Hospital Tales

by Jackson Biko

Pulmonary Hypertension is a little bastard that sneaked into my mom’s heart and ravaged her. It wasted away her flesh, tore apart her heart, broke her lungs and turned her into a shell. But even though the little bastard – a terminal disease – has hounded for 9years now, she refuses to let it have its way with the one thing she retains in the face of its repeated and cold assault; her spirit.

Look up what PH is. It’s not malaria. It doesn’t make your nose run nor does it give you a skin rash. It’s not like a hangover. It’s death in waiting. So she keeps it at bay with nine sets of drugs every day. Drugs that thin her blood and drugs that make strengthen her heart veins. Quite often she takes drugs that make her sleep. She takes Viagra for chrissake, a drug that you all 36yr olds sometimes need to keep the mast up. So, while you, limb-phallused blokes take it see another hard-on, my mom takes it in order to see another Christmas.

She gets weak, my mom. So weak she can’t walk or eat. Sometimes her lungs swell so much she says it feels like someone has blown a huge balloon in her chest. Sometimes you can see her heart beat through her skin from a mile away. Those days her eye whites become paper white and her feet swell and her hands shake like a druggie. Those are the bad days. And they are many. Every year she gets hospitalized at least once. Every year she gives death another reason to think – as my friend, Jean, loves to say – that it picked on the wrong woman to mess with. But even though her heart has failed her she has found a new ally; her spirit, the guard that fends off PH.

While The Aga Khan Hospital’s third floor was where the good doctors handed me a small life in form of my precious one, Mater Hospital has been the place that has always kept me with a mother. These two hospitals are literally the twin towers of my life because they have both handed me two vital lives. As a form of gratitude I donate blood to Aga Khan Hospital and as an appreciation to Mater, I run in their Heart Run so that some child may have a healthy heart again – something they struggle to give my mother every year. I’m deeply indebted to these two institutions and not any amount of tissue or money will ever be an adequate repayment.

Ten days ago, my mom was in High Dependency Unit at Mater. The second time she was a guest there, hell, she should have some sandwich from the hospital cafeteria named after her. She lay at the last bed, next to the window, hooked up on ugly machines that whirred and beeped. Wires ran under her hospital gown, which clumsily hang on her bony body like a costume in a horror flick, wires that ended up plugged on her chest. These wires monitored her heart which – according to some cardiologist – was failing. Whenever she coughed, or moved, the machines went gaga with loud beeps. On her head was this white head gear, she looked like a baker who was sneaking a nap as she waited for her pastry to get ready in the oven. The HDU is insanely sanitized, the floors are constantly polished with disinfectant and before you walk in you are required to squeeze some liquid disinfectant on your hands to disinfectant it.

She lay under the sheets, frail, weak and with one foot in the grave. She, with an oxygen mask pressed over her face, looked like a bomber pilot. She looked like a flickering candle. Next to her was a five year old boy whose life, I watched a knot of doctors, fight to save one night, a most excruciatingly helpless thing to watch. His mother cried alone in the corridor and I wondered where his father was, whether he knew his son was on his deathbed, or whether he gave a shit…even a little. That little boy died the next day. The missus cried like it was her own son. Children shouldn’t die, I remember my big sister saying. The next day a middle-aged Somali lady with, renal failure, was brought in to the same bed. She later died. It was harvest time for death, the grim reaper, and it stared at my mom from across the room with its dead beady snake eyes. But, thankfully, God was there to join in this starefest.

The HDU is deeply haunting; it’s ideally the gateway from life. It’s the waiting room where you sit to wait as your life is debated upon by forces of the universe. In the HDU you feel the two massive forces; evil and good. The devil pulls from one end and God pulls from the other. And nothing else matters in HDU, not money, not influence, not family lineage, not profession, nothing but God. And you bow before him and you say “please” as many times as you can, because before him you are worthless. And you hope he listens to you just that once. There is a bench outside the ICU where relatives wait for a miracle. If you ever want to see the face of desperation and hope, have a look at the occupants of this bench.

The second day in HDU my father came down from shags with his mother (probably to hold his hand, hehe, everybody needs their mommy, no?) and we spoke while avoiding eye contact as only two besieged men should. One man was losing a wife, the other a mother. Put that on a weighing scale, if you can.

There was a night I remember, her condition had dropped. Her heart was swollen and it was hanging on a string. She was walking on a tight rope, in the valley of death. I remember leaving the hospital at 9:00p.m and having this dark feeling that she wasn’t going to make it through the night, and there is something deeply troubling about leaving your mom in bed knowing well that she isn’t going to pull through the night.  That night I slept with my phone by my side, knowing that it would ring in the dead of the night bearing some dreadful news. The phone never rang. Thankfully, she was moved from the HDU a day later and into the general ward. But the oxygen mask stayed on and so did the bakers hat.

Rigged all over Mater are speakers. Small speakers in wards and corridors. At night these speakers spew low gospel music and short sermons, the soundtrack to desperation. It’s meant to sooth the sick, to encourage them, to fill their hearts with hope. It filled me with dread though, those disemboweled sermons depressed me, but then again I wasn’t the target audience. My mom loved them though, even though we aren’t Catholics.

Outside the wards is this small quaint church, an oasis of amidst this sea of pain and suffering. My brother loved to sit on the steps of the church the late nights we spent there, fiddling with his phone, trying to find strength. He is the kind of guy who derived strength by isolating himself from everybody else.

When you spend a lot of time at the hospital you will make friends with other people in the same boat. Misery loves company. I met this guy, his wife was sick in the general wards. He spent a lot of time on the benches outside the church, he looked lonely and downtrodden so one day I ambled over to his bench and said wasup. He gave his name as Pete. His wife had some birth related complications, almost died giving birth, he told me. I told him about my mom and somehow the conversation drifted to his own mother and his story both embarrassed me and gutted me deeply.

He had to depart Nai at midnight to go pick his ailing mom in Kisii. He got there early morning, and an hour later left Kisii early morning with his mother and his big sister at the back. His much older uncle rode shot-gun. His mother, as it turned out, had a clot in her veins. They took the Narok route, it was a cold morning. He played gospel music on the car’s stereo because he says his mother loved gospel music. All mothers do. He was tired because he hadn’t slept a wink. They chatted lightly during the drive. At some point before Narok his mother asked for ice cream. “That’s when I realized that if an ice-cream was the one thing that would save your life in those areas you would die,” he smirked. There was no ice-cream until Narok town. Yes, Maasai’s all act tough but they lick ice-cream like everyone else.

He said, during the drive, he kept watching his mother through the rear view mirror; she would sleep, wake up, stare out the window, sleep again, make some small talk, stare out the window…He checked up on her every so often. She barely ate the ice-cream, licked it thrice or so and gave up. Twenty minutes after Narok, after the ice-cream, he watched her mom take a deep breath, tilt forward a bit then slowly slump back in her chair.

And right there, he knew his mother had died, he told me. I was horrified at how casually he said it!

So he pulled over. Opened the door and checked up on her and indeed her pulse was shot. The aunt wailed throughout the journey. And he drove for another three hours with his dead mother seated at the back seat. She could have been asleep. She seemed peaceful. The hardest drive he had to make in his life, he said, to drive your death mother at the back of the car and a wailing woman in your ears. At the cop station in Nairobi, Central, he left his mother in the car to report the death so he could get a number for the mortuary. He left his dead mother in the car, seated like she was napping to get some document. The cops before handing the document came over to verify.

He, Pete, told me he never cried the whole time nor even during the burial. He says he felt numb throughout the whole thing an out of body experience if you will, as if he was living under water. He says a week after his mother’s burial, he sold the Prado immediately, and the night he sold the Prado is the day he cried for the first time, and it’s also the day his nightmares began. I couldn’t help wondering that, symbolically, he buried his mother in the Prado when he sold it off. He told me he will never ride in or own a Prado again; he says whenever he sees a Prado on the road he instinctively looks at the back seat.

 He told me that you can’t tell how many Prados there are in Nairobi until you lose your mother in one. Pete, 43, looked like a damaged man, but he told his story with such coldness that I felt shy to ask for a lot of details.  I ran into him a few times, went to see his wife and his little girl named after his mother. “God can never take everything away from you, “he explained to me one day, “he will always give you something in return. He is merciful.”

I think that is one of the lessons here today…that God is merciful and kind. That and that my mom asked to keep the head-gear at the hospital when she was being discharged and I remember thinking to myself, “But you can’t bake.”