Three Hospitals in January
Five years to the day, I’m an imposter on the chemo ward once again.
Appointments at New York Oncology and Hematology sound far worse than they are. I stop in like a visitor and sit in a padded reclining chair in the final home of my company—almost all elderly, spare one man who could be ten years older than me. I am twenty-nine, and for six years I’ve been stuck with needles and sent on my way without many answers. When my companions here rise, they shuffle and roll their IV drips with them like the tall staffs of prophets. They are encouraged to hydrate, hydrate, hydrate; for my procedure, I am instructed to restrict fluids as much as possible. I’m here for another drug infusion, meant to prompt my latent blood to respond to a stimulus, so that my doctors will have another datapoint to puzzle over and partially explain to me.
I love to tell the story of where I was on January 6th, 2021. In the midst of the pandemic, I received my first of four infusions at Mount Sinai Hospital in Chicago. The contents of the clear plastic bag seeping into my arm had been developed in rabbits and horses, they told me, so I had first been administered a hearty dose of benadryl intravenously to stave off animal allergies. I’d never taken benadryl before. I had assumed I’d be able to sit in the dark, quiet ward and conduct my 8th grade science lesson remotely as I would on any other Wednesday. Instead, I found myself swimming in my head, half aware of the screen in front of me, and ultimately needed to hand the lecture over to my co-teacher. I signed off, closed my laptop, and scanned my surroundings for something else to focus on as I drifted into an unfamiliar, high and tired state of mind. My attention landed on a small, square television broadcasting some sort of rally at the Capitol in DC. The more I watched, the more utterly confused I became, until I wasn’t sure where the benadryl ended and reality began.
The chemo ward in Chicago was full of people, but they hardly ever spoke at all. Living in a city, as I did for five years, you learn to exist close to others without interfering in one another’s business too much. There were translators sometimes on the ward to help the patients understand what was being done to them, and their intermediation made up most of the prolonged conversation.
The people on the chemo ward in Albany apologize for their pain.
“Ow,” says one woman kitty-corner from me, out of nowhere. Then a gentle smile, and, “Sorry.” Her first bag, the nurses explain, is just benadryl, and over the next half hour she gradually ends up splayed out on her side with her shoes off, stocking feet slowly flexing out the unreality in her head.
The woman to my right starts a persistent cough, and then explains “I just swallowed wrong. Ignore me.” It makes me remember how the prolonged bag of ruxience, that was the name of the rabbit-horse drug they put in me in Chicago, made me feel like I was full up with fluid till there was a strange taste in the back of my throat.
People take calls from their doctors in hushed, solemn tones. The man to my left, separated from me by a pane of glass overhung by my long winter jacket, is so quiet that I can’t make out a word he exchanges with the nurses attending him.
The woman across from me is where my eyes most often rest. She scowls in her deep sleep. Her eyes are hollow, and she looks old and pained.
One year and three days ago, I sat at a very similar bedside. Strikingly similar, actually, except the woman now across from me ironically still has her hair.
Time was meaningless on the Albany hospice ward. If the door was open, you could cross the threshold into a room full of buzzing people and pizza boxes and paper plates, or a room with a few people and sandwich wrappers, or a room with two people and just the smell and the snoring.
The one in the bed, she wasn’t much of a person anymore and I wasn’t counting her, though my family tried to feign conversation with her shell. She was the source of the smell—concentrated piss in a plastic tube which was inside of her. She was also the source of the snoring. It was loud, and it wracked her body with the effort of each long rasp that the drug ripped from the back of her raw throat. It was a product of the morphine, enough for her to sleep through the pain, the thirst, the hunger—and it was making her snore like a lawn mower. The people in the room couldn’t talk sweetly into her ear the way they’d pictured it because she was just too damn loud. Then she would stop, and she’d be motionless for long moments. The people’s faces would get still and wet as they waited for the eternal lack of snores, but she was only lulling them into a false conclusion. She would pause for dramatic effect, and just as the young, sensitive ones began to weep, she would honk out another long, loud snore as her passengerless body wrestled her soul back up a shifting slope that it immediately began to slip back down, over and over.
If you sat in the hospice room for an hour, you may just as well have been sitting for ten, dry and giggling with exhaustion, spine aching and flattening against a metal folding chair. You may just as well have been in the elevator with a gurney and a set of scrubs, or crossing the agora toward the parking garage. You may have been sitting in the five minutes before she died when her uncomprehending husband asked to be taken back to his nursing home but was shouted down by his children, and it would be just as well as if you were standing in the funeral parlor beside her waxy painted husk.
Time had no meaning in that reality. If we’re all lucky enough to end where they say it should, surrounded by mourning loved ones, maybe it ultimately has no meaning for us, the women, before or after, wherever we stand on our waypoints to becoming the wretched lovely host body who is feast to a thousand fat maggots.
January 6th, 2021
I am a teacher on Chicago’s redlined West Side. I’m not a disciplinarian—I get by on my sunny disposition and relationships with students. I try to introduce and uphold some structure at the start of the year. One of my three fundamental classroom rules is the Platinum Rule (better than the Golden Rule)—treat others as they want to be treated. Structure goes out the window with the pandemic, though.
I get a call about my bloodwork and have to step away from a virtual lesson on the Earth, Moon, and Sun. The doctors don’t know what’s wrong with me, but they’ve written me a referral to Mount Sinai Hospital and an emergency steroid prescription. My platelet levels are a fifth of what they should be, and no one knows why.
I visit my grandmother when I’m home for the holidays. She’d written me a letter in a failing hand in which she’d used the word “flower” instead of “floor.” I’m practiced at interpreting unclear writing and easily make sense of her scrawl.
In her faded living room, contents unmoved for half a century, her words come slowly to her, and she is distressed. Her hair is falling out—a translucent layer of down remains to her. Painstakingly, she expresses that she’d like very much if I chose to move home and live closer; she worries about my safety in a city like Chicago. I smile and nod and speak word-by-word, dripping them out at a pace she can follow. Under a layer of fear, she is pure love.
From a journal entry dated January 12, 2021
“I’m actually looking forward to my treatment tomorrow! It’s nice to take the time off work, even though it zonks me out, and I’ve actually been feeling MUCH better since the last one. Could be psychosomatic, but I’ve had more motivation to cook & fast & I’ve been walking every day. Even went to church on Sunday for the first time in a while!
Gratitude: My relationship w/ God”
January 2nd, 2025
I’ve met so many people in my grandmother’s community, my community I suppose, who would love to grant her bodily autonomy under these particular circumstances—she’s practically a poster child for their legislative agenda.
My uncle has power of attorney. He and my mother sit to her right; I am to her left, and over her vacant frame in the bed they explain to me that while her body could probably heal the injuries she sustained in her recent fall, her mind is the obstruction. It’s too far gone. She’s terrified when revived, tries to rip her stitches out, has to be restrained. She’s been admitted into hospice, where she will be kept under morphine without a fluid drip or intubation until she succumbs to nutrient deprivation. It is a death sentence chosen by her caretakers. They are ready to let her go.
In the last months before she was hospitalized, each Sunday morning when I knocked on the door to her room at the assisted living facility that couldn’t assist her, I’d found her worse off. She could no longer articulate why she hated it there; she could only weep to express how lost and afraid she was. She was aggressive toward the staff, and they didn’t bother with her anymore. I greeted her with warmth though I knew to expect hysterics—the words I said didn’t matter, the lilting tone was more effective than any verbal message. She wouldn’t do this for her children, but for me she’d try to pull herself together and cooperate to get out the door. A path walked weekly since her girlhood was worn deep into a trench in her ailing mind—the knowledge that on Sunday mornings, her family goes to mass. In reality, her surviving family hadn’t much use for this, but it didn’t trouble me any, so I’d help her put on clean underwear and find the hat she liked to wear to cover her baldness and keep her head warm, and I’d let her weep on my shoulder until she was ready to go.
I saw her once a week. My uncle, my mother saw her daily.
In the hospice ward, my uncle explains the nature of her present condition to me, and as he speaks I come to realize the choice he has made. To me, it defies the Platinum Rule. A Catholic chooses a hard life over an easy death. I’ve seen their lives consumed by her illness; I understand their need to let her go. When I look at the empty bed between us, I see her there but I don’t feel her. It is not my choice to make.
When everyone else had moved to the far end of the room to eat, I sat beside her hollow self and began to read gospel to her. I barely made it a dozen passages into Matthew before I was convinced my efforts were futile. Only in the next year would John 21:18 begin to haunt me:
Very truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.
A therapeutic musician in residence at the hospice ward is making his rounds. He comes to sit by my grandmother’s bedside and plays on his guitar a series of old hymns she must’ve heard a thousand times at mass. My mother gasps as a single, fat tear rolls down my grandmother’s sleeping face.
Excerpt from my grandmother’s obituary, published January 6, 2025
Mary Jo was well read, clever with words and precise in communication, which she used as a vehicle to maintain fond, warm relationships all her life… Donations in her memory may be made to The Community Hospice-Albany Inn.
January 6th, 2026
I’ve been avoiding the news, frankly. We’re a nation divided, and the more radical of popular sentiments root down to the populace’s fear of what happened in hospitals six years ago. It is so hard to be angry when you’re so tired. It’s so hard to find the words.
The woman dosed with benadryl sits up at attention now. I’m embarrassed by my nascent presence here, intruding among these rustling reeds by the River Styx. Soon I’ll close my laptop and stop my voyeurism, skip out the door with no nausea or hair loss.
Casey Vincelette (’18) served as fiction editor for issue 6.2 of Gandy Dancer, and in her bio for that position she identified herself first and foremost as a granddaughter. She currently lives in Albany, NY near her family. In 2020 she earned an MAT in middle grades language arts while working full time—by the absolute skin of her teeth. She would never have made it if she hadn’t practiced juggling many responsibilities in her undergraduate years.