Windows and Wards

WINDOWS AND WARDS

I could see Justin through the window of my ICU room, coming on duty with the rest of the nurses on the 11 PM shift. Alone and isolated in my glassed-in Covid pod, I felt like a guppy in an aquarium-and an especially ugly and grungy guppy, since I had staggered into Emergency three nights before with my oxygen at 82, wearing a pair of jeans, a hastily donned sweater in a clashing shade of blue, and no makeup. I once read that mother guppies sometimes eat their young, but no self-respecting guppy matriarch would have seen me as appetizing at that point. I was on a catheter up my urinary tract and oxygen up my nostrils, dressed in a backless hospital gown, my groin incision itching, and had not yet had a shower or even a sponge bath. As I stared out the window in the dim light, everything took on an undersea quality and fish metaphors abounded in my head, fast and furious as a great white shark, because it had been my right foot, looking like a colourless piece of dead haddock on ice and jarring me with a pain I had never experienced, which had brought me to Emergency.

I lay there watching the changing of the guard. Nights when Justin was on duty perked me up because he seemed to bring a party with him wherever he went. Laughter was unexpected in an ICU but through my window I could see if not hear the joking and it was a shot in the arm to somebody like me who was still worried about losing a leg.  My unexpected contracting of Covid-19, four days after I had received the first vaccine, had resulted in two Covid-caused arterial clots.  I somehow had found myself a passenger on a runaway train and within two hours of arriving at the hospital, I had been put on morphine and other drips, had had a CT scan, and found myself about to be anaesthetized in the OR for an emergency thrombectomy.

There seemed to be windows in the operating room opening onto a hallway and in my half delirious state I saw several blood-red images on them. I remember thinking that other images- sun beams, rainbows, or frolicking lambs- would have been a tad more calming for someone about to be put under and possibly wake up legless or footless. One of the nurses struggled to put the IV into my veins and the last thing I remembered when I woke up in the ICU was hearing, “The surgeons have arrived” and having a fleeting thought that, “At least they could have played “Hail To The Chief’ ” to pipe the surgeons on board and usher me into oblivion.

So now, here I was in my glass ICU pod, and it would be another hour before Justin and his Doppler would enter. Apparently, my foot had three pulses, one of them being a “fetal pulse”. It was news to me that I had given birth to a faint pulse that was struggling to breathe, just like a preemie. Figuring that it wouldn’t hurt, and since I’m Jewish, in my mind I named the fetus “Menachem”. Every four hours, a nurse would come in armed with a Doppler and there would ensue a cacophony of electronic farting. Dopplers make strange sounds: a combination of the heavy breathing of a pervert who phones you at 3 AM, the cloppity-clop of a horse trotting toward you, and a whooshing sound like the Great Mother Volga herself rushing over the steppes. With all that noise, it was hard to hear the fetal pulse, or the other two pulses located in my foot.  A consensus among the nurses that they had all heard it would mean that circulation had resumed and that the foot was healthy.  Justin was my favourite because he always heard it. James, another nurse, was a stickler for a strong pulse and I would become irrationally angry at him when he insisted that he didn’t hear anything. He was just being ornery, and I wanted no nay-sayers in my Covid pod!

I lay there, semi-floating in my glassed-in isolation tank for eight days until, amidst general jubilation and euphoria, every one of the nurses and their Dopplers heard and felt the pulse! Sadly, I had no cigars to hand out but Menachem, my fetal pulse, had pulled through.

They moved me upstairs to the Covid Medical ninth floor and I was again isolated in a private room, with only the window in the door to provide a vista to the hallway. Same catheter, same oxygen, same annoying hospital gown, but there were now visits from doctors dressed in PPE, with blue throwaway gowns, what looked like paper helmets, plastic face shields, Latex gloves, and N-95 masks. (I have since added to my Covid lexicon: “ground glass opacities” is my favourite so far.)

Faces would peer into the window, day and night, and people would occasionally wave to me. I was not allowed out and they were allowed in only when in their protective clothing. The monotony was broken by meal delivery and as I regained my appetite, I was allowed to call the hospital kitchen myself and choose each of my three meals per day a few hours in advance. To improve any cognitive function, possibly lost by lying on my back for two weeks before my pulseless foot and leg had even brought me to Emergency, I ordered my meals “en francais”.

My other “window to the world” was my cell phone and Facebook. In my haste to get to Emergency, I had grabbed my phone but forgotten the charger. Nurse Desiree, way beyond the call of duty, came to the recue and found me one. So now, the screen on my cellphone joined the window to the hallway as my link to outside.

My brother who lives in the South of Spain in Andalusia had to practically be forcibly restrained by my sister-in-law from getting on a plane to come see me in Montreal but thankfully she prevailed. Facebook Messages and online chats took over, to everyone’s relief.

Through my small window, I could watch the comings and goings of the various team members on their shifts. And, on my second day, I could also hear the hacking cough of a fellow Covid patient through the wall. Doctors would occasionally stick their heads in and ask me questions. One night, I had finally stared to drop off to sleep when the doctor stuck his head back in with one more query. “I forgot to ask you”, he said. “If you go into cardiac arrest, do you want to be resuscitated?” My response was: “Uhh…yes?” I hadn’t come in with any living will or instructions about medical staff not taking so-called “heroic measures”, so I guess they had to ask, but who wants that to be the last comment they hear before going to sleep? The doctor smiled at my answer and said, “I think you’re a good candidate for resuscitation.” How can anyone even respond to that except with a polite thank-you in the same tone used when accepting a cup of tea?

 On the fourth day, another face began to peer through the window. The fact that the face was very handsome behind the plastic shield might have contributed to the improvement in my oxygen level but also to a slightly elevated and accelerated heart rate. Then, there was a polite knock at the door and in came Dr. David Saint-Jacques, blue eyes matching the PPE he was wearing.  Reading that the name on my chart was “Moscovitz”, the first word out of his mouth was “Russki?”

Not knowing how to say, “No, my grandparents came from Romania” in Russian, I then proceeded to count to ten in Russian- vestiges of my stint as a hostess in the Russian Pavilion at “Man and His World” in Montreal. During possibly the best summer of my life, I had welcomed thousands of visitors to our pavilion, and had been placed there, again because of my name; nobody had bothered to enquire if I spoke Russian. It was three months of smiling, standing with hurting feet on high heels but not caring, sipping vodka, and spooning caviar onto crackers; the Russian pavilion directors let me, and my two co-hostesses, take our breaks in the basement where there was a cache of Soviet snacks. My main task, aside from ushering people into the pavilion and answering their questions, was to avoid the advances of Boris, one of the directors and a journalist with Novosti Press. I can’t say they were entirely unwelcome advances, as he was very attractive and seemed quite exotic to me, but my mom brought me up proper.

After Dr. Saint-Jacques and I had established that I was not Russian, we spoke in English. I received impeccable care from every nurse, doctor, and Personal Care Assistant at the McGill University Health Centre complex in the Royal Victoria Glen Site Hospital, but it was Dr. Saint-Jacques who came in every day to reassure me, to remind me that I was “a survivor” and that I would make it out of the hospital.  I looked forward to his visits once or twice a day and if he was busy, he would look through my little window and wave at me. Hyper-aware of how good-looking he was, I imagined what I looked like: no real shower yet, hair sticking up like the ill-favoured love child of an orangutan and a very homely Chinese Crested dog, and minus my partial upper plate (result of a car accident where my two front teeth hit the dashboard and exited my mouth).

I blush at my vanity now, but I called Dr. Saint-Jacques over to my bed to show him a photo on my cellphone where I looked pretty, and I actually said to him, “This is what I usually look like”. Cringe. Ever the gentleman, he replied, “And you will look like that again”.

On the fourth day of my sojourn on the 9^th floor Covid Medical ward, I was curious as to Dr. Saint-Jacques’ specialty. Was he a hematologist? A vascular surgeon? An epidemiologist? So, trusty little cellphone in hand, I looked him up and…” O.M.G.” as the millennials say. My doctor was Dr. David Saint-Jacques, the astronaut who had rocketed up to the International Space Station in December 2018 for a 204-day mission! Intrigued, I read his bio and, jaw dropping with every entry, learned that he had received an engineering degree, worked in industry fir a while, was then awarded a scholarship to Cambridge where he received his PhD in Astrophysics, then completed post-doctoral research, according to Wikipedia, at the National Atronomical Observatory in Japan where he worked on the development and application of the Mitaka Infrared Interferometer and the  Subaru Telescope Adaptive Optic System in Hawaii, then trained as an astronaut…and…oh yeah, he also managed to get a medical degree, become a family physician, teach at McGill, and develop and oversee programs for remote medicine in Inuit communities.  As I recovered from emergency surgery and Covid pneumonia day by day, in great part because of his encouragement, I would ask myself, “In what bizarre universe is someone unlucky enough to contract Covid five days after her first vaccine and lucky enough to wind up with David Saint-Jacques as her doctor???”

When he came in the following day, I showed him his picture and gasped, “Is this you?” He very modestly said that yes, it was, and, trying not to pry too much, I asked him if he had been one of those kids who dreamed about going into space. He confirmed that he had indeed been one of those kids and I tried my darndest, at age 73, not to be star-struck (no pun intended).

Sitting in my isolation room, my world diminished to a view through an eight- inch by ten-inch window onto the corridor, I thought about what unimaginable vistas Dr. Saint-Jacques had seen from his window on the space capsule, as co-pilot of the Soyuz spacecraft, or on what the Canadian Space Agency calls “extravehicular activities”, otherwise known as a “spacewalk.  As a CTV online news report mentioned, he performed a "cosmic catch" of SpaceX Dragon cargo using Canadarm2 -- the first time a Canadian astronaut had operated the robotic arm to perform the feat. My only brush with "extravehicular activities" was watching my front teeth fly out the window of the car in the abovementioned car accident.  Dr. Saint-Jacques had seen the world in ways that most of us can never conceive of and saw first-hand our planet’s place in the universe. And somehow, I found myself in a small hospital room, in space and time, with one of the most extraordinary human beings I have ever met and suddenly all was right with my world and my universe.