The Boogie Man Cometh

AWARE

 

I'm lying here in a hard, miserable single bed. Its crank can help me sit up or raise my swollen legs if a nurse happens to notice the blinking red light I control and finds time to help me. This room has been mine for twelve long days. T.V. is my only entertainment and source of knowing what day it is. They are all drags. The black and white set has only four channels, Dr. Oz, the weather, a football or basketball game or an antiquated movie with stars such as Marie Dressler and Wallace Berry. This miserable offering costs me three dollars a day. Thank heaven my I-pod still has some juice in it. It doesn't matter that my singing voice is worse than dying toads, I hum, I sing with Barbra. 'Somebody Loves Me' and really do wonder who. I switch to Frankie. He smooths my aching back and fills my heart with music.

 

Sooner or later, although neither makes me smile, I can hear the meal cart being rolled down the corridor. Each time it enters my room I snarl with distaste. Tonight I visualize a small dish of canned peas that may have been warm when it left the kitchen but just glares at me with wrinkled eyes. Special of the week is a tuna salad sandwich on white packaged bread. I have to take off the top slice to be sure it is tuna not ground canned sardines. Accompanying it is a shelled hard boiled egg, apple sauce and a slice of harlequin ice cream. The tuna needed mayo but I ate it as it was. It slid down my throat helped by the apple sauce. I would have enjoyed the hard boiled egg but am on a salt free diet which made me eat it slowly with sips of water after each nibble.

 

Sleep alludes me. Hours drag heavy chains. Voices come into my room through the door I insist be left open a few inches. I cannot make out the words but feel sure attendants are wheeling another poor soul down to the mortuary. This past week I have heard the same mournful sound  five times, which is four times more than the first week I was admitted to the Jackson Philmoor Hospital. My daughter and my internist, Dr. Daniel Bernstein, do not believe my problems are serious but need to be resolved and force me to this just about godless hospital for a full going over. Daily reports find nothing wrong in my blood, my heart, my brain. I am forced to take all kinds of tests until I believe the loss of blood is making me lose another pound.

 

My eyes get heavy but will not stay closed. I reach for the buzzer to get attention, a sleeping pill. I wait. I wait, nod off for what may be an hour. Thru the transom I can still see my red light blinking for a nurse.
The hall lights are very dim. A muffled sound nears my door. Slowly, so slowly, I realize someone is coming towards my bed. If it is a nurse, she would be in white. This person is not a nurse. I turn my body towards the figure, draw up my legs to make a smaller target for the intruder. A gray shadow of an arm rises so that I get a quick look at something silvery, about as long as my hand. It moves towards me and I kick, kick hard, toward the silvery thing. The sound of it hitting the tile floor and the feet running from my room makes me scream like a banshee.

 

My yell brings the night nurse running, coming into my wide open door. Immediately she turns on the ceiling light and hurries to my bedside.
She kicks something, stops, picks it up and stares at a hyperdermic needle. A fire alarm sounds. There is chaos on my floor and surely all others. Police, firemen, come out of the woodwork. They know who they are looking for, find him cowering in the doctors' lounge.

 

I become a heroine, am moved to a new large, sunny room, have an inter-com with the floor nurse, a new t.v., plenty mayo for my lunch tuna sandwich. The male nurse who was getting rid of long term patients made a big mistake coming for me. I was nowhere near my deathbed. Dr. Bernstein believes my swollen legs are due to wearing tight shoes, a now and then girdle, that have blocked my veins. He hands me the newspaper,  my story on the front page and signs me out.