John Hewitt . . . Writer » Poems

Making it Through August

John Hewitt — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 16:24:48 +0000

I am
Sweaty
Grimy
Fat
Angry
Just getting up in the morning

I want this month to end
Before I say or do something I’ll regret
I can’t have a good day at work
Or even a decent day at home
When I start out wanting to disappear
Run to the north
Run to the forest
Just keep running until I am
Dry
Clean
Thin
Happy
Ready to deal with all the people
I don’t want to see

I keep getting up
And hoping for one truly great
Piece of news to get me out of this funk
But at this point
I would settle for no bad news
For just a few days
Of life not going wrong

The Curse of Low Cholesterol

John Hewitt — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 18:43:46 +0000

The thin balding doctor
Brilliant they say
Flush with his degree
From the University of Nevada – Reno
Tut-tuts me about my weight
And runs all of usual tests
Extracts and measures my blood
To confirm that my fatness
Is killing me
But my cholesterol is low
Not high
Too low
He tells me
The good cholesterol
Has nary a toehold
In my system
Diet and exercise
You self-deluded porker
To raise your cholesterol
And so I am stuck either way
High or low
Good or bad
The answer is diet and exercise
And the question is
How do you make the next few years
Of your life
As tedious as possible

Big Heads

John Hewitt — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 00:18:09 +0000

The big-headed heard of small children
Tramples past me
Echoing shouts and threats and pleadings
For the small world enders that they see
And that I wish I could recapture
Just to judge if I have grown at all inside
Since the little shocks and horrors of a new world
Tripped over my untied shoelaces
And my unkempt, unpopular, unhappy, unabashed
Misanthropy of a childhood
Divided me slowly from the averages
The means
The medians
And the small comforts
That might have come from fitting in
The terrors and pleasures of children
Each a random sampling of their parent’s failures
Cobbled together and mostly functional
Mostly ready
I am the kid at the back of the line
Happy that no one can push ahead of me now
Happy to look at their backs and be alone
With the thoughts that sound clever in my head
Until the moment they leave my lips
And I realize that my audience
Wants me to fail
Expects me to fail
And gets pissed off
When I succeed despite them
So long herd
Get back to class
Go back to being lied to
And pounded on
And told how happy you should be
Good luck kids
It was great seeing you

Thanksgiving

John Hewitt — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 16:29:51 +0000

My wife and I spent Thanksgiving
In the kitchen with my Dad
Snacking on the food her family had provided
Talking about options
And the inevitable
Threatened
Move to a new hospital
The original hospital was ill equipped
For this long and intense a stay
Between MRSA
And a tracheotomy
And the dangers
Of a slow awakening
From a long coma
She was going to have to move
And we dreaded it

The new hospital
With its higher level of care
And pool of specialists
Could get her out of the woods
But it wasn’t made for families
And promises
Access would be strictly controlled

The issue now
Was time
How long would it take
To get her stable enough
To move
The issues did not
Make the turkey go down easy
And the day was long and blank
With the sadness
Of the empty holiday
My mother was not awake for

Snow Together

John Hewitt — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 16:32:46 +0000

One night at the hospital
I watched it snow
Which in Tucson is a next to never event
I felt bad because my mother
Couldn’t see it through the reflection
Of the lights in the room
And I had to describe it for her
Falling down and collecting on the windshield
Of my
And every other
Car out there
Light snowfall
Are natural attractions
But in the room it only made
My mother grow restless
And I eventually returned to the television
Because that was something she could see
And feel somewhat comforted by

Delusions and Dreams

John Hewitt — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 16:32:06 +0000

At some point
My mother started to confuse
The hospital with home
Thinking the view from the window
Was the backyard
And not the parking lot
I would gently remind her
That we were in the hospital
And the nurses were not in the next room
But patrolling an overcrowded hall
Which is why they took so long
To respond to her pressing
The button
Sometimes the Xanax
And other drugs fogged her mind
And she would forget who people were
But only in conversation
Not in person
She always knew who I was
And that was somewhat comforting

Passing

John Hewitt — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 16:31:16 +0000

The holidays kept passing
Christmas and New Years
MLK and Groundhog Day
The cycle continued on
Gloves and gowns
Uncomfortable chairs
Forced visits to the waiting room
Eventually we moved hospitals again
This one was supposed to help her
Get off the respirator
Remove the trach tube
Get her walking

It was closer to home
And more family friendly
We could camp out there like we did
At the first hospital
This one even had cable TV
So I could sit and watch Meerkat Manor
With my mother on a Saturday afternoon
The nurses at this hospital
All came from somewhere else
Russia, Poland, China, The Philippines
They spoke passable English
And were
For the most part
Kinder and more emotionally invested
In my mother’s recovery

Slowly
Far to slowly
They weaned my mother off the respirator
We watched her oxygen levels
The way people keep score at a basketball game
Complete with buzzer
Whenever there was a stoppage

The oxygen sensors
With their glowing red LEDs
Would eventually raise blisters
On my mother’s fingers and toes
Making her restless
And panicky

By this point they had long decided that Xanax
Would calm her
But it also seemed to reduce
Here respiration
So the balance led to long bouts
Of anxiety and depression

Sometimes she would call out in a panic
Only to not know
Or be unable to explain
What was causing her so much distress

The new trach didn’t allow her to talk
So she tried to write down her problems
But her motor skills
Weren’t quite good enough
For legibility
Which led to involved guessing games
Most of the time she gave up
With a frustrated shrug
And tried to talk
Which didn’t work out either

We were pretty good with the direct needs
Like lotion for her backside
But she had questions
Esoteric questions
Like what happened to Thanksgiving
That were hard to express

The focus was slowly changing
From mere survival
To recovery
No road ever goes smoothly
But the early false optimism
Was becoming a little more genuine
Home was finally a possibility

The Second Hospital

John Hewitt — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:30:31 +0000

The first hospital was inadequate
Was ill-equipped
Was too specialized
And so we had to move
To the big mega-hospitalopolis
Designed to care for any
And every problem
With equal disdain
For each and every person
Who walked through its doors

The new hospital was not designed for family
Or for visitors
Or for anything besides
Treating the body
The spirit is an issue
Of little or no concern
Outside of the chapel

We were not put off that easily though
It is amazing what you can get
If you just never stop pushing
And so we persevered
In hard plastic chairs
Continuing our shifts
Onward and onward
We wore gloves and gowns
And sat behind sliding glass doors
We fought security
And a general feeling
That we were just in the way

I was always making up for lost time
Time spent in Phoenix
In hotel rooms
In cubicles
Removed from the action
My sisters
On town
Took the nights
And my father took the days
And I added what I could

My mother would improve
Then fall back
At first we hoped to have her home by Christmas
But the days just kept passing
They were supposed to get her off the respirator
They were supposed to get her physical therapy
They were supposed to offer the care
She couldn’t get before
But all of that was as illusory as it gets
At best they were able
To fight of the MRSA
And keep up her dialysis
But as December moved into January
The only thing helping her
Was time
Her body started the slow path towards correction
Fevers came and went
Chills came and went
Some days she was yellow
When her liver couldn’t keep up
Some days she was bloated
Because she couldn’t digest the food
All progress was incremental
But we progressed toward something
Toward some point of recovery

She began to talk
Forcing her voice around the trachea
And that was almost more frustrating
Because we couldn’t understand her
And she so wanted to be heard

Awake and Paralyzed

John Hewitt — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 16:29:51 +0000

Her brain awoke in advance of her body
I don’t know how long she was awake
Before she could open he eyes
But that was the extent of it
For quite a wile
That and a small curl of the toes
A nervous twitch for the feet
She was trapped
Awake in her unmoving body
She stared at me and I
Stared back
Smiled as much as I could
And held her hand
I sat with my head on the bed
Feeling a kind of relief
Filled with the tension of knowing
That the first steps
Of a very hard climb
Had been taken
I tried to think of things to say
Conversations to have
Without her talking
I gave the sports report
And read a little from the paper
But in the end I had
Very little to say
And felt the frustration
Of ineffectiveness
I would ask what she thought about
During those times
But I don’t want to touch that feeling
That fear
Too deeply
Whatever she felt at the time
Is probably long gone now
As the brain washes away
What it cannot handle

The Shifts

John Hewitt — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 16:28:36 +0000

The rule was that we would not leave her alone
Someone would always be there
My mother would not
Could not
Die unless she was alone
So we took shifts
For four hours a day it was my time
So sit with her sleeping shell
Listening to the respirator
Inflate
And deflate her chest
Listening to the alarms
When her breath
Or her heart
Failed to make the next cycle
At the right time

The room was alternately too hot or too cold
And my intense
Driving
Fear of hospitals
Left me with a persistent dread
I could not have escaped
Even in better circumstances

As the days carried forward
And we worked harder and harder
To fit our lives
Back into the schedule
Most of the shifts
Were spent alone

I got to know the nurses and the techs
And the Spanish only cleaning woman
Who communicated hope
As best she could

The shifts would continue
For days
Then weeks
Then months
As we kept in motion
To keep our word