Invisible

The other day when I was in the ER, my nurse was a young. lightly bearded man, whom I took for a tech at first because he was the only nurse I’d ever seen wearing black, and because,when he first came into my room, he wheeled out one of the machines. He told me something that I’m still having trouble understanding. He was flushing out my PICC line after taking some blood to check my heart enzymes (hearts have enzymes!)…So that means pushing a syringefull of clear liquid into the line stuck in my upper arm. This happens at least once a week when Home Care Nurse changes the dressing on the PICC line or when I get chemo. (that thing goes straight to your heart, so you don’t want anything getting into the hole; when I shower, I wear a special plastic bag over it that Robert seran wraps tight.) The crazy thing is that whenever it gets flushed, I smell a very strong chemical smell, like rubbing alcohol, but more bitter. I had always assumed that my nurse smelled this, too. But I found out I’m the only one smelling it; and that clear fluid is only saline! What is that!

When I am on any IV, even saline, I get a metallic taste in my mouth. In fact, I basically live with a taste of tin that taints everything and turns me off of the foods I love most: like chocolate. I won’t drink tea or eat sweets or attack the bag of dark Swiss chocolate Robert stashed in the drawer beside my bed because he loves me. I can taste tomato broth and pickles. What is that?

I am used to the sounds of the ER room now, the chug, chug of the IV pump, and the beeps warning when the battery is low, or the line is kinked, or the bag is done. The whoosh of the blood pressure cuff filling with air, way too tight, every 15 minutes. The scrape of the rings that hold a curtain across the entrance, the light conversation of the staff outside or moans of the injured coming through, the squeak of stretchers being wheeled by, or the pat of heavy police shoes following perps or victims who have to be here.

And what with all the white in the hospital, white lab coats, white ceilings, lots of white machines, I notice color. Mustard chemo chairs. Seagreen walls. My echocardiogram was taken on a white machine, and though the picture on the screen was the usual fuzzy grey and white, the blood flashed bright red. Then blue. On. Off. On. Off. (I recognized the whirring sound of the heart’s pumping from my babies’ ultrasounds.) And there was the flash, flash, flash of bright red.

This test and the Muga scan with its silent reading of radioactivity might be interchangeable to some doctor or other, but this one’s innocuous name of “echo” and its insistent flashes of red were comforting to me. I saw and heard my heart in there, usually unseen and unheard, soldiering on at its own brisk, businesslike pace, getting the job done, despite the cancer, flashing the blood through my entire system in about a minute. Yay heart! And I remember how much of my life is just a tip of an iceberg, with so much more going on below the surface. There is of course my cancer and its nemesis, the Poison, locked in an unseen battle. There are also my thoughts, locked under that thick, patterned tortoise shell of an introvert’s life, noticing these sounds, these smells, these colors. And bigger yet, there is also God, moving, guaranteeing life, shaping my place in Him forever. And I welcome the flashes of red, or even the mysterious burst of an acrid, alcohol smell because they remind me of an Invisible Realm that envelops me. It is my hope.