At Least My Mother Was There
By: Brianna L Clark
Tags: Trauma, Mwc Reentry, Mothers, Hospital, MWC

It the blessing of human beings that we look for the good in every situation and it is a curse that we do not allow ourselves to acknowledge suffering in its fullness. I grew up thinking I had to gain something from my trauma but I was never taught how to navigate handling what I felt I had lost.

When I was sixteen, I almost died. On Christmas day in 2014 my family and I celebrated my pulmonary valve replacement as the supposed finish line after a lifetime of cardiac complications. Nearly three months later, I caught a fever. I figured it was just the flu and I would be healed by the next week’s chemistry test.

March began and my temperature marked 106 degrees Fahrenheit. “This is a terrible flu,” I thought as I felt my muscles cease to function under my duvet cover. They overheated. My throat muscles contracted and released as I tried to swallow. I tested my vocal chords and called for my mom.

“Mom,” I whispered. I tried again.

“Mommy,” I wheezed.

She strode into the room and tears of relief pooled along my lashes.

“I can’t move, Mama. I need a cold water bath.”

Death via illness reverses life in a very literal way. The closer it gets, the more we revert back to our infantile selves. We need help getting out of bed, going to the bathroom, bathing, eating, speaking, and it is death’s cruelest trick to force your own parent into witnessing the rewinding of their child’s life.

My mother is stronger than she looks. She is two inches shorter than me but she bore my weight and staggered me into the bathroom, like a baby beginning to walk. She stripped me from my clothes — “Raise your arms above your head. A little higher.” — and placed me on the toilet, as though I were a toddler during potty training. I looked down at my blistering red skin as if I were a child that had gone outside in summer heat without sunscreen. The thermometer in my mouth beeped and my mother gasped at the number.

I was a naked babe having bath time with my mother in the dead of night. I was a child crying myself to sleep in her arms. She cooed and wiped my tears and I felt small again.

I was a teenage infant of death telling my mother her worst fears: “I almost died, Mama. I felt it. I felt what death feels like. If I closed my eyes too long, I wouldn’t have woken up.”

After ten days of constant fever, it was clear that I didn’t have the flu. With a room overlooking San Francisco bay, I called UCSF Children’s Hospital my home for almost three weeks. Every day, teams of doctors would cycle through my room, running tests, taking blood — I lost so much, and I was already anemic — poking and prodding, and asking where it hurt. “Maybe it’s salmonella,” they said. But they had already run the test for salmonella and it came back negative. So did the test for mono, and the flu, and every S.T.I my virgin blood could carry. I threw up every meal, slept as much as a newborn, and had nightly hallucinations of a reaper standing in the corner of my room calling my name.

On day twenty-six they wedged a camera down my esophagus and found bacteria growing on my brand new heart valve. Two days full of antibiotics later, the fever finally broke — it lasted twenty-eight days. I had to be wheeled out of the hospital at the beginning of April with a portable IV strapped to my bicep, sticking out of my vein.

By the time it was all over, I missed two chemistry tests.

I referred to it as a “religious experience” to give my handshake with death some meaning, but that’s not what it was. My mom didn’t nearly lose her daughter to a “religious experience,” and I didn’t miss half a semester of school to meet Jesus, and my friends didn’t visit me in the ICU to see my spiritual growth. If I had died, that’s all it would have been — a death, premature and gradual.

To be fair, I did gain something from the experience. My perspective had completely shifted. I had previously been a moody teen, glued to my phonescreen like a moth to a lamp. When I returned home, I realized how we underestimate death in our youth and fail to appreciate life in the present. I was suddenly filled with love every second I spent with family and friends, focused solely on what was unfolding in that moment. It was impossible to take anything for granted because everything was nearly taken away from me. I was overflowing with compassion for other people’s tragic situations after watching my mother live through her daughter’s second near-death experience — the first being when I was born with a hole in my heart.

But I lost just as much as I gained. I had lost my autonomy. Every time the nurses asked to press into my stomach and check for pain, their request was merely rhetorical. I never had a choice of saying yes or no. My mother ushered me into the bathroom to wipe me down with sanitary wipes when I was too weak to walk to the shower down the hall and I was not allowed the privacy of bathing myself. I was violently stripped of the blissful ignorance I lived in where death seemed like a distant concept and not an inevitable, present possibility. After years of chronic pain, my failing heart secured a severe lack of trust in my own body, never knowing when the pain would come or go. I was full of anxiety and depression and no one challenged me to examine my experience for any other purpose than to find what I could have gained.

With my body healed, my parents, friends, and teachers expected me to bounce back to my straight-A, bright-eyed self right away. But I lived in death for the span of a month, measured only by how much life I had missed. When I was admitted, the trees did not have leaves and it rained during swim practice. The day I returned home was sunny and cloudless. The petunias and roses in the front yard were in full bloom.

I felt time had frozen on that first cold February evening as the calendar kept alerting me that I was late to re-entering life, or worse that I was living past my due date, a personification of every March assignment piling in my backpack.

I didn’t feel suited for life anymore — at least, not the life I had been living. My friends talked about mundane topics of drama, celebrities, the latest social media, giving more eye contact to their phones than to their friend who had returned from the brink of death. People shifted uncomfortably when I mentioned my month in the hospital, so I turned my horror into humor, joking about the reaper hallucinations and the idiosyncrasies of my nurses. I buried my trauma in a shallow grave of dark humor, but the weeds of frustration and bitterness over my loss being brushed aside festered for years.

The perception of suffering is divided between being an honor for the wisdom gained from it or only a terrible tragedy, but it’s neither. It is simply a part of life and we determine what becomes of our suffering, but to ignore it is not an option. When I failed to recover fully from my encounter with death, I felt I shattered the communion I had valued between suffering and honor for feeling the pain after it had passed.

Sometimes, my legs feel weightless — I have low blood circulation below my waist — and I remember the feeling of being too weak to walk down the hospital corridor. When I am nauseously sick, I can calculate the angle I need to tilt my head to avoid vomit coming out my nose because for a month I was unable to keep food down. In moments of breathlessness, I am taken back to when my breath rattled against the nubbins of oxygen flowing in through my nostrils.

I was told that trauma and pain were something I could use to my benefit — and I’m not just talking about creating inspiration porn for my college essays. It was supposed to make me a better person as long as I handled it in a socially acceptable way, something I could use to help others. Never mind helping myself heal and cope with the trauma of walking death’s tightrope at sixteen years old. I had to learn on my own that it was not a tool with which I could learn to dig through life. It was two blank chemistry tests I was handed and told to take when I hadn’t studied. I filled them out and moved on. Sometimes I remember the test questions, and I tell myself it’s okay that I still don’t know the answers.