Nobody tells you
How the years of waiting rooms
Emergency room runs
Compress
Become one room
One emergent life
One dying overandoverandover
Until
They are One weighting room
Air of blood and gasps and saline drips
Don’t cry, don’t yell
Smile and nod, calm: listen for the key words
Learn to lie for as long as you can, people stick around longer:
How’s she doing? So much better
When will he be back to normal? Soon
Medical science is magic, isn’t it? Yes, no permanent scarring or side effects or debilitating repercussions at all
How are you? Fine
Until you can’t anymore, then just be quiet
Dense
Nobody tells you
How to spot the decent earlylatenight truck
A pendant hanging from a string of beaded ambulances and roach coaches
Surrounded by a cluster of shiny med students
And swallow platitudes
With hot coffee and three Excedrin
Until too much burns through your gut
Switch to tea
And learn to recognize each other
By careful thoughts
Hoping for the best possible outcome
Whatever that is
Mass
Of words, murk of lost performances and milestones
And parent-teacher conferences
And sleep and friendships and chances
Nobody tells you
How to swipe a folding chair
And hide it in the curve of a bedside curtain
How to listen for the warming cart
Being restocked, so you can steal him a heated blanket, her an extra pillow
A clean sheet for your chair
Gravity
Nobody tells you
How to stop the panic attacks when the medical bills become a typhoon
How to slow your food intake to balance the budget
When the absolute musthavenosubstitutions medicine isn’t covered
You could give up your smokes but
Then you’d have to face the everyminuteeverysecond thought this will never end:
You will be juggling the appointments and titration schedules and warning signs and watching and measuring and keeping the sites clean and dry and measuring dead tissue after the earth itself has given up
I told you
So tell me
How to scream under the weight of this
smiling and nodding and waiting and fury.
Anne Perez (she/her) is a lifelong New Yorker who explores the extraordinary of the ordinary through fiction, sporadic blogging, and the occasional poem. She can be found on Twitter as Mrs Fringe.