Good News at Fallbrook Hospital — a Short Story

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

“Are you OK?” the surgeon asked her, out in the hallway.

What a question. I surveyed the faces in the institutionally furnished waiting room. No one else reacted. Not one focus strayed from the droning television. No sympathetic shrugs. Not a twitchy eyebrow on those feigning sleep. It was odd. Lack of compassion, maybe? Or perhaps they were too busy with their own fears and hopeful distractions. But I heard him. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t — because she was not the patient, because a busy surgeon bothered to ask, because the question was so miserably revealing.

At least he had taken her to the hallway. Not like the other nincompoops.

Earlier, emerging from the mighty O.R. to deign to a visit with the peons, one doctor strutted in, eyeballed the woman seated at the far wall (the one who had studiously avoided contact with the rest of us, securing her privacy in the depths of a large paperback book wedged hard against her abdomen), and he proceeded to hold court from the middle of the room.

He proclaimed, “Mrs. Bassini, you will be pleased to hear your husband is the lucky recipient of a successful hernia repair. He’ll be up and about in a few days, but, of course, you two should not engage in sexual activity for a couple weeks, maybe three.”

The wife’s tightly tidy appearance suggested she had not been inclined to engage in sexual activity with her husband since well before his little eruption; that, or behind closed doors she became a deliciously dangerous pressure cooker of raging corned beef and cabbage drenched in the salty juices of love. Either way, she now kept her eyes straight ahead, painfully avoiding the rest of us — a reluctant audience to the intimate details of her marriage.

“You can see him in recovery in about an hour,” the surgeon concluded on his way out.

“Thank—,” the wife began but didn’t finish as the last bit of green scrubs disappeared past the door jam. Her color rose as she bowed into her book, eyes unmoving.

I squirmed on her behalf. It was the least I could do.

The takes-the-cake doc, though, was the second one of the morning. He plopped right down in the seat between the young cowboy and me — the graying, sardonic female of our incidental family.

I had seen Cowboy on my way into the hospital. He and his gal were flirting in the parking lot by the genital-red pickup that was bigger than my living room. I assumed the truck was a tip that Cowboy was dangling something significantly smaller.

He sauntered into the waiting room after me, his lower lip swollen with chaw, a half-gallon milk jug for a spittoon, and his ten-gallon hat pulled low, demonstrating, as my mother would have said, that he had been hit by the uncouth stick. “A gentleman removes his hat indoors and in the presence of a lady,” she had taught us.

Cowboy did not honor that rule. Although in his defense, waiting room etiquette was ill-defined beyond pretending not to hear others’ conversations — a tall order around here. But I guessed Cowboy might fall short of any standard of etiquette, because the next thing he did was make a spitty brown deposit in his cuspidor, and then he plunked the ptooey container smack in the middle between his polished cowboy boots, spread his knees wide to reveal a noticeably worn patch of denim, and settled in for the wait.

I imagined an Old West directional sign dropping from the ceiling, hand pointing to Cowboy’s crotch. His confident posture caused me to rethink my original assumption about his endowment.

His little lady joined us shortly after the sign dropped, and she was packing a saddlebag of hostility. Levis you couldn’t have removed with a potato peeler, a homemade bleach job abusing her hair, and tattoos from head to swishing tail. The barbed wire encircling her firm biceps was a particularly nice touch. And, like Cowboy, Barbie’s bottom lip was packed as tight with chaw as her jeans with flesh. She, however, fancied a more feminine spittoon, squirting her brown spittle into a sports drink bottle.

Once again, however, my initial impression was squashed when she promptly settled in with the growing group of ambulatory care visitors to enjoy The Price Is Right with Drew Carey, applauding correct answers and commiserating over the failures.

“Sucks without old whatshisname,” Barbie said as another young woman walked in.

The newcomer smiled at everyone and cheered, “Hey, Price Is Right — cool! I love this show! And yeah, Bob Barker was great, wasn’t he? He seemed like a pretty nice guy.”

She sat down across from me laughing, apparently enthused to find kindred fans. Her olive skin and ebony hair shone in the room that had been doused in tones so bland they could not be identified. In the friendly village of Fallbrook, she was probably pegged as Mexican, but she appeared to hail from more Caribbean climes.

I smiled, mumbled something encouraging about the good old days, and figured Puerto Rico, maybe, as she chattered on with Barbie, laughing about past shows and special guests, about the time she took her mama to see the show’s taping — and they’d had so much fun in L.A.

And that’s when the second surgeon came in, plopping his well-fed derriere in the seat buffering me from Cowboy.

“Your wife’s doing fine,” he said, curling his lip at the jug. “I cleaned her out, got it all — uterus, tubes and ovaries.” He relaxed into the seat, looking pleased, and threw his arm across its back and into my space. I leaned forward, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Everything’s gone, and that should help with the pain. She is going to have some bleeding. If she saturates more than two sanitary pads in six or eight hours, call my office. Otherwise, she should be just fine.” Cowboy spit into his jug and the idiot doctor leaned into my lap without dropping a beat. “No worries — I did a good job, so I’m not expecting any problems. She’ll be in recovery a few more hours, but you can probably take her home by dinnertime. We like to get them up and running pretty quickly. I’ll need to see her in one week — and no sexual activity for four weeks, maybe more.”

I couldn’t help myself. I looked over to Ms. Puerto Rico, and — glory be! — she looked back, pursed her lips and rolled her eyes, nodding in Idiot Doc’s direction.

“The nurse will let you know when you can come in and see her,” Idiot Doc finished and rose, bumping my shoulder as he swept his arm back into his own space. He didn’t seem to notice that, either.

While we attempted to stifle our reactions to Cowboy’s barren news, a sweetly fragile voice trilled from an elderly woman in the corner, opening her eyes for the first time. “It’ll be OK, young man,” she said, pushing a tendril of white hair back into her loose bun and patting the wrinkles in her frayed housedress.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Cowboy nodded in her direction.

“I had a hysterectomy fifty years ago, before they knew what they were doing down there,” she chuckled, “and it wasn’t too long before I felt just fine.” She leaned over to pull up a tube sock, rumpled round her bruised and withered ankle. Her slant revealed an unfettered bosom as flat as the plates of a mammography machine. “You thank God you still have her, and you adopt. That’s what I always say.” She chuckled herself back into a doze.

I wondered if adoption was a good idea, given Cowboy’s Barbie. Then I figured the biological drive to procreate was a lot stronger than any social convention. And then I decided it was time to take a break. I headed out for caffeine.

The way to the tiny cafeteria was lined with a rogue’s gallery of former community hospital board members, some of them, familiar faces — the brilliant, Jewish lesbian neurologist who finally left town because none of the local practitioners would refer to her; the community gadfly whose penchant for Bermudas without underwear left his elderly gonads notoriously flapping in the breeze on the boardroom dais; the unwed deputy sheriff whose tanned, lean body inspired a generation of hopeful beauties into civic involvement; the recovered cancer patient who abstained from attending meetings, but gobbled up the free healthcare benefits he couldn’t buy if he wanted to. Typical small town fare, each mug shot was a fading scandal.

At least they led to coffee.

“Where are the coffee cups?” I asked at the cafeteria’s counter.

“Next to the coffee machine,” a slight figure facing the grill said without turning.

“Oops, sorry! Didn’t see them. My eyes took a hike with my youth.” No comment from the grill, as I poured some coffee into a Styrofoam cup just large enough for Holy Communion. Then I searched for half-and-half, couldn’t find it, searched again without success, and reluctantly asked, “And the cream?”

A skinny arm, doubled in length by a spatula, pointed to the far end of the counter. “In the ice,” she said from the shadows of the grill’s hood.

I followed the cafeteria tray rails to the ice, where yogurt, milk cartoons and a stainless steel tub of coffee whitener laid half buried. Whitener, not cream, a distinction it seemed unsafe to make under the circumstances, so I whitened my coffee and asked, “How much is it?”

The short order cook looked over her boney shoulder and peered up at me. She was all hairnet and sorrow, pressing a grilled cheese sandwich into submission, maybe the only power she had. “Never been here before?”

“Just to wait, not for coffee.” I smiled, a paltry cover for the fact that I knew I was annoying the hell out of her.

But then an amazing thing happened. She released the sandwich and turned straight to me, her hands resting on her semblance of hips and a smile usurping her unhappy face.

“Well then, here’s your good news for the day, Sugar,” she said, suddenly animated and beaming. “It’s free!”

“Free? Really? That’s nice!”

“Yep. Coffee, tea and ice water,” she said in a singsong voice, “all free, all the time!” as though it was the most important — the happiest! — damn message she had ever delivered.

I wondered if I should take her home with me and fatten her up in front of Fried Green Tomatoes, give her a chance to discover greater pleasures in life. But having done her duty well, she returned to subduing the grilled cheese. And she was whistling.

I wandered back to the waiting room, reading the signs along the way that repeated every ten steps or so, directing me to cough into the crook of my arm and wash my hands obsessively to prevent the spread of influenza.

With the image of a germ-riddled milk jug in mind, I stepped into the room to find all the same faces, some reading, some chatting, some dozing at the TV, some staring off into a fearful distance.

Ms. Puerto Rico said, “Hi,” as I returned to the seat that had become mine.

Cowboy welcomed me back by spitting into his  jug and placing it in the empty seat between us. He had apparently tired of bending over to reach the floor.

Ms. Puerto Rico cleared her throat and looked at me, her nostrils flaring in disgust, and I had to laugh despite the brown muck perched twenty inches to the right of my thigh.

“Hey, who’re you here with?” she asked.

“My daughter, but it’s a simple procedure, no biggy.” I shifted as far left as the chair allowed. “And you?”

“My mama. But she didn’t tell me anything, just that she had to have a little procedure and needed a ride home.”

“Wow! That must be disconcerting.”

“Oh, it’s the way she is. She says God has more important things to do than listen to us complain, so she never shares any of the bad stuff. What can I do? I just wait for her to nudge out her stories in little pieces, but she’s always pretty cheerful anyway.” She laughed and shook her head.

“Is that where you get it?” I asked, and she laughed again.

“Yeah, Mama’s Puerto Rican. She says Puerto Rican women are resilient — and they love to laugh.”

“And they love to cook,” I offered. “At least my former in-laws did. They made the best Puerto Rican food — pasteles and fried plantains are my favorites.”

“And chicharrones — we’ve got to have our fried pork skin!” and Ms. Puerto Rico was laughing yet again when another surgeon came in the door.

“The daughter of Mrs. Santiago?” he asked.

“That’s me.” Ms. Puerto Rico turned to smile at him.

He gestured toward the hallway and said, “Let’s talk out here.”

Everyone looked at Ms. Puerto Rico.

Her laughter stopped. Her smile stopped. She stood and followed him out.

The doc said something about “bronchoscopy” and maybe “sooner” and “Are you OK?”

There was a pause, and then, “Yes, thank you, I’m fine,” and after a silent moment, she was standing in the doorway. “Hey, where’d you get that coffee?”

“I’ll show you.” I jumped up and walked into the hallway with her, my arm around her shoulders. “It’s down this way.”

“At least he didn’t say she couldn’t have sex,” she laughed, and then she turned into me, and she wept. And when she could, she whispered, “She never told us, not a word. … And she’ll just say that Puerto Rican women are resilient. … And they love to laugh. … We do love to laugh. We do. …

“Hey,” she stood straight, “I could use that coffee.”

“Well, the good news is it’s free — coffee, tea and ice water — all free, all the time, Sweetie. I’m Patsy. What’s your name?”

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt