Hospital Food

Michael - Hospital Food

I'm not dead yet. That, in itself, is a miracle. Every day, there is a little less oxygen in my lungs and my heart weakens a little more. I want to tell you that I have reconciled myself to that; that death, after all the mind-numbing months in this hospital ward, would come as a relief. But. I don't want to die. Sixteen is too young to die. That's the way it is, though, and I've reconciled myself to that. Accidents happen, bad luck prevails, a sandstorm on a sunny day.

What do I do? Now that there's not much I can do my days are spent writing about things I dream of doing. I listen to the nurses' conversations when they think I am asleep. I watch the weather change outside the window, oblivious to my condition. I make small talk with the people who are in the ward. Some, like Old Harry and even older Marigold have been here before my illness was even thought of; and will be here possibly after my illness has gotten the better of me and my stubbornness. Others come and go; a euphemism, you understand. They come to the hospital to die. Like me. Only, they are timelier: come in one week, die the next. They are covered up with a sheet and wheeled out. What do we talk about while they are alive? The weather, baseball, food we miss. What don't we talk about? A more relevant question. They don't talk about the relatives they haven't contacted because they don't want pity or the relatives who they have contacted but who haven't visited because they don't pity the dying enough. I don't talk about how when I was little, I wanted to be an astronaut. I don't talk about how I've come to realize that I could have done so much more in sixteen years than I have. I don't talk about how all I need is a suitable kidney donor to live. I don't talk about that with anyone.

In order for me to live: someone has to die. Preferably someone who has died in a very practical way that hasn't damaged their precious kidneys. Certainly someone who suits my body's requirements. Evolution, in its practical sense, decreed that the vast majority of humans want to live another day. It will sacrifice parts of the brain in order to keep the heart beating. But it will refuse a kidney that is not a perfect match. So: this donor. Part of me, the moral, good part of me, says that it is wrong for me to want them to die so desperately. But. The other part of me, the one that wants to live, says Every Man for Himself. And I pay attention to the latter because, quite frankly, I don't have a choice.

There is another part of me that says this is a scam. Sixteen year olds can't die, parents only tell you that to keep you off drugs, or something to that effect. How much is it costing Mom to keep me in this ward? On medication? Alive? Far too much. But. Evolution, in its imperfect wisdom, decreed that mothers are implanted with this terrible maternal instinct that prevents her from saying Stop. The parent is not supposed to bury the child.

***

I know now how it began: all my lullabies were sad. The lyrics burned indelibly into my brain and refused to budge, circling when my dreams got boring. They are the reason I have almost resigned myself to death, and the reason why I can never completely resign myself to anything. Momma was not a good singer, but could hold a tune and loved music enough to want to sing to her children. She'd wanted more than one; she told me that when she'd had a hysterectomy, she'd been upset because there would be no more children to sing to. This was a lie. But it made it seem easier to deal with.

When I was eight years old, I was cruel. I finally told my mother that I did not want to be sung to. I was old enough to understand their meaning, and the lullabies lost their comfort. I told my mother, who was older and younger than me, that children should not be put to sleep with the words: When the bough breaks the cradle will fall, and down will come baby, cradle and all.

My mother told me that it was an American lullaby, about a young pilgrim boy watching a Native Am-

"No more, I said to her. I never heard the rest of the story. I looked it up on the Internet, four years later, and the answer was not interesting. The answer would have been fulfilling to me as an eight-year-old, but the fact remains that children become adults. My mother rarely took her own advice.

I was cruel to my teachers, too. For the most part, they were bored inner-city teachers who kept whiskey underneath their desks or harbored a secret crush on an older pupil and spent their time dreaming of the whiskey/student. My English teacher might have been an alcoholic or might have had a secret crush on an older pupil, but if she did she kept it very secret indeed.

She was young and naïve. I mean that in the nicest possible way; she really was a good teacher. She'd spent six months in Guatemala and spoke three different languages but she knew absolutely nothing about eight-year-olds. I thought several times that she was my mother's clone.

For instance: she believed that to an eight-year-old, politics is not too hard a concept to grasp. In order to get children interested, she needed to relate it to something they were affected by. And who affected them all the most? ("God? guessed Timothy Brewer, and was ignored) I could have screamed at her. But I didn't. Most children were struggling with spelling and used books as an escape from their own little world. Eight is a difficult age. When you are very tiny, you think the whole world subsists around you. When you are eight, this illusion falls away, and you are left with the frustrating knowledge that for the next five to ten years you would not be taken seriously.

I was one of the most well-read in my class. I say that not to brag, but to demonstrate. I read the Chronicles of Narnia, which confused my ability to spell for about a week before I understood that British English and American English were different.

I never understood why The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe was the most famous of them. I loved The Magician's Nephew the best ' Miss Meehan read us a passage in class. It was the one with the pools between the worlds. At that point, she shut the book and addressed us all very seriously as though we were studying English Literature at Harvard: "Now, class, isn't that a fantastic metaphor for a library?

I didn't know what a metaphor was but I knew what pools between the worlds were (sort of) and what a library was and connected the two very literally. For a year I read voraciously, convinced that if I imagined hard enough I would actually fall into the pages. My mom mentioned this at Parents' Evening, and it transpired that although Miss Meecham greatly appreciated my enthusiasm, I was not going to slip through the pages in reality.
"Michael, through your imagination, you did slip through the pages and you did fall into the story! Imagination is limitless, you remember that now, she told me the day after.

I felt cheated.

A week later, when the curriculum dictated we should learn how to write letters, she told us to write to the President. After some confusion over who the President was, we settled down to the arduous task of deciding what we should write to him about. I wonder about this, even now: did Miss Meecham think that the President was going to read our letters personally, or did she just imply it for our sakes? They were probably shoved in the bin, or some advisor read them and decided that we didn't have much to say.

My letter read:

Dear Mr. President,
You don't know me, but my name is Michael and I'm eight years old and my teacher told me to write this letter and I'm writing it and I'm writing to complain about writing it. What I really want to do is read and if I'm writing this letter than I'm not reading about the pools between the worlds, which is really a liberry but I don't think C.S. Lewis thought of it like that because it doesn't say so. If you haven't read it you won't know what I'm talking about, but you should have read it cause loads and loads and loads of eight-year-olds are writing to you which I think makes you important, but then again loads and loads and loads of people write to Santa and he's not even real. My teacher says I should ask you for something and cause you're in charge of the schools well that's what my teacher says you should stop teaching us how to write letters. We get taught that every Christmas when we write letters thanking people for our presents. I write loads and loads and loads until my writing arm hurts. So really it's our parents who teach us it exept me only Momma teaches me cause my Daddy left us when I was a baby so I don't miss him so don't feel sorry for me too many people feel sorry for me it makes me feel bad what about the people in Africa that we saw on TV but that's not important. It would be much better if eight-year-olds read more cause then they'll be better writers cause that's what Momma says cause writing and reading are the same exept opposite. So please Mr. President can we read Narnia insted cause we were halfway through Prince Caspian when this topic began and I want to know what happens.
Yours sincerely,
Michael Grosse.

At the bottom of the page Miss Meecham wrote:

Excellent, Michael! We will be finishing Prince Caspian after this topic. Watch out for these, though: "cause is "because; "exept is "except; "liberry is "library and "insted is "instead. Write out three times at the back of your book. Try to use paragraphs and shorter sentences. One gold star.

I wrote another letter to him, more recently. I didn't post it. It wasn't really to the President, but I remember the assignment and wrote the modern equivalent:

Dear Mr. President,

I wrote to you when I was eight-years-old. You never read the letter, and I don't blame you. Our teacher made us write them, in the spirit of good faith, but they were a load of crap. The majority of the class asked for a pony, or a racing bike, because they didn't know exactly who you were or what the assignment was about and therefore concluded you were kind of like Santa. I asked to be allowed to read to the end of Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis. I'm sure it would have been in your power to arrange that for me, but I gather that tax reforms and foreign policy take precedence over children's books.

Now, sixteen years old, I want to be allowed to read to the end of thousand more books. And a thousand more after that. And after that. I don't want the impossible; I want to be allowed to live. All I need is a kidney. The list is long for patients who are in desperate need of perfect kidneys, but I'm sixteen years old. I've barely lived my life. I thought my life would begin when I went to college; most teenagers are under that illusion. In truth, my life began when I was diagnosed. In that, my illness is a blessing. Leukemia makes you really appreciate life in all it's much-diminished glory (Are hospital wards the best viewpoints for seeing life? No ' but they are the most practical).

I've learnt my lesson. I do not take my Mom for granted any longer. I want my life back, and I will live it with renewed vigor. I don't want to die. Now that the time has come, and I feel very much like a man on Death Row, I don't want to die. Please, Mr. President, I don't want to die. Not yet. Not yet. I '
I ripped it up, knowing it was useless.

I don't know where Miss Meecham is now, although I'm betting she's more alive than I am. I remember the way her teeth weren't exactly straight and how she took everything so seriously a lot of people found it funny. I remember the way she never addressed that I didn't have a father, and the way she crashed down on anyone like a ton of bricks if they forgot their homework, as though they'd ruined her day. I remember her as the first teacher I thought of as a real person and imagined outside of school. She left the school three years after I was in her class; she probably would have been the only teacher not to pity me when the school found out why I was missing so many classes. I don't want to be pitied. But. Just enough to be talked to. Just enough to be touched. But not enough to look at me and think Sixteen! Such a shame.

I remember Miss Meecham as a strange mixture of a no-nonsense woman who had her head partially in the clouds. She would have looked at me and instead of seeing a dying boy, she would have seen a boy without a book in his hands and said such a shame about that.