at the VA hospital in 2017, the day we find out that love is magic
In Sweden, they like to call a spade a spade. An airport is a fly-place (flygplats). Raccoons are washbears (tvättbjörnar). Things that are wooden are “of tree” (av trä). A hospital is a sick house. Sjukhus. Monday night I dream of the sjukhus. Or, you know, hospital.
I mostly know why. I wake up in the middle of the night and look at my Facebook memories and see my husband’s side, stapled together like Frankenstein. My gorgeous wife didn’t want me to post this, is how he starts. He tells people he has had surgery to remove a chunk of tumor. I count the staples. I think there are twenty three. Seven years ago Monday.
In my dream Mike is annoyed at the ladies in the hospital that won’t shut up. Why won’t they stop talking? They won’t stop talking because his gorgeous, still-alive, dreaming wife is listening to a podcast. The ladies in the hospital (sjukhus) say the words that Sarah and Katie, the podcast ladies, say. Tired of this, Mike leaves his hospital room and hides. I find him in a storeroom behind a water heater, and go tell the nurses that he has PTSD. He needs a private room.
There’s more to the dream than that, including a part where my husband, having been released from the sjukhus (or, left of his own accord, because with Mike frankly it could be either), arrives home in a DeLorean, pulling a dozen or more pieces of military equipment behind the car. On chains. Tanks, helicopters, small planes. Are they all on wheels? I can’t be too sure. I tell Lesley about this and she says a DeLorean would make her think “future.” She is my new favorite person to tell my weird dreams to.
I think about the hospital, though. Memories are snapshots and not necessarily written down. There are no letters and no journal entries. There are not that many texts, even, because most of the time Mike is in the hospital I am with him. He never, not once, spent a night in the hospital without me. Both of us slept better together in a hospital bed than either of us would have slept alone, even with nurses coming to check vital signs and pain medication and a husband hooked up to everything he was hooked up to, which was like a lot. Alone we would not have slept at all.
Also, though I am not sure I ever say this out loud to him, I am quietly terrified that whenever I leave him I will come back to find him dead. Especially at first. I don’t understand until later that he wouldn’t do that.
The dream makes me think of the Sjukhus and something else, too. Of how right after Mike dies, when I am bridging two worlds, both of them terrible and magical, I go running and know things, and one is this:
Something important happened at the hospital.
Not Parker Adventist where Mike died, although that was important. The VA. Not the new one, long and cold, where Mike went a few times. The old one. It was like a rabbit warren and a summer camp, but with modern medical equipment. Utilitarian yellow-tan walls and TVs that swung out from the side of the bed and hit you in the face. The sickhouse you go to, if you’re a veteran.
Something important happened in the hospital.
The problem is, almost six years later I don’t know what it is. At first I assume it has to do with money or a lawsuit. So much of those early days is about survival. Is it a medication? A diagnosis, a prescription that proves something? But lawsuits go nowhere. I cry when I talk to attorneys. Eventually I decide to believe the only thing I can, which is that Mike would have died anyway. If not from cancer complications, another way. A car, a gunshot. Or probably his personal preference, serving as a human shield as I fell from the sky, miraculously absorbing all impact so I am unscathed. I’m not entirely sure that didn't happen.
After the sjukhus dream I search my memory again. Is it a medication? Something he said?
I think of the first time I go to the VA with him, a psych appointment when he explains that his PTSD medications do not work. I watched them not work.
I think of therapy, his and ours.
The time he has amnesia and his short term memory disappears, right before our honeymoon. I ask him when our anniversary is and he initially gives the wrong one. Horrified, I say, “Who do you think you’re married to?” Reassuringly he says “Not fucking Becky” and supplies the right date. December 17, 2016. When we walk into the ER, he looks to me to explain what is happening, complete trust in his eyes.
Two months later, post honeymoon, when we go for what we think will be two hours and stay for two weeks. His face when they tell him they think his body is full of cancer. (Cancer and blood clots, it turns out. Bit of both.) I guess when it’s your time, it’s your time, he says. And my first thought is to be glad we took so many pictures on our honeymoon.
Operations, chemo. IVs and monitors. Me singing “Give Said the Little Stream” because when you are doped up on dilaudid and oxy it’s hard to pee. Singing inspirational songs helps.
Walking all over the hospital and all over outside. Just me, because I can escape and Mike can’t. Walking a little far up Colfax and realizing it’s a little sketchy. I text Mike who says to go back on Clermont. And do I want to order a pizza? You bet I do!
Mike’s mutinous face when they tell him his choices are to either have a bag hanging out of his back or lose a kidney. I am called back from my coffee run to convince him he needs his kidneys.
The time they are selling sequined fedoras at the “Freedom Marketplace.” They come in four colors: Silver, gold, blue, and red. Do they manage to sell any of these at the sickhouse for veterans? Who buys them1?
When I come back after running home to shower. Mike is still in the ICU. “Your magic wife is here,” the nurse says. And when we ask what that means she tells us that when I touch Mike his heart rate goes down. Mike says:
“That’s not magic. It’s Love.”
But I think they are the same thing anyway.
The reason I know that a hospital is a sickhouse is a sjukhus is that my parents don’t let me take German in 1983. I want to take German but they say it is not practical and if I take ether Spanish or French they can help me. My dad went on a mission to France and is fluent in French. My mom, as far as I know, might have had Spanish in high school one time. It turns out I am great at language classes which should have surprised exactly no one, and my dad dies halfway through the four years of French I take. I need his help zero times. Forty years later “I want to take German” seems like an incredibly silly thing to say no to.
I don’t want to take German in 1983 because it is the most useful, I want to take it because it is the most interesting. So when I go to BYU in 1988 and there is a language requirement, I decide to take the most interesting language possible, not the language I have been taking for four years already. Unfortunately, Icelandic is at 7:00 am. Swedish is at 9:00. Swedish it is! That’s how I decide when it is up to me. I only take it for a semester because I am transferring to UC Santa Barbara to go get married too young. But I pick it up again thirty-three years later when Lesley (same Lesley, dream Lesley) shows me Duolingo. 2022 me, like 1988 me, wants to speak something interesting, regardless of practicality.
The road to sjukhus is a long one. Long, and unpredictable. I don’t know what I am supposed to remember, what important thing happened at l’hopital/the hospital/the sickhouse/sjukhuset. But I tell Mike that if he needed a wife who remembered things, remembered him, he picked the right one.
Granddad had a heck of a time in Vietnam. I bet a red sequined fedora will cheer him up!