On TV, Julia Child stands beside the butcher block, her face radiating indulgent interest, as a young chef chops celery and tells us how to make shiitake-mushroom soup.
“You’ve already fried a bit of bacon,” Julia prompts.
“Yes, and now the carrots and the potatoes,” the chef says, pushing aside the celery.
I glance sideways at my hospital roommate. Sonya sits erect as a queen in her cranked-up bed, gazing ardently at the goings-on in Julia’s kitchen. Cooking shows are Sonya’s favorite, and she is relieved that I profess to like them, too. We watch in companionable silence; Sonya never comments on anything she sees, and my attempts to elicit her opinion are met only by a gracious, dreamy smile.
The young chef removes the stems from the shiitake mushrooms and tosses the caps into the frying pan with the other vegetables. Bacon grease sizzles delectably as Julia, looming over his shoulder, comments good-naturedly on his progress.
I think about the soup he will make. I think about eating. Because of the tube running through my nose and down my throat, I am not allowed to eat or drink. I know that Sonya is unconscious of how cruel it is to watch a cooking show in the presence of someone who cannot eat, and I forgive her for it. She is a woman beset with cravings, so busy with them that many things escape her notice.
“Now for the stock,” Julia encourages, and the young man ladles in some liquid from a plastic container.
At the mention of stock, I lose interest, which must show what an unsophisticated cook I am.
I’ve been hospitalized due to complications from surgery. After a harrowing operation, I was moderately comfortable for a few days. Then the extreme stomach pain began, and the surgeons suspected a problem at the place where they had stitched my bowel back together. I couldn’t eliminate waste, and the pain became unbearable.
The nurses come by periodically to give me an enema — three so far today. (Does this rubber bag filled with soapy water truly reflect the sophistication of modern medicine?) The surgeons gather around my bed to discuss my case. They speak of “adhesions,” or “a kink in your bowel.” One of them peers at me through his spectacles and says, “We hope to unkink it.” I’ve had five days of this — long enough for me to get to know Sonya.
“Salt and pepper,” the young chef announces as he shakes on the seasoning with a flourish.
“And to finish,” says Julia, “a pinch of parsley and a dab of butter.”
The camera pulls in close to the bowl of steaming soup. It looks delicious.
“Hey, pretty good,” I comment to Sonya.
She gazes blissfully back at me. Sonya is a delicately built young woman with sleepy eyes and Q-tip-thin brown legs below her hospital gown. One of her arms is slender, the other swollen like a sausage and stuffed into an elastic sleeve. “It’s from my mastectomy,” she told me. She winces as she moves her monster arm, trying to find a comfortable position for it in the sling the nurse has rigged for her. She seems so young, and I know she has a six-year-old son because a friend brought him to visit her yesterday. She went down to the lobby to see him. “I got to hold my baby and kiss him,” she said when she returned, her face filled with joy.
We don’t have conversations exactly: Sonya just tells me about herself, often nodding off in the midst of a monologue. This morning, Sonya slept through her breakfast. Tortured by the smell of toast and eggs, I coveted her meal while she dozed with her head lolling to one side, mouth open.
When she finally awoke, Sonya was inexplicably annoyed by the food. She stared disgustedly down at the contents of her tray and said, “I can’t eat this! This is the worst breakfast I’ve ever seen!” Frowning indignantly, she pushed the buzzer for the nurse.
As we waited, she told me that she missed her alcohol. Holding my eyes with a level gaze, she said, “I drink every day at home.” She let that sink in, then asked, “You know Cisco?”
I admitted my ignorance.
“It’s wine; that’s what brand I drink.” She spoke wistfully, as if about a distant lover. “I have me a bottle of Cisco in the morning, one in the afternoon, and two at night.”
I tried to imagine Sonya drinking at the kitchen table, or in front of the TV set, or on the front stoop. I wondered how that fit with mothering her little boy.
“I ain’t violent or anything,” she assured me. “But if I don’t get my alcohol, I get irritable.”
I have seen how anxious she can become, thrashing in the bed, loudly demanding painkillers and sleeping pills: “Nurse, I need some Valium! Nurse, bring me Demerol!” Then she’ll lower her head, cradling her swollen arm and muttering many motherfuckers and goddamns and shits under her breath.
Now I understand this agitation for what it is: a withdrawal symptom. Sonya’s suffering is palpable, and I wait with her for the nurse to come and relieve her with a shot or a pill.
Once medicated, Sonya displays a sweetness that is completely engaging. She speaks to everyone, makes fast friends, and takes care of me. “We’re family in here,” she told me on the first day. “We have to watch out for each other.” On her cigarette breaks, she tells me, she wanders the hospital wards, especially the maternity ward, where she looks in on the babies.
The nurse comes in to give me another enema, pulling the curtain around me, and Sonya disappears from sight. She never asks about my problems with my reluctant bowel. Later, when I rush to the bathroom, dragging my IV stand with me, I am met with the reek of cigarette smoke, sharp enough to pierce my chemo-damaged sense of smell. Nausea rises in my throat.
Climbing wearily back into bed, I say to Sonya, “You’ve been smoking in the john.”
She shrugs her good shoulder. “Yeah, sometimes I can’t make it downstairs fast enough.”
And I am left to ponder desire — Sonya’s and my own — the clinging and craving that cause us such suffering. In Buddhism, we speak of the endless cycle of suffering and desire. I can observe it in myself, here in this bed: The tube in my nose hurts, so I want it taken out; the more I long for its removal, the more it hurts. The IV needle burns in my vein, and I want it gone, too. I want the pain in my gut to disappear. I want to eat and drink again. Whenever my mind focuses on my discomfort, it manufactures more desire — the fervent wish for things to be other than they are.
When I think about it this way, I realize that my suffering in the hospital really isn’t much different from the ordinary suffering of daily life — so many moments of wanting something other than what is.
I close my eyes and direct my attention to the reality I am presently experiencing. I feel the weight of my body in the bed, the pressure of the tube against my nostril and the inside of my throat, the pulling of the needle in my vein. As I pay attention to the sensations in my nose and hand, I begin to realize that they are changing, fluctuating, vibrating, and I become more interested in the sensations than in my distress. The feelings continue — pressure, heat — but I am no longer resisting them or defining them as discomfort or pain. Now I shift my focus to the breath, following it in and out, letting my mind move with it, all the way in through my nose and throat, then back out. After a few minutes of this, I grow calm and arrive more fully where I am.
Then I realize that Sonya is talking to me. I open my eyes to see her brandishing the remote control.
“Let’s cut it on and have us some nice TV. Want to?”
She smiles charmingly, and I suspect this is a gesture of apology for the cigarette smoke in the toilet.
“Sure.”
Soon we are watching Mollie Katzen, author of the Moosewood Cookbook, concoct an Indian dinner. Sonya is immediately engrossed, and I know there will be no talking until Mollie is done making dahl. We watch her chop up lots of garlic and mix it into the cooked yellow split peas. Then she adds black pepper, crushed red pepper, mustard seed, turmeric, coriander, cumin seeds, and cinnamon.
I have asked Sonya if she likes to cook, only to receive a vague shrug, as if I were asking the wrong question. Perhaps what fascinates her about these cooking shows is the great care that is expressed in them; maybe she grew up watching her mother or her grandmother cook, providing sustenance for the family and for Sonya herself, and the cooking shows lull her back into a warm, reassuring dependency.
I entertain these thoughts as Mollie dribbles lemon juice over the dahl, salts it, then tells us it is best eaten with chapatis — thin, pancake-like breads. As I watch, I feel strongly connected to the living process that is my physical self.
Mollie sets the dahl aside to begin preparations for the rice pilaf, and my mind wanders back to yesterday, when I saw Sonya’s fierceness. It had been a hard night, with much noise from a neighboring room, where a man sang and laughed wildly. The nurse told us he was a “5150,” a psychiatric patient, who couldn’t be moved to the psych ward until a doctor “signed him off.” During the night, Sonya had persuaded the nurse to give her a shot of Valium, and afterward she became downright cheerful. I, on the other hand, was worried and irritable all morning because the machine that sucked brown acids from my stomach out through the tube in my nose had stopped working. Imagining the acids burning my stomach lining, I pushed the buzzer and complained to Sonya. When no help came, Sonya sprang from her bed, puffy arm cradled against her side, and announced, “I’m going down there and get you a nurse!” She sailed out of the room, gown flapping behind her narrow buttocks.
I lay back and found myself suddenly crying, the hot tears crawling down my cheeks. Sonya returned and stood in our doorway, alternately gazing reassuringly at me and peering imperiously down the hall in the direction of the nurses’ station. In a few minutes, a nurse arrived and got the machine working again. When she had gone, I dried my tears and thanked Sonya, who didn’t seem to hear me.
Now we watch Mollie add almonds, walnuts, and raisins to the rice pilaf, then grate some lemon peel over the top. Sonya smiles with satisfaction and deep interest. Mentally, I thank her again for being a teacher to me, as fragile as she is, pulled about like a dandelion puff on the wind, yet so generous and loyal to life.
“We’re Family In Here” is excerpted from Hidden Spring: A Buddhist Woman Confronts Cancer, by Sandy Boucher. © 2000 by Sandy Boucher. Wisdom Publications, Boston, Massachusetts, www.wisdompubs.org.
