6/8/26 - 6/11/26: Trapped in the hospital.

6/8/26

As my mom gets checked in at the emergency room I stare at the pain measurement scale. It goes from no hurt to hurts worst. There are different colorful faces to help illustrate the scale. For no hurt it’s a little green face who is as joyous as can be. This little green guy lives by the motto ignorance is bliss. There are pockets of time where I have legitimately been that little green guy and it’s extraordinarily euphoric. But life is hurt and the longer I stare into the face of this happy-as-a-clam green, grinning face, the more I realize I’m staring into the face of an absolute… 

A) moronic knucklehead.
B) imbecilic ignoramus.
C) dimwitted cretin.
D) boneheaded nincompoop.
E) all of the above.

 

 

I look past this pain measurement scale with the green-faced grinner and lay my eyes on a door that just says room. 

 

 

My mom is checked in and lying on an incommodious bed in the E.R. She tells me she feels like a pancake. It sounds like such a lovely thing to be. A gorgeous, fluffy, peaceful thing just lying there. 

 

 

I move the car to a more permanent spot in the hospital parking lot once she gets admitted. I turn the heat on, go on my phone, and search on the internet (I will forever think it’s insalubrious for humanity and weird as hell that a phone can do this). My face is warm and my fingers are typing into the search bar why can’t I stop thinking about them? The internet uses phrases like neuro-chemical imprint, or coldly explains that a person you can’t stop thinking about is encoded as high-priority data. Sometimes I get curious about the non-emotional answer to a highly emotional question. 

 

My body doesn’t want to let go of the comfort and positive possibilities it felt when I was with this person. The things I felt were so soft and lovely and really quite sweet. And it’s hard to not feel melancholy about some of the ways it all transpired. Sometimes certain people can make your life feel so ineffably expansive, and when they leave it, it feels like it shrinks incredibly. It’s not an easy transition for me. I don’t want to get used to the absence of someone that brought me joy. Many folks probably believe they’re forever unlucky in love, and I’ve definitely been feeling lately like this is my fate. Doomed. 

 

I recall being drawn to them since before we started talking. What exactly is that big expansive feeling that draws two people to each other? What does it look like? And when I close my eyes and try to picture this feeling it’s absolutely oceanic. 

 

I want so badly to feel safe with someone I love and have them feel safe with me. To have a loving support system you can make out with is the dream. You lean on each other and all the love is there and there’s room for mistakes and growth. I really want to find this. I wonder who it will be. 

 

 

6/9/26

I’m at war with the beeping machine in my mom’s hospital room on the seventh floor. When I finally think I've put it to rest once and for all and lay back down on my improvised hospital room bed, the machine starts beeping away again like an evil maniac. There is no rhyme or reason to this machine. It operates purely on the powerful trifecta of vengeance, hatred, and pure spite. 

 

I locked it in the bathroom. But the beep was still prominent. The nurse just wheeled it out. “Goodbye machine from hell” I think to myself. 

In the last twenty four hours my mom finished brain radiation and then ended up in the E.R., and then was admitted overnight. It’s now the second night here in this dreadful seventh floor hospital room.

 

No water or fluids starting at midnight because of a procedure she’s having tomorrow. One of the nurses said it was okay to take little sips with pills during this period. Though, this new night nurse is more extreme and refused to give her a single ice chip when she asked for one. I pushed hard for this single ice chip. He doubled-down and said if he gave it to her it was a slippery slope. Since this happened I’ve been referring to him as Mr. Slippery Slope. 

 

 

6/10/26

Still at the hospital. 

I think we’re trapped here forever.

 

I feel insane. Haven’t slept since we got here on Monday night. 

We live inside other peoples decisions and they live inside ours. The effects are far-reaching. 

 

6/11/26

The cancer has me back to feeling isolated and lonely. I can’t leave her side. When my mind wanders away from what’s going on with her treatment, I turn into a lame person that can’t stop thinking about him. His rejection has just been feeling very heavy since it happened all of a sudden back in January. His disappearance from my life has felt unnatural, and perplexing, and hurtful, and sad. I could very possibly just never see him again. And that’s his decision and I just have to move on from it somehow and hope that he’s happy. I just don’t know how to move on from it right now. I tried dating after his rejection to try to get my mind off him but everyone was such a dud and here I am still thinking about him. It didn’t work. Usually five months is enough to feel a smidgen of peace about someone being absent from my life but not in this case at all. I don’t know what it is about him. He seeped into me in a way that’s hard to remove. Though, honestly I'm not really rooting for the removal. 

 

 

5:22 A.M.

I’m lying on this makeshift hospital bed that’s really just an uncomfortable plastic-y couch, and my mom has her ocean wave sounds for tinnitus on full blast and I haven’t slept very much since we’ve been here. Oakland is sprawled out in the window behind me. I’m menacingly melancholy and overwhelmed. 

 

 

My mom gets a CT scan tomorrow and then we’ll figure out what the next part of her cancer treatment is. 

 

 

Her CT scan was pushed up to today. 

 

The last time my mom was in this hospital the food was made by a chef and it stunned her at how delectable it was. In a move to cut costs, it’s been changed to a rotating mixture of fowl tasting, microwaved food that everyone abhors. Even the cut up apples are trapped in cellophane. “You don’t mess with the kitchen” she says with passionate fury. 

Family Feud is on mute in the hospital room as my mom sleeps. We should be discharged but they’re keeping us another night just for fun. 

 

Here's an example of a question that would be on Family Feud if the show was written by me:

What Kinds of Time Are There?

1. A window of time.
2. Chunks of time.
2. No more time. 
3. Not enough time. 
4. Thermodynamic time. 
5. Subjective time. 
6. Free time. 

 

 

I go out to Safeway at 11:30 P.M to pick up yogurts and cheese crackers. Her and I chow down while we watch You’ve Got Mail on the hospital T.V. until about 2 A.M.

 

We get discharged tomorrow.