The Standard of Care

by Rax King

Riding the train to the hospital one day I notice that the pink-haired 20-something sitting next to me keeps blowing her Elf Bar vapor in my face. “Could you please stop that,” I say. She smirks and says something snide that I don’t hear through my noise-cancelling headphones, which is probably for the best, because I can feel, as a heated itch in my fingers, the desire to grab her by the hair and smash her face into the floor. How dare you, I think, as she texts feverishly, presumably about the uptight bitch sitting next to her on the F train. I think, I am a human being and you are not, which is unfair, but turning her in my head into this perfect avatar of petty shitty hate feels good; it distracts me from the crisis at hand.

The situation is bizarre, but briefly, the major beats are: my husband had to have multiple emergency surgeries a couple weeks ago, during one of which he had a few minor strokes. This is where people usually stop following the story. They hear “stroke” and assume the situation is grave, or else they hear “minor” and assume that my husband is moonwalking out of the hospital as we speak. Neither is true. He’s both okay and not. I’m both okay and not. The strokes were about as tiny as strokes can possibly be. We’re very lucky in that specific irksome way where much luckier people insist on reminding us of how lucky we are. So I’m here trying to grind out a few thoughts on our situation for a paying audience, because “grinding out thoughts” is how I make my money, and because our situation is the only thing I’ve had thoughts about. 

I took my husband to the emergency room on November 20th, and he hasn’t left the hospital since then. And let me tell you, when you’re “sleeping” in a recliner next to your husband in the ICU, springing out of your chair every few hours to stop him from sleepwalking out of bed, dreaming uneasily of beeping hospital machines, bathing with wet wipes, it really puts the falseness of the world into perspective. So many of the things that irritate us and eat up our energy are revealed to be fragile, pointless, and, in fact, totally ignorable. People in the ICU sob all night. They bolt from their beds, dragging tubes down the hallway, screaming. They groan and bleed and breathe rickety, gurgling breaths. Everybody’s in there because one of their crucial inner bits has tried, very recently, to shut down or force its way out. Nobody here says a word about Pod Save Fucking America. Nothing matters except the part of your body that betrayed you. I read the news just to turn up my nose at it. I am piously annoyed at anyone who isn’t living in a hospital right now.