Pink Phlegm Bottle
:: Mar 30, 10:51 PM

One week before my dad passed away, he was staying in a two-person hospital room. He refused to get his own room because it was too costly. So his roommate was in earshot. The roommate was better in health but easily 20 years or so older than my dad. He would listen to the radio at a courteous volume. It was usually news or the sports, anything to remind him of the outside world—that the world was alive and well despite the stale air inside the room. His wife would come by about three times a week. She was his only visitor. But he was chill – he had accepted his fate and was making the best out of it, waiting for his turn. He had broken past the phase of patient life where you are restless and rebelling hospitalization. My dad never got past that stage.

The two-person room was closest to the nurses’ desk. In the room, my dad was closest to the hallway and his bed was placed against the wall so his body was parallel to the power outlets lining the wall. When he was a little better in health, he was perpendicular to the wall, with the headboard of the bed against the wall, like beds should be. I am not sure who he asked to change the orientation of the bed day-to-day, but he seemed to move around as he pleased. The default position was parallel, which was clearly not the position he preferred. All the blood pressure pumps and oxygen wires attached to the wall were inches above his face.

Three weeks before he died, he lay there all day parallel to the wall. I would stop by after work to tell him about my day and if I got an email from my sister in Berkeley. He would ask me follow up questions and smile whenever I mentioned my sister Cindy. I knew this well, so I tried to correspond with her as much as I could. I couldn’t ask him how he was feeling. I knew he was hurting and that even if he explained his pain to me, I would not understand. I would nod with sympathy and move on.

With steel guard railings propped up on either side of his bed, it was like he was a baby again. Except that if he broke something after falling out the side of the bed he would not have a lifetime to heal. Babies have two advantages: time and rubber for bones and muscle. My dad’s bones were like astronaut ice-cream and his muscles were like poached eggs.

His health was getting worse by the day and two Saturdays before he died, as I approached his two-person room, I heard him hacking. This was a sound I had not heard before. His body being so weak, he would hardly emit any kind of sound, but this was loud. As I entered the room, there hung a clear glass bottle above his head with pink, swirly liquid, about a pint’s worth. Attached to it was a tube and pipe-like object, kind of like the apparatus they use at the dentist to suction up your saliva.

The end of the tube was being operated by the nurse who was vacuuming the pink, pearly phlegm out of my dad’s throat. I don’t know exactly where it was coming from – most likely the lungs. Whatever it was, I felt like he was melting and his body was rejecting itself. That although the phlegm had no real content, it was still my dad and eventually a few (precious, at this point) cups of him would be thrown out as bio-hazardous waste that day. I didn’t quite understand why they had to place the bottle in the immediate field-of-vision of the patient. I didn’t understand why he had to look at the product of his hacking. There are many things I still don’t understand about hospitals. When he was dying I was in a constant state of denial, convinced he would get better and that I’d be watching Beverly Hills Cop with him again. This never happened, instead we were watching the contents of the glass bottle rise up.

written in Beijing on March 30, 2009