The Day My Husband Would Not Help
They came fast. The last clear thing I remember from the house is a young paramedic kneeling in front of me putting a mask over my face, a real one, oxygen, and Pam standing behind him with her hand pressed flat against her chest, and Lorraine in the hall in her nightgown gripping the walker, crying, saying my name.
I do not remember the ambulance.
What I know about the next part I mostly know from other people, because for a stretch of it I was not making memories. I had gone into what they called status asthmaticus, which is the name for an attack that will not break, the kind that kills people, the kind that does not care how tough you are or how many times you have ridden it out before. They worked on me a long time in the Rook’s Branch clinic and then they sent me by ambulance again to the bigger hospital over in Carthage, and I spent that first night in intensive care with tubes and a mask that forced air in instead of asking my lungs to pull it, and a nurse who sat with me because my numbers scared her.
Pam called Dale on his route. I know how that call went because Pam told me later, and Pam does not soften things.
She told him his wife had collapsed and been taken by ambulance and was in serious trouble. And Dale, on the other end, three counties away with a truck full of soda, said, “Is it real this time, or is it the usual.”
Is it real this time.
Pam told me she went quiet for a second. Then she said, “Dale, I watched them put a mask on her face on your hallway floor. You get to that hospital.” And she hung up on him.
He did come. I want to be honest about that. He drove two hours and he came. But by the time he got there I was stable enough to be scared instead of dying, and the first thing out of his mouth, standing at the foot of that bed looking at his wife wired up to machines, was not “I’m sorry.” It was not “I should have stayed home.” It was, “Who’s got the kids?”
Who’s got the kids.
The answer, it turned out, was nobody and everybody. Hannah, fourteen years old, had gotten off the bus to a house full of strangers and flashing lights and her grandmother crying. And Hannah had held it together. She had called me and gotten no answer and then called her father and gotten told to “handle things at the house,” and so she had. A fourteen-year-old had made supper for her brothers out of what was in the freezer. She had gotten her grandmother’s evening pills right, from the little labeled cups I keep, because she had watched me do it her whole life. She had put Sam to bed. She had sat up in the dark not knowing if her mother was alive, and she had done my whole job, and she had done it well, and she was eleven years older than she had been that morning.