...and I can only see her eyes.

 

“If you’re going to clean me up, clean me up.”

This is what she hoarsely whispers as I attempt to wipe the foamy saliva and blackish-red liquid that boiled its way over her bottom lip to cover her entire chin again. Struggling weakly to balance the cardboard ring that gives her translucent blue plastic puke sac its form she shakes and juts her head forward so as not to mess her blankets again. This is when I notice, when I start to see her reality. This is the moment that it becomes serious. Immediately serious, the way an event demands your unlimited attention; like a splintered bone ripped through your skin, proving how white it can be as you carefully roll up your pant leg to assess the injury. The puke sac bulges at its bottom, alluding to the last hour’s efforts. Her stomach doesn’t work and hasn’t for some time. All shall entire ALL shall leave. Later I would be shown pictures of the inside of her throat. The constant weeks of vomiting has caused bleeding sores that weep even more that I and fill her stomach with darkest red soup. Her chin is speckled with red dots, superficial blood vessels rubbed raw and irritated from the paper tissue needed to clean the soup from her. Her splitting chapped lips are swollen almost as much as her abdomen, which contrast the rest of her now eerily frail frame.

All of this exists and I can only see her eyes. Appearing hollow at first glance as if they’re empty, like the medication forced them back, deep inside her to hide from everything. I think wow, she’s checking out. But I stay and study. Peering through the layers in those orbs I learn. And they tell the story of pain, but mostly confusion - the misunderstanding of her body. They tell me how she longs to eat something that is welcome inside her. They show me how scared she is. They tell me how scared to be. They relay a sense of helplessness that is so foreign to this person I’ve known every second of my being, a needing so strong that blankets her most-powerful asset: stubbornness.

Mom: “Are you going to hook up this tube again?”

Nurse: “No, the doctor’s want to just leave it pinched off for now.”

Mom: “Oh, so you just want me to be uncomfortable then?”

Nurse: Silence

At the back of those eyes she’s waiting, bored and tired, but stubbornly waiting for a better hour, minute, second, a moment when she can escape the uncomfortable light in that crowded hospital room, a moment when she can be herself again.