“No,” I interrupt. “How did I get back from the Galápagos?”
Finn blinks. “Diana,” he says, “you never went.”
TWO
TWELVE
Later, I would learn that when you want to take someone off a ventilator, you use the acronym MOVE to gauge readiness: mental status, oxygenation, ventilation, and expectoration. You want the blood vessels in the brain to be receiving and perfusing oxygen, so that the patient can process information and respond. You want the oxygen level to top 90 percent, and you want the patient to be able to overbreathe the ventilator. You have to make sure she can cough, so that she will not choke on her own spit when the tube is removed.
To determine this, a spontaneous breathing trial is done. First the patient is switched to pressure support mode, to see how much of a breath she is capable of taking. Then comes a spontaneous awakening trial, to see if the patient can wake up when the amount of sedatives being pumped into her veins is lessened. Finally, the pressure support is turned off to do a spontaneous breathing trial. If the patient can maintain low carbon dioxide levels, then she is ready for extubation.
This process is called a sedation vacation.
It is, according to my nurse, Syreta, the only vacation I’ve been on.
I am alone most of the time, but it seems there is always someone hovering outside my door, peering in. The next time Syreta comes in, I ask why, and she tells me that I’m a success story—and the staff has had precious few of them.
Syreta tells me that it’s normal to feel wrung out. I can’t sit up on my own. I am not allowed to eat or drink—I have a feeding tube down my nose, and will until I pass something called a swallow test. I am wearing a diaper. Yet none of this is as upsetting as the fact that everyone keeps telling me this is real: the moon-suited medical team, the wonkiness of my body, the television reports that schools and businesses are all closed and that thousands of people are dead.
Yesterday, I was on Isabela Island and I almost drowned.
But I’m the only person who believes that.
Syreta doesn’t even blink when I tell her about the Galápagos. “I had another patient who was convinced there were two stuffed animals on her windowsill, and every time I left the room, they waved at her.” She raises a brow. “There weren’t any stuffed animals on her windowsill. She didn’t even have a window.”
“You don’t understand … ?I lived there. I met people and made friends and I … ?I climbed into a volcano … ?I went swimming—Oh!” I try to reach my phone, on the table in front of me, but it is so heavy that it slips out of my hand and Syreta has to fish in the blankets to hand it to me. “I have pictures. Sea lions and blue-footed boobies I wanted to show Finn—”
I use my thumb to scrub across the screen, but the last picture on my phone is of Kitomi Ito’s painting, from weeks ago.
That’s when I notice the date on the screen.
“Today can’t be March twenty-fourth,” I say, the thought rolling like fog through my mind. “I’ve been away for two months. I celebrated my birthday there.”
“Guess you get to celebrate again.”
“It wasn’t a hallucination,” I protest. “It felt more real than any of this does.”
“Honestly,” Syreta mulls. “That’s a blessing.”
The Covid ICU is like a plague ward. The only people allowed to enter my room are my doctor, Syreta, and the night nurse, Betty; even the residents who do rounds talk to me from outside the plate-glass wall. There are too many patients and not enough medical staff. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I am alone, trapped in a body that will not do what I need it to do.
I keep watching through the window, but I am the bug trapped in a jar—peered at occasionally by people who are mostly just grateful I am no longer sharing their space.
I am so fucking thirsty and no one will give me water. It feels like I have been in a wind tunnel for days, unable to close my mouth. My lips are chapped and my throat is a desert.
I still have oxygen being piped into my nose.
I have no recollection of getting sick.
What I do remember, vividly and viscerally, is the sparkle of the rock walls of the trillizos, and how the dock in Puerto Villamil smells of fish and salt, the taste of papaya warm from the sun, and the soft curves of Abuela’s voice rounding out Spanish words.
I remember Beatriz, sitting on the beach with wet sand dripping from her fist.
I remember Gabriel treading water in the ocean, grinning as he splashed me.