Stories From a Darkened Hallway

Have I told you lately how much I love my desk? I love it because it’s in my office, which is in a building on a nondescript plot of land in Daphne, Alabama. I’m aware that working in an office has graduated to clichéd middle class horror story status. If the media is to be believed, I’ll kill all of you any day now. Until then, I’ll tell you a story from my home health nursing days, where my office was my car, my desk, my freakin’ dash board. Android tablet in one hand, cell phone in the other, hurtling up and down bloody Hwy 98 like a black hearse full of, ironically, normal saline, sterile gauze and catheter tubing. I've done and seen some amazing things. Roy Batty’s quote from Blade Runner comes to mind.

 "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe..."

In truth, amazing experiences in life aren't always beautiful and some moments deserve to get lost like tears in rain. I've catherized a retracted penis while roaches crawled all over my shoes. The retracted penis was the real deal breaker in that scenario. It’s like trying to threat a big, soft meat needle On the plus side, I did a passable job of willing the roaches to get off me with my mind. I've put my entire fist into a sacral pressure wound at gunpoint. I've been attacked by wasps and chased by donkeys. I've eaten gas station food!  I've reveled in awe and disgust. If you reserve your sense of wonder in life for only the beautiful and the palatable, you will eventually find yourself in an existence devoid of polarity, where beauty has lost it's value in the absence of horror. This is a place that is at first seemingly idyllic, then merely dull, until the true nature of our universe asserts itself  and demands checks and balances in the form of cruelty and brutality. Nursing forces one to acknowledge this duality and home health nursing was truly fascinating, until I got burned out. The patients were all lovely (or bizarre or terrifying), in their way, but the burn out was inevitable. If you throw an object around at high velocity long enough, there will be damage. It's just a matter of time.

But enough of my trials. Here's the story.

 The lawn was more red clay than grass, leading up toward the front of the house in muddy red gashes. All over the yard were scattered several abandoned vehicles in various states of decomposition. Behind the house was a rusty, older model trailer, wrapped in a flimsy looking barbed wire fence. On the roof of the house, an orange tabby cat slept, stretched across the shingles sunning itself like a tiny tiger. My eyes were drawn to the cat immediately. He seemed like a totem from a parallel dimension, where dainty, elegant gargoyles guarded hideous, monstrous houses. A plywood wheelchair ramp led to the front door. Inside, the plywood continued underfoot into the front room, unpainted and unadorned except by dirt and scuff marks. On this plywood floor lay two mattresses. Lying on these mattresses in their pajamas at approximately 2:00 in the afternoon was the patient’s family. It appeared to be at least three generations with ages ranging from toddlers to school age kids to teens to twenty somethings and on to young, middle aged and older adults. They presented with a selection of various physical features one associates with, to put it delicately, a shallow gene pool. Sloped jaws gaped open and crossed eyes scrutinized me with embarrassingly naked curiosity as the family lounged on the grimy duvet covers spread over each mattress. The patient himself, who ironically was the only person present besides me that wasn't clad in rumpled sleepwear, greeted me from his motorized mobility chair. He was an older gentleman and possibly the father/grandfather/great-grandfather to the rest. He was extremely cordial, as were the rest of the family. I gingerly put my bag on the plywood floor, donned my invisible anthropologist's hat, gathered my wits and started the patient's physical assessment. As I worked, my eyes roamed the room compulsively. There was so much to take in. Random objects were stacked against the bare dingy walls, forming towers of miscellaneous crap that lead like rickety towers up to filthy, cobwebbed corners. There was no actual furniture to speak of, except for the mattresses. A dark hallway on my right cast me in deep shadows as I squatted down to take my patient's blood pressure. A rhythmic and frantic banging emanated periodically from the end of the hall.. My head snapped around with each fresh round of thumps but the hallway remained dark, inscrutable and empty. The legend of the Sawney Beane clan sprang to mind and lingered. A child smiled up at me and licked her lips. I then heard the shrill chirrup of birds close by. I smiled.

Yes! I thought. I’ll use looking at the birds as an excuse to check out the kitchen! It's bound to be, um, well, weird! 

Welcome to how my mind works. You see, going into people's homes to perform health care was, more often than not, a banquet of the strange, the appalling, the unfamiliar and the unexpected. And as a person with an appetite for the unorthodox, I did indeed feast. Oh, yes. Anyway, when I walked over to the birdcage, which sat on a shelf in what was intended to be a dining room. I was stunned. Inside, two small parrots perched in the neatest, cleanest birdcage I’d ever perused They were chubby little things with a fluffy rainbow of cotton candy colored feathers. Underneath the birds, fresh newspaper covered the bottom of the cage, littered only with the daintiest sprinkling of birdseed. From the kitchen, an older lady with long, stringy grey hair looked into my eyes through the bars of the cage and smiled toothlessly. “Aren't they beautiful?” she asked me softly. I agreed that they were as I watched a teenage boy bring bags of dog food into the kitchen. Again, that parallel universe intruded through the ether. How could people keep a birdcage so clean yet allow themselves to live in such utter squalor? Maybe they loved those birds more than they loved themselves. It's a mystery I've never solved. Nothing I've encountered in life before or afterwards offers any insight. Now, it's forever gone to the other side of the ether, visible but just out of reach.