Broadcast Interference

From crispyneurons

9 December 1996

I had left work, and was headed to the hospital. My mother was there. I had been visiting her daily ever since she had had the seizure, and I was on my way to see her.

The hospital lobby was clean and polished. It was all done in expensive looking wood. There were oil paintings of religious figures on most of the walls. There was a marble statue of Jesus, standing on a sphere; a mystifying image. I was interested in the way that his bare feet conformed to the sphere. I passed by these things as I stepped into the elevator. Hers was room 218, so I pressed the 2 button. The elevator doors closed.

The doors reopened. The repellent smells of hospital food, antiseptic cleansers, and human feces jarred my senses. That's what I'll always remember about the hospital, that smell. The lobby doesn't smell like this. I walked down the halls, past the nurses' station. An enormous nurse was watching a soap opera; another, a wiry spinster in her manner, was sifting through a stack of files and paperwork. I entered my mom's room.

She was laying in the bed, she didn't see me come into her room. She was watching a television show. All I saw was a lot of American flags and some tinny, morose musical theme. She was staring at it blankly. there was a half-eaten, smelly dinner on a tray next to her bed.

She turned to me slowly. "Hi, Jason." Her voice carried a heavy slur. A byproduct of the seizure's shock to her brain, I was told. I was told it would eventually lessen, or go away altogether. Still, a pang oscillated through me when I heard her. I couldn't stop myself from thinking that she was a flicker of her former self. I crushed that thought.

"How are you doing? Are you feeling any better?"

She had a very dull look on her face. "Oh, a little, I guess..." She paused. "I'm still having trouble putting my... thoughts together." She tittered slightly.

Her tongue seemed to be made of lead. I wondered if she would ever be able to express herself lucidity again. She was quite sharp long ago. I remember, when I was young, that she was a very capable woman. In the days when my father still drank, she ran the household. That had dramatically changed one summer morning in 1986, when she experienced a grand mal seizure. She has had short term memory problems every since. She was prescribed an anti-seizure medication to offset the damage done to her brain. It's possible that she forgot to take it the day she had her second seizure, and had fallen off the second story staircase. Her left wrist, which bore the brunt of her weight in the fall, had shattered, and so she wore a thick cast about her wrist. She had no memory of the fall. In fact, after the fall, she forgot anything you told her after about fifteen minutes. This improved gradually as time passed, but it was very disheartening at first.

Yet I tried to be positive about her condition. Perhaps some improvement would occur. The doctors seemed to think so. Unfortunately, no one, not even the specialist, really understands the brain.

"So what did you do today?" I asked her.

"Well, I asked if I could go to the bathroom and they won't let me, for some reason." She sounded a little worked up about it, and the cloudy vagueness in her mind seemed to weaken slightly.

"I know, Mom. We've gone over this before." And we had. "You aren't strong enough to walk over to the bathroom. You tried to last week, and you collapsed. That's why they don't let you." I was annoyed that she had forgotten again, and then I was automatically angry with myself. As if this were something she could control.

"Well, I don't know about that," she said indignantly. "They let me walk around outside earlier."

"They did?" This was beyond belief. She couldn't even walk to the bathroom unaided.

"Yeah, and I walked around in a sunny field... and there were some little kids there..." she smiled at the memory.

I looked out the window. It was raining; it had been raining all day. "Did you do this today?" I asked.

"Yeah, just a little while ago... I think." She looked for a clock, and frowned when she didn't find one.

"But it's raining outside, Mom," I said gently. But I knew she was helplessly confused.

I could see my words weren't making it through to her. She was staring at the television again, just as she had been when I entered. Tears were forming in her eyes again. "Mom," I asked, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice, "did you hear me?"

"Uh... I think so..." she squinted in effort. "I think the president made some sort of speech earlier..."

I looked at the television. It was the Nixon funeral. There were thousands of American flags everywhere. A giant crowd had assembled. President Clinton was orating. The NBC logo was evident in the bottom right corner of the screen. The director must have been having a fit, because he kept hopping from camera to camera: now a shot of Clinton, now a glance at President Nixon, eyes closed, horizontal, now a weeping woman, now a grim-faced Orrin Hatch. Apparently, all of Washington's political elite had assembled for Nixon. Friends and foes appeared now that Nixon had bought the farm.

And to see my Mom... she wasn't just watching the show, she was there. Tears were flowing. She had achieved a Zen Master oneness with the television. The band played some death march, probably Chopin. They had been playing patriotic music. It was comical, revolting.

"Mom!" It finally occurred to me. She was couldn't tell the difference between reality and television. The sunny field, the children - that was probably some fucking detergent ad that had been on earlier. Anxiously, I grabbed the television control, which was a beige control on a wire connected to the ceiling, and began pressing the main button. It cycled through every single channel until it finally turned off. The television was designed to be left on, apparently. "I think you're having trouble sorting out what's going on right in front of you from what's happening on the TV."

"What?" she said blankly. She looked down at me for a moment, and was confused. Her eyes wandered slowly back up to the television. Since it was off, she asked: "Why did you turn off the TV?"

I was getting upset. She couldn't keep her eyes of the TV! It was an addiction, a way for her to feel connected and participatory, yet detached and pleasantly passive. A way, no doubt, to alleviate the hospital boredom. "I think the TV is confusing you. So I turned it off. I'd like to talk to you while I'm here."

"O.K." She closed her eyes for a moment. "I wish I could talk more... um... I can't seem to talk very well," she managed. She was frustrated.

"I think you're doing fine," I said. A lump was forming in my throat. She wasn't fine, although it's true that she was doing better than she had been. There was some hope. "Just take your time. I can wait."

"It's so crazy in my head. I can't make any... sense out of it."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I see all this stuff, but it's so... confused."

"It could be the medications," I offered. I hoped.

"Well, I wish they would take me off it!" she said, and she laughed weakly. I smiled, but it wasn't funny to me. She had a childlike simplicity. Subsequent testing had revealed that on the summer morning in 1986, she had lost a third of her I. Q. That loss is literally unimaginable. The lump in my throat grew more intense.

"That probably wouldn't be a good idea," I said with a chuckle. I wondered what she would be like with no painkillers, seizure suppressants, and all that other junk they were piping into her. Probably she would start convulsing first. She would probably flop out of her bed, possibly breaking the cast on her broken wrist... certainly she'd enter some kind of shock. I had no idea really. Maybe she'd be better off without that stuff. As it was, she was as dippy as a deadhead with half a sheet of acid.

"And the bedpan is awful," she complained. "I wish they would let me go to the bathroom." This must be a real sore point for her. She was harping on it endlessly.

"I don't think I can do anything about that."

"I know... I'm tired of being in the hospital. I feel like I'm never going to get well. I just keep getting worse and worse..." She was quietly weeping again.

"I don't believe that. You're a lot better than you were when you got here, and you're going to keep getting better. You're going to get better really soon, OK? You just keep working on healing, and I know you'll be just fine." I stated this with authority, as if I really knew. She stared at me, meek as a frightened child. But she heard the authority in my voice and she believed me. It startled me that things had reversed so dramatically. I remember when I was young, she would console me when I felt bad. She was the authority. Not anymore. She had to draw strength from me, now. It was an odd, unnatural feeling.

She was looking pretty tired. The sun had set. I looked at my watch. "I need to go now," I said. "Do you want me to get anything for you?"

"No, I don't think so..."

"O.K. I'll see you tomorrow."

I hugged and kissed her, and she looked into my eyes vaguely. "Goodbye, Jason."

"Goodbye, Mom."