Golden's Rule. C. E. Edmonson
It looked like she was trying to screw up the courage to tell me something, and I realized that it would have been easier to let her just keep talking over me instead of to me directly. That way, we could have both pretended she was talking about someone else.
“The purpose of the CT scan is to determine what, if anything, is wrong with you,” she said. “But it’s possible that you’ve had a mild stroke.”
Mild? Gimme a break! That’s how I order my General Tsao’s chicken. But a fourteen-year-old kid with a stroke? There’s nothing mild about that, any way you look at it. This is, like, guess what? Somebody tossed a refrigerator out of a window and it landed on your head. But don’t worry. It was empty.
“The procedure,” she continued, “is simple. We’ll inject contrast material through a vein and take a few pictures. Nothing to it. It’s entirely painless.”
Yeah, for you, I thought.
And then she was gone, off to give thirty seconds of her precious time to some other chump. Mom sat next to me on the gurney. Her eyes were red and swollen, and her forehead was lined with tension.
“I don’t think it’ll be anything,” I told her. “I feel great.”
Physically, that was true.
“I know, honey. You’re a strong girl,” she said, squeezing my hand. “Just keep being strong.” Then she stood up and paced around the small space. “I need to get in touch with your father.”
“You didn’t call him last night?”
“I tried, but his cell phone was out of reach. Anyway, it’s probably better if we get this pinned down first.”
I wanted to ask why, but a nurse pulled the curtain aside and stepped up next to the gurney. She was carrying a plastic container full of needles and vials. My eyes grew wide at the sight of them and I shot my mom a quick look of panic. I mean, she wouldn’t let me rent any of the Friday the 13th movies because I’d have nightmares—and now I was living one!
“We’ll just take a little blood,” the nurse said, smiling sweetly. “Just a pinch is all.”
Promises, promises, that’s all I got. She had to make three attempts before she hit a vein. I mean, was she a trainee? Or did she just like to torture people? Not that she was apologetic or anything. No, her failures didn’t seem to bother her very much—she somehow kept up that beauty pageant smile, like someone was going to hand her a crown and a bunch of roses after this. With any luck, they’d have thorns on them.
Hey, I was allowed to be bitter about this. After all, it was my arm getting stuck like a voodoo doll—I halfway expected to look down and see the nurse’s initials tattooed on it.
When she finally finished taking the blood and labeling the vials, she handed me a plastic container with a lid and directed me to the bathroom. “We’ll need a urine sample, too. Drop it off at the nurses’ station when you’re finished,” she said cheerily.
Then she was gone, no doubt off to find her next victim. And I was, like, so totally bummed out I couldn’t even talk. I felt like I was disappearing, the incredible shrinking Maddie—like I wasn’t a person anymore, just a series of test results or a lab rat to be tormented and studied.
“Do you want me to go to the bathroom with you?” my mom asked.
Oh, yeah, like that’d make it better.
I did my duty, then settled back on the gurney to wait, wishing I’d thought to bring a book or something. Anything to take my mind off of what was going on around me, to me…inside of me. It seemed surreal to be sitting there while everyone else went about their usual business, poking and prodding patients, and talking about strokes like they were the most normal things in the world.
I guess if you work in a hospital, that kind of stuff becomes second nature to you. But to me, it was as if my life had been turned upside down in just a matter of a few hours. Nothing was less normal than sitting here on the gurney, waiting to find out what was wrong with me. Being probed by aliens wouldn’t have been much weirder!
But everything was normal just yesterday morning, just a short twenty-four hours ago. Life was perfect. No complaints. Now here I was, being checked for signs of a stroke. Could this really be happening to me? I kept wanting to wake up or turn back time. With something this serious, shouldn’t they give you at least one do-over?
My answer arrived in the form of an aide pushing a wheelchair. I did get a do-over—unfortunately, with the wheelchair! Why did I need one when I could walk? Hospital rules.
My mom and I looked at each other, but I think we both knew that we couldn’t fight procedure. Better to get it over with. I sat down with a sigh. Only the trip was even more depressing than lying on the gurney. When you’re in a wheelchair in a hospital, everybody looks at you. Like, what’s wrong with this one? And the elevator they put me on was already occupied by an old man on a gurney who stared at the ceiling and groaned with every breath. I don’t even think he was in pain or anything. He was just groaning. Maybe that was his way of protesting against what was happening to him.
I understood how he felt. I wanted to groan myself.
In the CT room, some space-age-looking equipment was set up, similar to what I saw on the school trip to the planetarium. I focused on that while another nurse pushed an Iv into the same vein used to take blood. “Just a little pinch, dear.” Then before I knew what was happening to me, I was put on a platform that slid into a machine that completely encircled my head. “Don’t move, dear.” A liquid was injected into my arm and the machine began to spin, whirring like the sound of birds’ wings, first to the left, then back to the right, finally making a sound that reminded me of bees in a hive.
Being in there was one of the worst experiences of my life. I felt so utterly alone, so cut off from everyone in the outside world. Almost like a living robot. And it didn’t take just a minute, like X-rays in a dentist’s office. By the time the machine stopped, I felt like I was the victim of a cave-in. Don’t move? It was all I could do not to jump off the table and run away from the machine that was trying to devour me headfirst.
I was feeling dizzy when I finally got to my feet, but the unit was already being prepared for the next patient. My mother was arguing with the X-ray technician, who wanted us to go back to the emergency room. The scans, she told him, would have to be read in this very unit by a radiologist, so returning to the emergency room was pointless. Therefore, we’d be sitting in the small waiting area until that radiologist made an appearance. Then she handed him her business card: Abigail Moore-Bergamo, Attorney at Law.
“Hospitals,” she told the man, “have certain obligations with regard to their patients, obligations that are best honored. We’ll be in the waiting area.” It was a small victory but, as Coach Stover taught me, every win counts.
I held my tongue until we were sitting next to each other on plastic chairs, the kind with a little depression that never really fits your bottom. “What kind of obligations do hospitals have?” I asked. The question was sincere. I mean, I couldn’t demand my rights if I didn’t know what they were, right? But Mom was a step ahead of me.
“I have no idea, but at least he didn’t call security,” she said, and we both started laughing. For me, the laughter was a kind of release of all my pent-up nerves. For Mom, the laughter turned into tears that suddenly streamed down her face. Finally, she swiped at her eyes. “Don’t you worry, baby. Whatever happens, we’ll get through it together.”
Okay, so it’s just what you’d tell a little kid, which a day before I definitely didn’t want to be. But it worked. I felt better—at least until Dr. Rosenberg came into the waiting area holding a sheet of X-ray film. Then my nerves began to act up again. It was worse than getting back results for a test you weren’t prepared for.
Dr. Rosenberg was a younger man, most likely still in his twenties. Like Dr. Sandoval, his eyes were red, his eyelids swollen. He looked as though