Flashback: The Trauma of Survival

"Miss Goo-rell?" the nurse called, tapping me on the shoulder as I circled the cramped family waiting room at Baystate Medical Center, focused on the surge of pain from tearing deep into my cuticle creating a little pool of blood, a practice I'd honed for coping with hospital-wait anxiety.

I jumped to face her. "It's Gur ..." I stopped myself from needlessly correcting her pronunciation.

"Yes, I'm Natasha Gural. Luba (LYU-bah) Gural’s daughter. Is my mother …”

The nurse looked at me strangely and carefully, as if my face had been replaced by a Magritte apple. This constant discomfort I feel in my birth city, where I over-analyze every action of people who choose to expend as little mental energy as possible to get by, particularly at this hospital, is compounded by fear of what she will say next.

“Your mother is fine, medically speaking. The procedure went well and she is awake,” despite what sounded like good news, her troubled expression intensified.

“OK … So can I see her?”

“Well, normally we do not let anyone into the recovery room immediately post-op, but she is calling for you. We don’t know what she is saying, but we think she is calling for you.”

“OK! She’s OK?”

“Yes, medically. But she is awake, and I suppose alert, but she seems to be in some kind of shock and she seems to be calling for you. We cannot understand how or why she is awake. She should be sleeping for hours …”

My mother’s hyper-sensitivity to sedatives and narcotics is bested only by her ability to remain awake on any dose, even as she experiences every other known side effect. I suspect it’s a defense mechanism.

I follow the nurse through giant doors clearly marked to fend off non-staff. I hear my mother. It sounds like a little girl, a voice I’d never heard, but one I’d imagined.

“Natashenka! Natashenka! Natashenka!” she half-cried-half-screamed as she alternated between English and Russian, both in that haunting childlike voice.

“I’m here, Mom,” I said, holding her hand.

“They are trying to kill me,” she said in what must have been an attempt at a whisper. “You have to get me out of here. Look: All the other people are dead! They are laying here dead!”

Every other patient was sound asleep on a cot, some young, some old, all attached to monitors and stuck with needles. All were expected to survive after a few hours following their operations, or else they’d have been whisked downstairs to ICU. But to my mother, the pale, motionless faces were corpses, on their last earthly journey from gurney to grave.

To the typical Baystate employee, my mother’s behavior was irrational, beyond their comprehension and control. That’s why they called in the expert: her daughter, the only one who might be able to perform where Valium conked out. Save for the odd orderly who experienced combat, nobody passing through those daunting doors could possibly understand how terror triumphed over IV-induced catatonia.

Though I had no means of calming her, I could at least empathize. Was I better off pretending she was correct and promising that I was going to get her out before they killed her, or should I try to draw her back to the start of the 21^st century in the United States?

I knew exactly what she meant about the dead bodies destined for a mass grave. As a young child, I had recurring nightmares of a death camp where I, too, lay in limbo as others had already gone cold and rigid. In my dream, I made every effort to appear dead as guards in long, tailored coats and peaked caps, circled around my intended deathbed. My horrific visions originated from the stories my mother’s parents and other Great Purge and World War II civilian survivors shared in sharp detail, supplemented by my fascination with the dark side of my family’s history.

My nightmares were born from my mother’s real-life experience. I could only imagine how horrifying it was for her to relive that trauma, held captive in a cold, soulless depository of patients who were expected to lay lifelessly for a few hours offering the staff a respite from any interaction aside from gossiping about doctors, barking fried food orders to subordinates and creating a patient-less world through insufferable banal banter.

The nurse came by a few times, mainly to grumble that it’d be best if I could get my mother to sleep. “It’s the best thing you can do for her.” The countless shortcomings of the U.S. medical system are second only to its complete failure to recognize and identify the psychological needs of patients who were asked to fill out dozens of pages of paperwork, none inquiring into the unique background of a human being. There I was, the de-facto shrink-crisis manager-untrained Girl Friday left to deal with what the system isn’t willing to address.

If I sound bitter or resentful, it’s because I am. This is the same hospital where I was called upon to fill in where staff had failed, most notably when as a young teenager I was whisked from an ambulance that picked me up at school into an operating room and ICU with my mother’s father, translating orders on how he breathe during a lucid trauma procedure following as car crash “it’s a miracle he survived.” That nurse tapped me on the shoulder in the same room where I learned my father was dying from undiagnosed-despite-all-the-right-tests Stage IV colon cancer metastasized to the liver. This is the same hospital my grandfather once escaped before discharge. The same hospital where both my mother’s parents spent the cruelest of their dying days. I knew every hallway, every exit and every supply closet (since staff often don’t bother with the basic needs of patients who can no longer speak).

No wonder I was treated as unpaid personnel. Besides being called upon to assist with my own family member’s care, I’d once served as a translator in a language I barely claim proficiency when the emergency room supervisor said she couldn’t find a German translator for a Polish man who had apparently broken his leg. Before I came along, they’d suspected he’d suffered a heart attack.