There was a terrific clatter in the hallway and two nurses pushed in a large pair of scales, for in addition to its being Sunday and a visiting day, this was also the last day of the month and weigh day. As each of us was helped out of bed and onto the scales, the room was tight with hope, for gaining weight signified at least a foothold on the climb to health. Losing weight meant a sliding backward and we could almost feel Sylvia’s wild desperate attempts to grab something that would keep her from slipping farther down toward the yawning chasm, as with scared eyes and indrawn breath she watched the impersonal nurses adjust the weights and push the balance back, back, back. Sylvia had lost six pounds. Marie had lost three pounds, Kimi had gained five pounds and I weighed the same as I had at the clinic, which was twenty-three pounds underweight for my age and height, according to the chart.
For a time after the scales had gone the room was still and heavy with despair. Even the sunshine seemed to have lost its promise and was watery and without warmth. Sylvia looked ahead at nothing and plucked nervously at the sheet. Marie twirled the knob of her stand drawer with one thin finger. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes dark and angry. Kimi examined the palms of her hands. I watched the wind flitter the corner of the paper napkin on which my water glasses stood.
Then from Kimi’s corner there was a small sound. I looked over and saw that she was crying and blotting her eyes with her bed jacket. I asked her what the trouble was and she said in a forlorn voice, “I am not happy to be the only one who has gained. It makes me feel like a beeg lonely hog.”
At this point the Medical Director came in. He was alone without the usual retinue of house doctors and charge nurses, which was as surprising as being handed an aspirin without water to wash it down. He came to my bed. He said, “How do you feel,” and I could tell by the way he asked and from the expression in his eyes that he already knew and cared nothing for my opinion. But I said anyway that I was cold.
This evoked a lengthy lecture, excerpts from which were: “It is better to be too cold than too warm. . . . Too much heat makes patients restless. . . . The nearer a comatose state tuberculosis patients can be kept the better their chances of recovery. . . . Hibernation like bears would be best. . . . Rest is the thing and only rest and more rest. Just lying in bed is not resting. . . . Resting is done with the mind as well as the body. . . . Tuberculosis is caused by the tubercule bacillus, a red, rod-shaped microorganism. . . . To date no medicine has been discovered which will kill this bacillus and not be too toxic for the patient. . . . The only way a patient can get rid of the bacillus is to wall it off in the lungs. This walling-off process is done by fibrosis which is more delicate than a spider’s web and can be torn by the slightest activity. . . . The poisons sloughed off by the tubercular sores in the lungs make the tuberculosis patient nervous, make his heart pound, make resting difficult. . . . Rest is the answer. Just rest, rest and more rest. Tuberculosis can and does attack every organ in the body. . . . Drinking lots of water helps to wash the poisons out of the system and to prevent tuberculosis of the kidneys.”
The Medical Director gave his talk to the room at large, then he turned to me and said, “You are a very sick young woman and you have much to learn.” He went to Sylvia, poked at her for a few minutes and told her that she had tuberculosis of the intestines. He said Happy Birthday to Kimi and asked Marie how in hell she expected to get well if she didn’t eat. She told him about her constipation and he said, “The trouble with American women is that they read too many advertisements and take too many laxatives.” He left.
After he had gone Marie cried because she was constipated, Sylvia cried because she had diarrhea, Kimi cried because she was eighteen and I tried to gather my thoughts into a neat bundle, which I intended to tie up securely and label “out to lunch.”
Trying to gather up my thoughts was as futile as trying to pick up spilled mercury. I had two big main depressing thoughts and each time I touched them they broke into many little morbid pieces. Number one was: Who will support the children if I die? And number two was: Will I be able to support the children if I get well?
The first one broke down into a lot of horrid little thoughts connected with my life insurance, the empty chair at the dinner table, the children’s education, how long it would take me to die, what were the first symptoms, etc. The second one brought many cheering mental pictures of me in a faded wrapper peeling the last potato; me in a faded wrapper earning a meagre living by addressing envelopes at home; me in a faded wrapper making the children’s winter coats out of an old blanket, their sweaters out of old bathing suits.
Just after nourishment the Charge Nurse moved Marie and Sylvia. As we kept our same beds, beside stands and chairs all the way through the Bedrest Hospital, moving the patients was simple. The Charge Nurse put their chairs on the foot of their beds and wheeled them to a new location. Another nurse came for their bedside stands and flowers. We asked this other nurse if she would move Kimi’s bed up across from mine, where Sylvia’s had been. She said suspiciously, “Did the Charge Nurse order it?” and Kimi said, “Would we ask you if she hadn’t?” The nurse moved us grudgingly and when she had gone, Kimi said, “I hate to resort to trickery but sometime it is the only way I can get my wish.”
Dinner was a very pleasant meal. Among other things, we had fricaseed chicken, dumplings, asparagus and ice cream with chocolate sauce. I tried some of Kimi’s shoyu on my asparagus and chicken and liked it very much, though I thought it was gilding the lily to put it on the chicken.
After dinner Kimi put on a little lipstick, while I put on quantities of liquid suntan makeup, mascara and bright pink lipstick. It made me look like an old sick Madam but raised my spirits several notches. Kimi instructed me to “hold the lipstick, mirror and comb clutched in a sweaty palm under the cover, then when the nurse has made the last inspection and just before the alien step of visitor are heard you may quickly repair the ravage of sleep.” I did as she told me and held my lipstick, comb and mirror in my sweaty palm but it was unnecessary because I didn’t sleep and I lay so quietly that when I looked every pore was in place.
Kimi’s family came on the stroke of two. Her father with an armload of yellow chrysanthemums as big as grapefruit, her mother with a poem but also the sock, sweater, mitten and other presents, and her brother, George, a tall handsome young Japanese, with some sweet and sour spareribs, which he ate himself because he thought Kimi was too fat.
My visitors were late and Kimi’s dear little mother, thinking that I had no friends or judging from my appearance that they were all cheap transients, brought me half of the yellow chrysanthemums and arranged them beautifully in a square white vase. She had just put the vase on the stand and had said in her gentle voice, “for you,” when Granite Eyes came in to fill the water glasses. She said, “Patients are not allowed to keep flowers on their stands,” and clunked the vase to the floor.
Then she said, “Patients may not talk to other patients’ visitors, Mrs. Bard. If you break the rules your visiting privileges will be taken away.” As Kimi’s mother spoke only a little English and apparently did not understand what the nurse was saying, she smiled and bowed to Granite Eyes and said, “Thank you very much, it is a lovely day.” Kimi’s brother, who had been watching, turned and spoke to Kimi and her father in Japanese. They all laughed. Granite Eyes stalked out of the room but her back looked self-conscious.
Just then Mother, Mary and Jim, Mary’s husband, came in. Jim walked purposefully up to the bed and immediately handed me everything he had in the way of conversation. He said, “You look fine.” The rest of the two hours he spent looking longingly out the window or examining me from different angles, as if I were a building site.
Mary brought me a huge bunch of butter yellow chrysanthemums with chartreuse centers. Mother brought a bed lamp and a stand bag (Mary had unearthed an old friend and old patient of The Pines who had told her I would need these) and a box of hot fresh cookies. They were so curious about everything in the in
stitution and I was so curious about everything at home that the two hours were up almost at once. Just before they left Jim said, “Very little is known about tuberculosis. How is the food here?” I said it was wonderful and he said, “Well, that’s something.”
When Charlie came in to put up the beds he said, “Well, I seen your two friends down the hall. They’re in a cubicle together but they don’t look too good to me. I doubt if either of them two ever gets out of here. Of course, they might send ’em home to die, but they’ll never get out any other way.” Kimi said, “Charlie, I think you are in the wrong work. I think your occupational therapy time should be spent in the morgue.” This, for some odd reason, sent him into paroxysms of laughter.
Sunday night after supper the store girl came around and took orders. The store girl was an ambulant patient but always a very trusted one as she took orders from the men too. This store girl’s name was Velma Martin and she had, in addition to her trustworthiness, a purple plaid coat, steel-rimmed spectacles, a nasal voice and a habit of working her tongue around the inside of her mouth as if she were looking for hidden crumbs.
Velma said that the store carried toothpaste, soap, writing paper, magazines, candy, gum, pencils, ink, Coca-Cola, pop, fruit and cookies but that bedrest patients were not allowed to order any of the food. We could have gum, though, said Velma sending her tongue way back behind her right-hand twelve-year-old molar after some little particle of the forbidden food. I didn’t need anything but Kimi ordered gum and soap, and then seeing that I hadn’t bought anything said, “It would be my pleasure to lend you some money if you need it.” I thanked her but refused.
After Velma came the nourishment cart bearing, in addition to the regular milk and cocoa, all the excess food brought patients by their visitors. The nurse offered us dry white cake, always referred to in our family as “choke cake,” chocolate cake, cup cakes, cookies and candy. She said that any food we had been given that we couldn’t eat by lights out must be put on the cart. I felt it was a sacrilege to put mother’s cookies on the cart with the dry cup cakes and the choke cake and was wondering what to do with them when the night nurse solved the problem by eating them all while she talked to us.
She told us that her name was Katy Morris, she was twenty-four years old and very interested in t.b. because her brother had died of it. Kimi said, “I suppose that most of the patient here will eventually die.” Katy said, “Nonsense! Most of the patients here will get well. A few will die certainly, but most everyone who does what he is told and tries to get well, gets well.”
I told her that I was surprised to learn that an old woman like Nellie could have tuberculosis. Katy said that there were several very old men downstairs and that all too often old people who had had catarrh or a cough for years and years were found to have had active communicable tuberculosis. She said that in one room down the hall there was a woman seventy-eight years old and a little girl thirteen.
Just before she left Kimi said, “Just on the chance that I may be one of the few who die, will you turn the radio up just a leetle.” There was a radio control in our ward and Katy, winking at me, turned it up until we could understand all the words.
We spent the rest of the evening listening to the programs and drinking water to wash the t.b. poisons out of our systems. I thought that evening, and again and again in the weeks to come, how fortunate I was to have gentle, intelligent, considerate, witty, beautiful Kimi for a roommate.
Being suddenly thrust with perfect strangers and forced to live with them without any privacy at all for twenty-four-hour period after twenty-four-hour period is as much a problem in adjustment as a planned marriage but without the impetus of curiosity or the surcease of sex.
I like people but not all people. I’m neither Christian enough nor charitable enough to like anybody just because he is alive and breathing. I want people to interest or amuse me. I want them fascinating and witty or so dull as to be different. I want them either intellectually stimulating or wonderfully corny; perfectly charming or hundred per cent stinker. I like my chosen companions to be distinguishable from the undulating masses and I don’t care how.
Like a wonderful woman I once knew who spoke beautiful English and lived in her chicken house. She had hung up gold velvet portieres in the middle of the chicken house to let the chickens know that they were sharing their quarters and while we drank our tea my friend bemoaned, in her beautiful English, the sad plight of the educational system in America and completely ignored the fat hens clucking and scratching and bumping into the gold velvet portieres which swayed and parted so that little brown feathers and small pieces of chaff flitted between them and landed on our tea table.
Or like a one-time neighbor whose husband raised Mallard ducks in their basement and she was so anxious to be grand that she always referred to the duck raising as “my husband’s business enterprise,” which made it seem huge and important like the gas works. Or another woman I enjoyed immensely who was so obsessed with being refined that she blinked her eyes and hesitated carefully before she trusted herself to say anything at all and then produced gems such as “Between you and I, Betty, Charlie don’t like living so neah the trolley line” and “He don’t care for nuts but would you and she wish for some?”
From my stay at The Pines I learned that a stiff test for friendship is: “Would she be pleasant to have t.b. with?” Unfortunately, too many people, when you try separating them from their material possessions and any and all activity, turn out to be like cheap golf balls. You unwind and unwind and unwind but you never get to the pure rubber core because there isn’t any. When I started unwinding Kimi I found that under her beautiful covering she was mostly core. She said, “It is not character on my part, Betty, it is just that if you have to have tuberculosis it is easier to be Japanese.”
Monday, immediately after rest hours, Kimi and I were handed a new problem in adjustment. Her name was Eileen Kelly and she was young and pretty with very long red hair and very long red fingernails. With disapproval radiating from her like heat, Granite Eyes wheeled Eileen in and helped her out of the wheelchair.
Eileen took off her robe, which was pale blue and leaned far from the required warm sensible bathrobe and heavily toward a peignoir. She had on sleeveless, backless, black satin pajamas and an anklet. Granite Eyes took her by the bare arm disdainfully as though she were holding her up in two fingers and disposing of her.
Eileen, not at all disturbed, leapt nimbly into the bed, but as she slid down between the icy sheets she let out a yell. “Jeeeeesus God, this bed’s cold!” Like a shout in any empty church the yell bounced against the walls of the completely quiet Bedrest Hospital. At once the Charge Nurse was projected in the doorway. Eyes flashing, lips stretched tight with disapproval, she demanded an explanation of this very unorthodox noise. Granite Eyes said, rather inanely, we thought, “Miss Kelly’s cold.” The Charge Nurse said, “Miss Kelly, patients of The Pines do not shout.”
She noticed a bare shoulder. Then turning back the covers, as though she were looking for maggots in a sack of flour, she revealed the rest of the bare and satin-clad Miss Kelly. Her nostrils swelled almost to the bursting point. She said to Granite Eyes, “Miss Murdock, go to the lockers and get a pair of outing flannel pajamas.” She turned to Miss Kelly. “Did you read your list of requirements?” Miss Kelly said that she had. “Then,” said the Charge Nurse, “why have you come here wearing silk [she breathed out heavily as she said this loathesome word so that it came out “suh-hilk”] pajamas and nail polish?” Miss Kelly said wisely, “I don’t know.”
Just then Granite Eyes came puffing back with a very ragged pair of blue and white flannel pajamas which, Kimi pointed out to us later, had probably belonged to a patient who had died. The Charge Nurse snatched the pajamas and sent Granite Eyes back for oil of peppermint. Then she removed Eileen from the black satin and stuffed her into the outing flannel with purpose and dispatch; with sharp surgical scissors, which she carried in her pocket, she c
ut about half an inch from the long pointed blood red fingernails; removed the polish from the remaining stubs with oil of peppermint; and informed Miss Kelly that the next morning her hair would be cut to within one inch of the ear lobe. Her stiff white uniform switched angrily through the door and she was gone. Miss Kelly sat bolt upright in her bed, a deadly sin, and stuck out her tongue at the retreating Charge Nurse. Then she turned round hostile blue eyes on Kimi and me and said, “Jesus, what a dame!”
She disdained to communicate further with us until suppertime when she picked up the beautiful thought from her tray and read, “‘Intellect is invisible to the man who has none.’ Now what knothead thought that up?” she asked no one in particular.
When the House Doctor and the Charge Nurse made rounds a little later Eileen complained of the cold and asked for a hot-water bottle. The Charge Nurse said quickly, “Hot-water bottles are filled at eight-thirty in the morning and at seven-fifteen in the evening.” Eileen said, “I wasn’t here at eight-thirty this morning and I’m cold now.” The Charge Nurse said, “Your hot-water bottle will be filled at seven-fifteen this evening.”
It was unfortunate that on that of all evenings the hot-water bottle filling should have been assigned to Miss Muelbach, who was so slow that even if she had put hot water in the bottles, which she never did, they would have been cold by the time she got them distributed. She threw mine on to the foot of my bed, dripping and cool. I looked over at Eileen. She said a very bad word and threw her hot-water bottle on the floor. It lit with a resounding clunk but, with Miss Muelbach on hot-water bottle duty there were so many resounding clunks up and down the ward, this one passed unnoticed.