In It’s Like, Catherine Power Evans captures the split second when life changes forever. A night of carefree dancing turns into an A&E vigil as a young woman faces her father’s brain injury, confronting shock, fear, and the sudden weight of adulthood in raw, unflinching detail.
The realisation that life can change in the time it takes to form a thought is dramatic. One minute I’m all Jaegerbombed up, dancing with my girly crew to 'Blonde’ blasting out 'All Cried Out.’ The next minute the mobile lowers from my ear in slow motion to a world that now spins on an entirely new axis. Just like that.
Clichés swirl and crowd. Lines of words--phrases--slide off the walls like flocks of word birds. Swooping in streams they target anxious, helpless relatives in A & E cubicles. They don’t help, those sayings that bombard the void in my skull, ricocheting against feeble, flabby nothingness. Numb bum. Numb brain. Is this what happens in these situations?
In these situations. I whisper needlessly. Even at this dead hour of the morning, the footfall of staff wearing out the floor tiles is constant. The clip-clop clickety-clack or the slap-slap-slap of varied soles briskly emphasise their owners’ attendance to the seriously ill and those teetering on the brink of existence.
Medical angels battle on through the night, coaxing or sometimes shocking weakening bodies from the warm cloud of illumination seducing them to another realm. Porters push beds round corners with surprising dexterity, rushing the prone and the prostrate to places where diagnoses and death sentences are deciphered. Wavelengths and WiFi are the tools of the day. A cleaner wipes bio mess from surfaces. She is diligent in erasing beginnings and endings. I have to lean forward on the chair to rest my palms against my eyes. They feel scratchy and heavy.
What is happening? I’ve fallen into a role: I’m living the cliché. Like a scene on a TV drama, I find myself acting as the person waiting for their loved one after a sudden trauma. I wonder which camp I’ll be in by dawn! The thumbs up gang or the other--like those Roman gladiators. What if the doctor sucks his breath in like the plumber did when our boiler packed up? (Which is actually hopeful since he managed to overhaul the boiler--at a cost that made my mother suck in strong words.) The other option was the grave sympathetic face: the doctor fills the air with sentences you know mean something if only you could arrange them into some sense. A newfound empathy with the plight of dyslexics is brought on by the current tangled web of intangible, floating, spoken words congesting your ears.
There will only be one future: one reality despite anything I do or fail to do. The realisation is not comforting. A new taste floods my mouth. When the inevitable happens and I actually do puke, it is partially on the floor, partially in the toilet bowl of the bathroom through whose door I hurl myself. In cruel irony, even when I think I’m done, the smell of bile makes me dry heave. I remain kneeling, unable to relinquish my desperate grip on the toilet seat I was strewn over. Hygiene, or lack thereof, made me think of food poisoning. It was an unfortunate idea that sends my vision swimming as my aching stomach endures another impotent retch.
The tap water in a cupped hand takes the worst of the acidity from my mouth and I begin to rouse from the enclosure of the bubble of sickness. There is stomach splatter on the new black suede heels but it doesn’t matter, nothing matters now. I wipe the shoes idly with toilet paper because of some vague urge. It’s funny how small, irrelevant things keep you going when there is no clue what else to do. There’s a strong wish to flush reality down the pan and watch it swirl out of sight.
Doctor Atkins sits me down. He looks like Grandad when I was younger. It is neither of the imagined options: a mixture of both. Dad has a brain injury. Swelling on the brain. He’s in an induced coma to help him. Some of the doctor’s words register: recovery, time, wait and see. Trying to digest it all on an empty stomach isn’t easy, I can’t decide if it’s good news or bad. The urge to pinch myself is strong though I resist. Atkins waits. Raising my eyes to his, he proceeds with more words: optimistic, good odds, occupational therapy. And the scariest: quality of life
Leaving the hospital to grab some things from home--just for me Dad has no need of anything right now bar prayers--I feel the terrible burden of being responsible for someone else. Everything has turned upside-down. Only now do I truly know how Mum and Dad felt parenting me for all those years.
At twenty years old I thought I was grown up, but I grew more in these last few hours than in all the time before--since I’ve been on this planet. Shamed, I give myself a mental shake. A deep measure of breath expands my chest and moves it upwards. In that moment of inertia things seem so much clearer, more concrete. I set my shoulders back and lift my chin up. Finally, I set my eyes straight ahead ready to face my new role.
Life--and death--really is just like that.
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