow had eaten some of her apples. Cut fruit left exposed to the elements would be seasoned with bird droppings and air pollution in no time. Only the hardiest souls would eat a stack cake that was only a few targeted inches, as the crow flies, away from poisonous. Maybe he’d found himself in the emergency room as a result.

 I turned away from the TV with a sigh. I decided to play a game with myself. Every time the receptionist was condescending to someone, I would imagine reaching for her desk scissors (the ones unbearably decorated with gingham ribbon) and cutting off a blonde tip from her overly frosted hairdo.

Another hour crawled by. She’d lost four by then.

I hoped Mammaw was ok. I wasn’t sure if she’d be admitted into the hospital. If so, it would be monumental. Despite the number of smokers in our family and our tendency towards alcoholism, my relatives seemed bulletproof — except of course for Daddy, who’d kicked the bucket at 48, and me, who was by far the fattest grandkid and the only one with asthma.

My heart sank all the way to my toes. Sitting in the crowded waiting area, amongst the suffering, I was reminded that there was no guarantee that Mammaw, or any of the rest of us, would be ok. Even if we had access to good care — or even just adequate care, as I’d witnessed tonight — eventually, it wouldn’t be enough. We’d pass out of this world into whatever awaited us next, and many of our exits would be painful and undignified.

I tried to lean on my patchwork Christian beliefs in times like these, but I knew I’d never have the answers. Why did we have to suffer at all? I’d been taught that Jesus or God or the Holy Spirit was always with us, supernaturally holding us close during times of trouble. That was great, I supposed, but why couldn’t They just put a stop to it instead? Either God was weak, or He was a total butthead who loved to watch sinners flail painfully or, best case scenario, life, and all of its associated horrors, were some sort of impenetrable cosmic education to help us grow.

I also had to consider another tremendously sad possibility: bad stuff happened for no reason at all. After we died, we’d lay a molderin’ in the ground forever, unless someone bulldozed over our bones to build a new mall.

The thought of being trapped under a Cinnabon for the rest of time was almost too much to bear.

There were no easy answers in the waiting room; no resolutions; only constant reminders of our defective bodies and insufficiency. I thought I might go crazy if things didn’t improve soon.

Loud music sprang forth from the lobby TV. I recognized it as a car commercial that had been released right after Thanksgiving, obviously timed to make the most of the Christmas holiday. I’d seen it a zillion times, and it was even more annoying to see it still playing in January. In the commercial, an announcer blabbed about the benefits of an overpriced SUV over the strains of “Linus and Lucy,” the song more commonly known as the Peanuts theme.

Not again, I thought, irritated. I loved the whole Peanuts gang and cried happy tears every time I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas. It was gross to use a song from a cartoon that railed again holiday materialism to sell anything. The evening had already drowned me in existential dread, and this was just adding insult to injury.

I wanted to bolt. I wanted to scream. I wanted to rend my secondhand turtleneck and cry to the heavens.

I did none of those things. Instead, I began to bob my head in time to the music.

My neck, sore after hours of craning upward to stare at the TV, immediately began to ache. I continued, undeterred. There weren’t enough words in the dictionary nor time left in my life to express my grief over humanity’s loss of potential from things done to us and things we did to ourselves.

Movement to the right caught my eye. Sissy was bobbing along to the music, too. Apparently, we were of one mind on this subject.

So we bobbed, both in defiance and in acceptance of all the things we would never be able to change, looking like nothing more than a couple of psychically controlled marionettes performing for a group of tragically ill groundlings.

When the commercial was over, we laughed for a long time. I started to feel better, especially when the nurse came out soon after to collect the retching man. I was happy for all of us.

Mom and Mammaw finally returned to the waiting room around 10:00 p.m.

“Mammaw!” I cried. “How are you feeling?”

“A little better,” she mumbled.

“They gave her some fluids,” Mom explained, “and some prescriptions. She’s going to be ok. Why don’t you girls go get the car and bring it to the entrance?”

Sissy and I were back in a flash. We helped Mammaw into the back seat.

“I know you girls haven’t had any dinner,” Mammaw said weakly. “You can help yourselves to a sandwich or something while your mama goes and picks up my medicine.”

I was deeply relieved that Mammaw was feeling good enough to return to one of her default settings — hostess. I hoped that in a few days, she’d also be fully restored to the undisputed Burchfield gin rummy champion as well as the short-order cook for our battalion-sized family. “Don’t worry about us,” I told her. “We’re going to take care of you first before we worry with sandwiches.”

I drove down Sevier Avenue with a growling stomach but a full heart. Despite the turmoil in the waiting room, Mammaw had dodged a bullet tonight. Our family would remain intact, for now. I sent up a grateful prayer.

“Can you and Sissy get Mammaw to bed while I run to Walgreens?” asked Mom.

“Sure,” I said. “I’m happy you’re feeling a little better, Mammaw. We were worried.”

“I’m pretty strong,” Mammaw admitted, “but I never want to feel this bad again. That’s for sure.”

Neither did I. I was barely out of high school, and mathematically, the chances that I’d never have another rotten night like this one were slim. Trouble waited for all of us, in one form or another, as predictable as taxes or cauliflower farts.

Back on Island Home, Sissy and I tucked Mammaw into bed and made some dinner. Perhaps, in time, the worst memories of the evening would fade, although I’d be hearing the retching man’s dry heaves in my dreams for weeks to come.

Unbidden, the sound began to play on a loop in my mind, interrupting the enjoyment of my turkey sandwich mid-bite. I had to put a stop to this. I could live with endless questions and existential dread, but I drew the line at losing my dinner.

I forced myself away from the emergency room and back into the dining room, swallowing forcefully. I took another bite, keeping my focus on the crunchy lettuce and creamy cheese stacked between the soft slices of bread. As I chewed, I heard only the eleven o’clock news playing from the living room. I sighed in relief, finally able to pull the plug on such a terrible night.

Picture from Sissy’s journal, 1998