That late morning when Gail walked down the hallway from the ICU waiting area to her mother’s room, she figured she was starting down the long path of adjusting herself, adjusting her mother, to amputation. Her mother was eighty years old and had arterial sclerosis. Her veins were simply giving out. When she checked into the emergency room forty-eight hours before, complaining that she could no longer feel her foot and the skin was cold, her toes were already starting to turn black with gangrene. Horrified at the idea of a leg being removed, Gail’s mother succumbed to morphine. Gail wasn’t even sure that her mother understood she was going into surgery when she was rolled out of the room in the early dawn.
How do you say goodbye to a limb? Gail supposed she would want morphine too.
The doctor said her mother did well in surgery and that now the focus would be on getting her into rehab. An above the knee amputation meant no prosthesis, but a wheelchair. Gail’s mother needed to build her upper body strength, so that she could lift herself from chair to bed to toilet and continue to live on her own, within reason, in an assisted living facility. As Gail walked through the big double doors into the ICU, she was already thinking ahead, wondering which facility, who would be best able to take care of her mother, to tolerate her mother, so that Gail could escape with only the most necessary visits.
There was activity in her mother’s room. “She started having trouble breathing,” the nurse said. “We think it’s from the morphine and the anesthetic.”
Her mother moaned, an odd guttural grunt that sounded animal. Her arms rose and dropped in an irregular rhythm and her remaining leg swooshed under the sheet.
“We’re going to give her a special medication, something that will block all effects of the morphine and anesthetic, to see if she can control her breathing then. Otherwise, we might have to put her back on the respirator.”
Gail nodded. She didn’t know if she didn’t hear the nurse ask her to leave, or if the nurse simply forgot, but when the medication was administered, Gail was still there, by the bedside, as her mother zapped out of drugged unconsciousness. Zapped into a world of excruciating pain where a limb was lopped off and it was impossible to breathe.
Her whole body contracted, then arched away from the mattress. Her remaining foot flailed and kicked back the covers and Gail saw the bandaged stump, leaping up and down, out of control, like a balloon that has lost its ballast. Her mother’s head bent back at an impossible angle and her eyes bulged white and gelatinous from their sockets. Her mouth dropped wide, her jaw fell unhinged, Gail never saw anyone’s mouth open so far before. It was a scream, a soundless scream, but so loud and shattering, it knocked Gail’s knees out from under her and she hit the floor, her mother’s shrieking silence overwhelming her into an echoing and swirling black void.
She came to in the hallway outside her mother’s room. An aide propped her against the wall and offered her a cup of cold water. The nurse knelt beside her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You weren’t supposed to see that. We put the respirator back in and gave your mother more morphine. She’s resting comfortably now.”
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