In the Hospital
I wake up. It is daytime. The room is very white. I see somebody standing by my bed. “Hel…hel…hello, Hen…Henry.” It is Uncle Eddy. I don’t remember at first, then I do. I am in the hospital. I have been real sick. I have pneumonia.
“Hi.” I say. Eddy smiles at me. He can’t talk good mostly.
“You are muc…muc…much better.”
I pick up my hands and look at them. I move my arms. I barely remember. But I woke up sometimes and my hands were tied to the bed. I couldn’t move them only a little. “They tied my hands,” I say.
“Yes. You were del…del…delir…delirious.”
“They make me sit on a pan to go,” I say. “I hate it.”
“That’s no…no…no fun.”
“I don’t feel so good yet. Tata says I have to stay until I get better.”
“Oh, yes, for sure,” Eddy says. “There is a re…re…reason why you are a…a…alive.”
This is it. The major traumatic experience of Heniu’s young life. Possibly of his whole life. After endless little sicknesses, comes the big one. People die of pneumonia, and often. Penicillin hasn’t been invented yet.
Heniu had terribly high fevers and in his delirium needed to be restrained. His hands were tied to a kind of rack on which he lay. A tube was inserted through an incision in his back. It drained his lungs into a container under the rack.
The scar from the incision is still there.
Uncle Eddy’s comment reinforces Heniu’s sense of being special, “there is a reason why you are still alive.” I remember it, nearly sixty years later. I am tagged as someone who survived, so therefore duty-bound to do great things.
Heniu carries not only a scar but a burden, too.