“His name is Chris,” I reply.
She raises a brow. “Oh, I know.” She walks toward the bed. “I’m Prisha. I’m a physical therapist.”
“Nice to meet you,” I say.
“We’ve met, kind of. When you were sedated, I moved your limbs around so your joints and muscles would stay healthy.” She shrugs. “You’re welcome.”
“I want to go to the bathroom,” I tell her. “I mean, not now. But when I have to.”
She nods. “That’s a great goal. But you’ve been on a vent for five days, so we have to see how you’re moving, and how you’ll respond to being upright, first.” Prisha draws one of my arms over my head, encouraging me to take a breath. Then she does this with the other arm. I can feel my rib cage expanding. She gives me a few breathing exercises to try, and I do, until I cough. “We can try to get out of bed, but to do that, we’re going to need a second set of hands and a blood pressure cuff,” Prisha says.
“Please,” I beg. “The bathroom?”
She narrows her eyes, as if assessing me. Then she calls in Chris, the CNA, again. Prisha helps me roll and lowers my legs off the bed. With Chris’s help, she gets me to a sitting position. Prisha slides an arm around me, and at the embrace, I almost gasp. Everyone else—even Finn, that first night—is tentative about coming close to me, as if my skin itself is contaminated. To have someone touch me, so willingly and without fear, nearly brings me to tears.
Everything hurts as I move it, but I am driven. I do not want Chris wiping my ass again.
“Why,” I grind out, “is this so hard?”
“You’re lucky,” Chris says, from my other side. “The other postvent Covid patients—and there aren’t many—have a lot of complications. Renal failure, heart failure, encephalopathy, pressure ulcers …”
Prisha interrupts him just as I’m starting to get panicked hearing about complications I haven’t even anticipated. “Okay,” she says. “Let’s try sitting up on your own for a few seconds.”
Sitting? I’m not an invalid; it’s only been a few days. “I just need help standing. I haven’t been in the hospital that long—”
“Humor me,” Prisha says, and she removes her arm so that I have to support myself upright.
For about fifteen seconds, I do.
Then everything swims. Around me, inside me. Being vertical feels like hurtling through space. I see stars, start to tip forward, and Chris’s strong arms catch me and gently lower me back onto the bed.
Prisha looks down at me. “You’ve been effectively paralyzed for nearly a week. When you sit up, all the blood rushes down from your head because the muscles around the blood vessels have been on hiatus and need to remember how gravity works. Baby steps, Diana. You almost died. Cut your body a break.”
I feel exhausted, like I have run a mile. I think about how, on Isabela, I would swim or run or snorkel for hours without getting tired.
But then again, that was fake.
Prisha tugs the blanket up around me. “I’ve got patients who can’t even manage five seconds,” she says, patting my shoulder. “Fifteen seconds today. Tomorrow’s going to be better.”
When Prisha and Chris leave, I watch them through the plate-glass window, stripping off their PPE and stuffing it into special bins for Covid-exposed gear.
The sound of my own failure pounds like a headache. I reach for the smooth plastic tail of the TV remote, fishing it closer. It slips out of my hand twice before I manage to drag it onto my belly and turn the TV on.
The channel is CNN. “At least 215 million Americans are under shelter-in-place orders,” the anchor says. “At this point, the United States has surpassed China and Italy for most known cases worldwide, with over 85,000 cases and 1,300 deaths.”
My mother being one of them.
“One of the hardest hit locations is the New York City area. A hospital official in Queens said that they have only three remaining ventilators, and that if this continues into April, patient care may have to be rationed. Bodies are being stored in freezer trucks—”
I smack at the remote until I hit the button that turns the TV, blessedly, off.
Twice, I see a ghost.
She comes into my room so quietly that at first I am not sure what wakes me. She moves in the shadows and is gone soundlessly before I can even blink her into focus.
So the third time I am waiting. She is a dark blur of activity at the edges of the room, and I turn toward the disturbance and narrow my eyes. An older woman with dark hair and darker skin, who is holding her own shadow in one fist.