The Moon in the Water: Reflections on an Aging Parent

ER Moon

99 ER Moon Convenient ledges of rock let this nonchalant Kuan Yin prop her feet and lean an elbow. The artist has inked her in on the back of a Buddhist sutra, and its characters show through dimly, in reverse, on her water, sky, rock, and full moon; Will might say those letters don’t know whether they’re coming or going! Next to her willow sprigs, Kuan Yin is leaning a finger on the rock; I can’t tell if she is drumming it impatiently, or just keeping her place in the poem, while she checks for reflections of the moon—and the verse—in the water. Dad’s caregiver (a new girl) calls school to say he fell down in his bedroom and cut his head. Because she insists the cut has stopped bleeding, I wait until after my class to go home. Only after the caregiver leaves do I notice that Dad is not putting his weight on his right leg when he moves to his wheelchair, so at 7 p.m. I call a cab to take us to the emergency room. At the hospital the nurse spots Dad’s defibrillator and orders an EKG. I tell her he’s not complaining of his heart and always has unusually low blood pressure, but she hooks him up anyway. After that test we wait half an hour for the doctor. Unfortunately, all the movement from wheelchair 100 The Moon in the Water to cab (in a rain shower) and from cab to wheelchair (under sprinkles) and from wheelchair to gurney has opened up the cut on his forehead, so it distracts the doctor from my questions about the right leg. While he sews six stitches over Dad’s eye, I ask Dad if he remembers taking me to the ER as a kid to get stitches over my eye: “Not hardly.” He was calm then and he’s calm now, and I don’t remind him that I made a lot more noise through my stitching. “He’s not putting his weight on his right leg,” I say again to the doctor. While he probes the leg, Dad keeps craning his neck to see what’s going on. “Is your neck sore?” the doctor asks. “Kind of”—from all that peering, I suspect. Nevertheless, the doctor orders a CT scan for the neck. “No, no,” I protest, “he needs an X-ray of his right leg.” The white-coated, unshaven doctor looks doubtful: “Hip maybe. Old people are often breaking hips.” Two aides wheel Dad to the CT room. We wait there forty-five minutes while I drum my fingers impatiently and Dad looks nonchalant. Then we wait for the test to run. Then we wait outside the X-ray room another twenty minutes. When the technicians finally get to him, they shoo me out. Finally we’re finished at the hospital. After I call a cab from the front desk, we station ourselves outside. Half an hour later the cab pulls up. “I can’t fit a wheelchair in my trunk!” the cabbie fusses. (I did tell the dispatcher we needed a trunk big enough to accommodate a wheelchair.) As this cabbie, leaving in a huff, does not specify if he’ll Reflections on an aging PaRent 101 signal a new dispatch, I wheel the chair back inside and call a cab again. We return to our curb. Finally the security guard, who’s been sauntering in and out of sight, says there’s a cab waiting on the other side of the building: Could that be ours? (I did tell the dispatcher ‘Ewa side.) I push the wheelchair through the building to Diamond Head side. This cab is still there, and all our selves and our appendages fit into it. When a hospital official calls the next day to report that the CT scan was fine (I knew that), I learn that allowing myself to be expelled from Dad’s little bubble at X-ray was a big mistake. The official adds, “X-ray of left hip also fine.” “What? Left hip? But I told every new nurse, doctor, aide who came into the room that it was his right leg!” “I’m sure you did.” Pause. “Hold on.” The official comes back in about ten minutes: “The X-ray technician says that the order was for left side, but the patient did...