Breath

I’m supervising Connor’s breakfast when the phone rings. It’s J, my very sick client. I can barely hear him. “Help me,” he says, and I can hear that he is struggling to breathe. “Where are you?” I ask right away in case he loses consciousness. “At home,” he says “my arms and legs feel heavy.” I call 911, explain the situation. Sometimes there is a wait for an ambulance because NYC pays EMTs so little that they flock to jobs in the suburbs but it's not long before I hear them knocking through the phone. He can’t get up to open the door, so I call 911 again and give them his door code, thanking the universe that his door does not require a key. Once they’re in, I continue with my morning- human pills, fill the water bowl, put two cans of food my crew has rejected in my pocket to stick in the free pantry down the street. My mind is still in the Bronx though - I leave my phone sitting on the piano and don’t notice until I am already on the train. Thinking about the sound of the breathless client on the phone, I remember the day during the last year of his life when Dad’s breathing started to sound strange. This was odd because he didn’t have any physical health problems “just” dementia, blindness, and deafness. I called my childhood friend who has become an ER doc and tried to tell him what was going on. Breath is too ephemeral to be accurately captured in words, so he said “put your phone on his chest.” When I did, he said “I hear a lot of wheezing,” so I called an ambulance. The first people to respond were six firefighters who came thundering up the stairs in their heavy boots. There’s not a lot they can do medically, but they put an oxygen mask on his face and then stood awkwardly around his bed. I didn’t have to tell them I was his daughter, the photos on his bedroom walls made that clear. Some of them kept their eyes on Dad, but a couple of them were looking at me sympathetically. I could always tell who had had an elderly relative – those were the taxi drivers that didn’t speed by at the sight of a wheelchair but stopped and helped load him in; the fed ex guy who laughed when Dad, feeling blindly around the elevator, touched his ass; the random men who took Dad’s arm and led him out of public restrooms to where Kate and I were hovering anxiously just outside the door. When the paramedics arrived, a couple of firefighters had to step out so that they could fit in the bedroom with their bulky gear. They switched oxygen masks, wrapped Dad in a sheet, and strapped him into the stair chair. Then we all made our way down four flights and they loaded him into the waiting ambulance. That was his first and only hospital stay, and also the only time he lashed out at me even as his dementia worsened. The strange surroundings and disrupted routines were making him hallucinate and he wanted to get out of bed, but he couldn’t. The first time, he was convinced we were at a beautiful resort and he wanted to go for a walk in the woods. I was able to dissuade him by telling him we couldn’t go because it was raining. The next time though there was no discernible storyline, just an agitated struggle to get out of bed. To stop him, I had to sprawl across him with my whole body and yell for help. Not understanding, he tried to throw me off just as the nurse came rushing in. I stepped back to let her deal with the situation, my logical brain knowing that it was just his confusion but the feeling part being swallowed whole by the shock and sadness.