Dalai Mama Blog

^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

Later we will find out that there's something going on this weekend called a Grateful Dead Conference -- which calls to my mind the incongruous image of patchouli-scented middle managers networking in a hotel lobby with their "I Need a Miracle" signs -- but I don't know that now. All I know is that the nurses keep cracking each other up about the various kids here who've galloped off into the psychotropic wilderness. "Um, yeah, it's called tripping," is the punch line of one story I can't quite hear, even though the nurses' station is right outside our open door; they see me listening and speak in whispers. Which is not true for the young patient in the next room who bursts into addled episodes of shouting. "Dude!" he shouts. "Dude! So not cool." There is also some groaning from all sides and no small amount of barfing. "Call housekeeping again for me," one nurse says to another. "I'm not going back in there until they mop the walls."

Our children are home, asleep in their beds, and my mother, thank goodness, is with them. I'm with Michael instead. Michael, whose fever appears to have greater ambition than the 104 it has already achieved. Michael, who sleeps and sweats and mumbles and snores on the gurney. Michael, who has not complained since the great Martha's Vineyard clam poisoning incident of 2003, when he was suddenly barfing bivalves into our friends' peonies while Birdy slept on his chest in the Bjorn. Michael, who, as we were just climbing into the car in the middle of the night, graciously offered to drive. "Would you?" I said. "That would be great. I'd really like to relax with a cup of tea on the way to the ER." I'd forgotten about the bad fit between delirium and sarcasm. "Okay," he said, and I said, "I'm kidding, honey," and he said, "Oh," and fell into the passenger side and fell immediately asleep again.

Earlier, at 3 in the morning, when Michael was bunching himself up on his hands and knees the way you do when you're, say, in labor and trying to extricate yourself from your own crazy body, I asked him to let me take him to the hospital and he was all lucid reassurance. "Oh no," he said from beneath the pillow he was pressing over his head. "I'm okay. Really." And at a little before 5, when he said, "Actually, maybe that's not a bad idea, the hospital," I had a heart attack. "Are you kidding?" I said. "Oh my God! Are you that sick?" And he said, "Oh, no, no. I'm fine."

"But let's just go anyways."

Because the children aren't sick or even here, the whole experience is oddly -- how shall I put this? -- relaxing. Nobody wants to drink out of the viral water fountain or piece together the Ebola puzzles or ask in a loud whisper if that woman is wearing only the sheet that's wrapped around her; nobody is weeping over the possibility of a blood test or panicking at the sight of a needle; nobody is terrified, not even me. Michael sleeps; I alternate between a mild kind of hand-to-the-hot-forehead fretting and a peaceful confidence that all will be well again. I need to pee, but I don't want to leave the room. I am too hot, but I don't want to make the karmic commitment to being here another three hours by unzipping my down vest. I want a cup of coffee but don't want to be the kind of person who would abandon her feverish partner to go and fetch it. The sheet woman emerges into the hallway from her room, blinking under the bright lights, and says only, "Whoa."

In a little while a doctor will rush through our room like the wind, leaving behind a positive strep culture and a prescription for penicillin. Later this afternoon, Michael's fever will start to break, and he will come fraily downstairs where the children will be a little shy. My mother and I will take Birdy to watch Ben's chorus sing "Jerusalem" with a hundred other people in a beautiful chapel, and the swell of the organ, of voices young and old, will leave us in tears. In 48 hours, my caretaking impulse will snap abruptly off, like a thrown switch, and I will become impatient with both Michael and the pace of his recovery. I will feel, in fact, not very well myself, like someone is shaking my hand with a joy buzzer, only it's not my hand it's my sinus cavity, and I will feel achy and tired, like I need to be put to bed with a hot water bottle on my neck and a cold beer in my hand, despite the fact that my temperature has soared only up to 99.1.

But for now, I'm just sitting here. The nurse sticks her head in to ask, "Is that your husband?" and after I say, "Yes," I flush with the craziest feeling that I could not begin to explain but that seems a lot like happiness.