“Hello,” I whisper, and she turns. She looks startled.
“Are you real?” I ask.
Like everyone else, she is masked and gloved and gowned. She points to the trash can. I realize, then, that what she holds is just a black plastic bag. That she is an essential worker who’s come to clean the room.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
She says, haltingly, “No English.”
I tap my chest. “Diana,” I say, then point to her.
“Cosima,” she replies, and she bobs her head.
It strikes me that nobody willingly connects with either of us. Cosima, because she is beneath the notice of the medical staff; me, because I’m a walking potential death sentence.
“I don’t know what’s real anymore, and what’s not,” I confess to Cosima, as she wipes down the faucets and the sink basin.
“I’ve lost time,” I tell her. “And people. And maybe my mind.”
She pulls the bag out of my garbage can and knots its neck. She nods and takes away my trash.
There aren’t clocks in hospital rooms, and your sleep keeps getting disturbed, and the lights never really go out fully, so it’s hard to get a sense of time passing. Sometimes I am not sure if hours have gone by, or days.
Instead, I begin to count the spaces between the fits of coughing that leave me spent and exhausted. My lungs may have rallied enough to take me off a ventilator but they aren’t anywhere near being healthy. When I start coughing, I can’t stop; when I can’t stop, I gasp for air; when I’m gasping, the edges of my vision turn dark and starry.
It’s exactly what it felt like when I thought I was drowning.
When it happens again, I press the call button, and Chris the Hot Nursing Assistant comes in. He sees me struggling to breathe and adjusts the bed so I am sitting up. He takes a suction tube, like the kind from the dentist, and slips it into my mouth. What comes out makes me think of hoarfrost, little crystal shards, that I’ve coughed out of my chest. No wonder I can’t breathe, if this is what’s inside me.
“Okay,” Chris soothes. “Now, try to even out those breaths.”
I cough again, my ribs seizing and my eyes watering.
“In … ?and out. In … ?out,” he says. He grasps my hand firmly and looks into my eyes. I don’t blink. I hold on to his gaze like a lifeline.
My gasps level out. Chris squeezes my fingers, an acknowledgment. But I still can’t keep that tickle from my throat, that urge to cough, from taking over. “Just match me,” he instructs, exaggerating his breathing so that I can follow along.
It takes a few moments, but eventually, I am doing my best to breathe along with him.
A few more moments, and I find my voice again. Now that I am breathing, he will leave. And I don’t want to be alone again. “Are you single?”
“Are you asking?” He laughs.
I shake my head. “I have a boyfriend. But one day, you’re going to make someone an incredible partner.”
He smiles, clasping his other hand over our joined ones. Just then, the door opens, and as if I’ve conjured him, Finn enters in his PPE.
“Since you just lit up like a Christmas tree,” Chris says, “I’m guessing this is the boyfriend.”
“Dr. Colson,” Finn corrects, narrowing his eyes.
Chagrined, Chris drops my hand. “Of course,” he says, and he glances at me. “Just breathe,” he reminds me, winks, and slips out of my room.
Finn sits down in the chair Chris has vacated. “Should I be jealous?” he asks me.
I roll my eyes. “Yes, because the first thing I’m thinking about after almost dying is cheating on you.”
The sentence hasn’t even left my mouth before I feel a furious blush on my cheeks.
With the exception of how Finn and I met, I haven’t really had a chance to see him in his professional mode. It’s impressive to see him cut a swath through the hospital, but the way he just used his title to bully Chris makes me cringe a little … ?even though I should probably be flattered by the fact that he was possessive.
What he said or did, though, pales by comparison to the fact that he’s here. He’s in my room; he’s not on the other side of the glass; I’m not alone. It makes me giddy. “Where have you been?”
“Earning our rent,” he says. “But I missed you.”
I reach out my hand to touch him. Just because I can. “I missed you, too.”
I want him to take off his mask; I want to see his whole face as if everything between us is normal. But I also know that he’s already taking a risk being in this room with me, even trussed up in all that gear.