Love on Wheelz

One of the things that my MD has affected over the years has been my facial muscles. I’m not able to open my mouth as much as could before and I can’t smile as big as I used to. Because of this, my default face looks very annoyed and I have to make an effort to look not annoyed. So conveying an emotion isn’t a very easy thing to do. My happy face might not be very different from my angry face. But that’s not the case when I’m in trouble, and by trouble I mean “having trouble breathing so you better do something before you turn three shades of smurf” kind of trouble. And doing something usually involves a medical procedure.

I always try not to do medical stuff in front of people I’m not close to or comfortable with. It makes me feel embarrassed. The two big things that I don’t like doing are suctioning (oral and tracheal) and bagging. Suctioning is done by a small vacuum like machine that sucks stuff. Oral suction is when you just suction the drool that I can’t swallow. Tracheal suction is when, as you would expect, you suction the mucus out of my airway and lungs. If it builds up or coagulates and hardens then you have to get it out of there or I won’t be able to breathe. When this happens, it turns my face red and makes my eyes water. So after that happens I’m usually sucking for air, which is where the bagging comes in. If you’ve ever seen a medical show, then you’ve seen an ambu-bag. They’re the bags that the paramedics break out when they need to revive someone who’s not breathing. They stick it in their mouth and squeeze air into them. It’s basically the same thing with me except the bag plugs into the trache. You then pump air into my lungs by squeezing the bag.

In my three years in college, I’ve never gotten a girl note taker, much less a pretty one. So I was sure my luck was changing when the teacher told me that Aamani was gonna be my note taker. I’d first seen Aamani when I got to chemistry class a few minutes early. She was tutoring half the class. I couldn’t get over how pretty she was. I say pretty, not hot because there’s a big difference between a pretty girl and a hot girl. You fuck a hot girl and date a pretty girl. And she was definitely the latter. And the fact that she was smart definitely made her even more attractive. So, naturally, I wanted to impress her. I was going to do my best to appear as normal as possible. That meant no suctioning or bagging in front of her. I was gonna do my best to appear normal in front of her. It wasn’t that I liked liked her, I barely knew her. But I didn’t want to scare her away in case I did end up liking her. And I imagine seeing me with a red face and tears rolling down my cheeks can be pretty disconcerting if you don’t know what’s going on. So when I started having trouble breathing during my chemistry lab, I went outside to take care of it.

The nurse bagged and suctioned me for more than five minutes. That’s five minutes of constant pumping and sucking air in and out of my system. I could feel the tears welling up inside my eyes, but they didn’t feel like they were coming out of my eye. The thought quickly exited my mind as I focused back on being able to breathe. But try as I might, the phlegm wasn’t going anywhere unless I got to my home ventilator with the humidifier and I told fundienurse as much.

“Okay, we just need to get our stuff and we’ll go.” So we went in and FundieNurse hurriedly told Aamani that we had to go.

“Oh, that’s okay. We’re done anyway.” And FundieNurse reached for my goggles to put them back in my locker. I found out where the tears that never came out where hiding, at the bottom edge of the goggles. A miniature ocean of salty tears zigzagged their way into the corners of my mouth. Aamani furrowed her eyebrows and then let out very soft and distressed “oh” sound like she’d just seen a dead puppy on the side of the road. She looked so worried and distraught. All I wanted to do was jump up, give her a hug and tell her I was fine. But I couldn’t and I felt like shit for it. All I could manage was my best smile and a meager, “Oh, no. I’m fine.” But my best smile isn’t much. It takes all my muscle strength to give a small smile. And it killed me that I couldn’t even reassure her with something as simple as a smile. It made me feel completely helpless and useless.

I used to be able to smile fine, I’ve seen it in pictures. But now I can’t even do that. If I could’ve just given her a big smile and reassured her it wouldn’t have made me feel like it did. But I couldn’t and she looked away sheepishly as the nurse wiped my tears away.

“I’ll see you Wednesday.” she said as the nurse and I rushed out the door.

This entry was posted on March 16, 2010 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.