Slum Enterprise - Chapter 22

CHAPTER 22

 Annie noticed a lump in her groin area, deep in the left inner thigh. She thought nothing of it at first but still went to the doctor to check on it. The primary care doctor said it was nothing to worry about, just a common cyst, very normal for someone in their early 20s. She let the lump fade from her consciousness; she didn't talk about it for months after. More time passed, and she noticed it again, but this time it felt “off,” and it made her anxious.

 “The doctor said this cyst usually goes away on its own; it's been about 4 months.” Annie said to Lee one evening.

  Don’t worry,” Lee comforted her. “Let's go back in and get it checked out.”

 When they did, the same doctor said it was nothing to worry about. Annie even had the doctor write it down on a piece of paper:

 The lump in your leg is a common cyst; you do not need to worry about it. Everything is okay.

 Now, whenever Annie was nervous about it, she would pull the piece of paper to look at the scribbled words. She read it over and over again until the panic thoughts subdued into the background of her mind. More months passed. The cyst was still there. But she noticed it was quite large and very numb, with the surrounding area tender to the touch.

Days passed, and the pain became unbearable; she couldn't even walk without screaming. Lee became extremely worried but was scared to admit what he was feeling to Annie.

 They arrived at the ER one morning since Annie was in complete agony. The local ER doctors suggested that surgery was the best solution; the cyst had to be removed. It was agreed, and the surgery waivers were signed for the emergency operation. Lee held Annie's hand hard as they prepped her. She undressed and put on the hospital gown. Then, back in a hospital chair, the nurses pricked Annie's arms and hands with I.V needles over and over (Annie had tiny veins.)

She was wired to the heart rate and blood oxygen monitor. She was going completely under since the surgeon had to cut deep into her leg. The doctors in the prep room administered the anesthesia, and Annie fell asleep with tears in her eyes. Lee looked on with complete helplessness. He watched as the doctors and nurses transported her on the hospital bed to the operating room.

 Lee walked back to the waiting room with dread, hoping that she would be okay and the cyst was nothing more. In the waiting room he observed the other people while he sat on an uncomfortable chair that dug into his tailbone in a weird way.

 It was a large waiting room for many different medical specialties. Standard checkups, imaging, labs, etc. The carpet was just like the grey carpets at his work. Rough to the touch but made to withstand constant floor traffic and wheelchair tires and the weight of the swivel wheels underneath a fully decked-out hospital bed with an oversized man. It was very dull, with no vibrant colors anywhere, all tan light brown, and maybe a splatter of grayish orange on the walls to add some dimension.

Large fluorescent lights buzzed with dimmer filters. The light made everyone's faces look ugly, oil gleamed off people's rough, unshowered skin, and Lee also concluded that hospitals likely had the highest ratio of unshowered people to showered.

 A wooden receptionist desk stood in the back corner of the waiting room. There was a mixture of chairs and couches for family members to sit on while unspeakable horrors of modern medical science took place not too far away through multiple sets of double doors. An inner-city medical center waiting room is the true melting pot of America. All sorts of people from all sorts of places must sit together in suffering silence. They must endure the presence of different races, heights, smells, etc. The medical floors are occupied by many busybodies. There are even assistants wheeling around older men and women, most of them fat and unable to walk in a long time.

 Hospitals are all designed like a maze; when you walk through one, you always feel like you are not supposed to be in a room even though you were invited to that room. They don't feel sterile, but Lee tells himself, “They have to be, I bet the janitor crews are massive.”

 Baby boomers have their pocket screens speakers wailing the sounds of grandchildren and stressed-out mothers wondering why the hell they are saying hello at 6am. Boomers like to talk out loud; it makes them feel important. The good old days have long gone by.

Younger faces stare and pass the time with pocket screens of their own in a more subtle fashion; they don't want to disturb anybody because if they did, they would die of cringe and embarrassment. They aren't very good at talking to people anymore.

In the waiting room, the two women asked questions of the newcomers who limped or rolled to the wooden desk. “Name and DOB. Any travel in the last 30 days?” The women ask.

Lee suspects that the two women are veterans in the receptionist department; they have probably dealt with more psychos than a seasoned psychiatrist. They were small Black women with shaved heads. “Twins?” Lee thought.

 They checked patients in and gave them a special pager based on what department the patient was heading to. The pager reminded Lee of the restaurant industry that used the same exact pagers (black pucks with red LEDs shining through the plastic that buzzed when signaled) that alerted the person when the table was ready for seating.

 Outside the large waiting room is the medical building's main welcome center. It was grey with whitewashed architecture. It looked like one of those modernist liberal museums you find in the middle of town near the more “hip” neighborhoods filled with college kids, 20-year-old burnouts, and the gray-haired hippy couples still “sticking it to the man” sitting on their front porch of a million-dollar house they bought back in the day for 20 grand.

The ceiling is 3 stories tall. When you arrived through the pressurized rotating doors, to the left was the waiting room entrance and to the right a makeshift coffee shop and cafeteria. There was only one cashier and one cook making breakfast orders on large steel flat tops. It smelled like eggs and fried breakfast sausage. The fast movements of the cook pumping out orders remind him of the breakfast attendant on his recent business trip. Lee's eyes were glossy and red; the amount of movement in a hospital was too much for any sane person to handle.

 An old couple sat close together and gawked over a pocket screen playing (out loud for everyone to hear) the sounds of talk show hosts and their opinions on current politics. They would laugh and nod their heads in agreement and think, “What has the world come to?” As the couple nods and agrees and reminisces about the old days, they peer and take quick glances at the people in the waiting room. Their main goal was to keep tabs on the whereabouts and the movements of the darker-skinned families and patients. When the Black family members moved or shifted in the seats or stood to stretch their legs, the old couple would clutch their personal belongings closer to their chests. The wife even went so far as to wrap her purse straps around the chair armrests. The couple desperately wants to leave but is bound by appointments made months in advance. If they miss this one, they’ll have to wait another 3 months for the next available opening.

 Clean-shaven men with solid-color polo shirts and khaki pants sit cross-legged with Birkenstocks and white socks. Lee wonders what is bringing them into the medical center. Hopefully, not another case of erectile dysfunction.

 The difference in health amongst the waiting room crowd is expansive. Shown on the faces of those who wait on the cold, stiff waiting chairs. Some are sickly and actively dying, and some are just waiting to find out if the process of actively dying will begin today. The human race is on full display, all at their worst moments, the bad and the ugly. Every ego in the room is reduced from a strong flame to burning ash. Fate has no prejudice.

 The waiting patients want only one thing: to be waited on, to be heard and understood with dignity and respect, to have a connection, and to be granted relief from the doctors who study most of their lives to work this job. They think that all their problems and failing bodies are commendable; it wasn't their fault that they let themselves go or put their lives on easy mode, only for it to finally catch up.

 Waiting… It might be the truest secret torture of the human mind. An unseen torture that every single person will experience. Waiting at the hospital is only suffering. Everyone is trapped in a cage like wild animals. Everyone wants to look civil and proud, but the hospital takes it all away. Dignity is hard to find; death has to face you before you find it.

 The waitering patients like to crack jokes to break the tension in the room. They joke about their appearance; they compare the appearance to how ragged and broken their hearing is, a strange metaphor. They scream “What?” to the receptionist as they ask them for “Name and DOB.”

The hospital support personnel roam around looking for a poor soul to help, looking for disabled bodies to fill the time, to obtain an essence of a “job well done.” They want to feel pride in the job so they can tell friends and disappointed Mom and Dad that “this job matters, I help people, I make them better, I hear them, it's much better than your corporate job polluting the earth.”

The parents respond with, “All you do is push sick people around while wearing a walkie-talkie. When was the last time you showered?”

 The parents' son didn't listen; he kept going, “Haven't you seen the news? You are always staring at your pocket screen at dinner when I'm trying to talk to you. The construction companies... are all booked out and whatnot, like for years to come. The news said they dropped all the civil infrastructure projects to start these new contracts. The toupee-wearing anchor said the major 500 corporations paid the big bucks to expedite their new projects. They are loading in materials and workers as we speak. They're getting ready to transform their buildings into the NEW WORKPLACE OF THE FUTURE. I know they just updated your office floors, Dad… Dad, are you listening? What the fuck are you listening to? Dad, that's AI. Everything you look at is AI; it's fake, not real, capeesh? Mom… like I was saying, the big corporations are practically giving money away to the construction guys…”

There are the occasional waiting room dickheads, the insufferable lowlifes. Older, middle-aged drunken men with swollen faces and beer guts that break the invisible planes of doorways before the rest of the man follows behind. Seconds later, sad, pathetic, plump wives who have round torsos with stick arms and legs. They cough and hack nasty phlegm into their tooth-decayed mouths only to savor the salty taste and swallow it back down into their ulcer-ridden guts that expel corn liquor gases drunk the night before.

“These people are easily agitated. It's always about TIME and WAITING. It must be hardwired into their brains,” Lee thinks.

Having appointments run late, or it taking too long to be seen, is pretty much the end of the world for these folks. The front desk, during the check-in process, tells them it will be 15 minutes until the husband's blood can be drawn and hands him a hockey puck pager (they are checking for liver function; the outlook is grim.) 40 minutes pass. Lee watched them pace around.

Then, the man's pager buzzes, and the sounds of unlocking shafts travel from the metal double doors on the other side of the waiting room. The door motors pushed them open, and a nurse emerged from the long corridor.

 “Number 225.” She said it with spoken word projection. Lee thought the nurse must have been in the theater program back in school. She could throw her voice across the waiting room loud and clear so even the hard of hearing could comprehend what number was to follow her back.

 “Finally,” the man said and walked briskly towards the nurse.

 “Hello, my name is Amber; I will be helping you today. How are you this morning?”

 “Better now. I've been waiting here for the last 40 minutes. Is the blood bank back up today?” The man asked.

 “Oh, of course, the system overbooked patients, and it is a Wednesday; it's the busiest day of the week, so we have gotten more lab calls from the upper floor than normal.”

 “Amazing,” the man said sarcastically. “I have other things to do…” The man started to spill his beans to Amber. Their voices faded as they entered the back rooms beyond the long corridors; the metal doors shut and latched behind them. Once again, there was a suffocating silence that filled the waiting room.

 Lee sits back on the chair and closes his eyes for a moment. A Japanese lady walks in. Lee opens his eyes and sees her, and she grabs his attention. The lady's spirits seemed to be high; it radiated from her. She checked in with the Black ladies with fancy glasses and turned around and headed towards Lee. She sat down next to him in an open chair. When she sat down, she did a dance with her hips. “She must have borne a lot of children with hips like that,” Lee thinks. The lady settled in and looked over at him.

 “How are you?” She said Lee did not respond right away; he cataloged her looks and demeanor. She was a Japanese woman in her late 50s with a perfectly cut bob of white-silver hair and smelled nicely of some oriental perfume and food grease. Her socks, pants, and shirt were the same matching color, sky blue.

 I’m fine.” Lee responded with a slight stutter.

 “What? Only fine? Just be happy; this is life. Just be happy.” The lady turned away and sat facing forward and moved her hips in a jiggle in the seat. Then she pulled out a pocket screen from her bag and gazed into the never-ending joy the screen provided. Lee looked over in secret and saw that she was just scrolling through her photo albums looking at pictures of her family and 2 little yippy dogs; it looked like she was almost crying with joy. Lee was a tad perplexed, yet it made him feel warm inside. Not every day do you find someone so infatuated with life and what they have. It seemed like when she was away from her family, all she could do was stare at pictures because she loved them so damn much. The lady didn't take life too seriously and only cared and focused on what she loved.

 The unlatching of metal double doors sounded across the hall. The man appeared with a blue bandage around his forearm, and the wife perched up from her seat and got into a coughing fit. As they left the waiting room, the man had to make his departing comments. “40 minutes…what shit, I can draw my blood at home; it's not going anywhere.” The man wanted some sweet, sweet validation from the waiting room patients. He got no looks, a few sniffles and coughs, then silence. He left looking down, with his wife tailing behind.

Annie's surgery was successful. The doctor calls Lee back from the pre-op consulate. She explained that everything went smoothly, and they sent the mass to biopsy. The word “mass” stuck in Lee's brain.

 Annie and Lee wait in agony for 9 days to hear back the results. Then, Annie's pocket screen rings; it was the doctor calling about the results. Lee couldn't hear what the doctor was saying, all he saw from the kitchen was Annie pacing in the living room, dropping her phone to the ground, and freezing.

 More surgeries followed, scans and checkups, and consultations with specialists. After they got to a sustainable point of remission, 3-month scans were set up for monitoring.

 It never got easier; it only got harder as years went on. Lee battled deep inner turmoil and depression; he drank and daydreamed heavily, staring out his office window, looking at the yard and trees, getting lost in horrid thoughts. Now, looking back, he wonders how he kept his job at Green Earth Solutions. Nothing was ever the same again.