Let's Accelerate Over This Thing | Roughy D 4

from whence we came

So back to where we were, and by that I mean not only my mom and me, but you, because it'd be nice if you were there this time. Not that we didn't have it covered. It was just that some days you wanted to have a committee to make you feel better about your decisions. I think that's what corporations and committees may very well be: an ass-covering human blanket that hides the fact that we're all too timid to do something on our own. I include myself in that trembling mass, except on a few occasions. And it's funny, whenever I've stepped out and done what I truly feel needs to be done, things work out OK. I think we all know how that works. Unfortunately for me, I have to be pushed past all safe and readily available points of departure before I'm left to make a desperate leap off a cliff.

That's where I am in the story, the cliff. And I'm driving over it with my mom and her huge gauze dressing. She's about to do some cliff diving too. Later in the week she would take off her gauze cap and refuse to put it back on again. I would implore to her that the world wasn't ready for a human with no forehead bone and 52 industrial staples. She said she didn't care. She was who she was and that's who she was going to be. I was mortified, but probably not as much as the waitress at Buca di Beppos, who stopped cold. Looking past her order pad she focused on my mom's head--she couldn't help it, it was a massive head wound walking. And then, as if Sarah and I weren't even there...as if the entire world had dropped away and left just her to care for this poor woman with the bashed head...she leaned forward and asked, "Ma'am, are you OK?"

"Oh god," I said cradling my face in my hands. "Mom, I told you. the world isn't ready." Undeterred, my mom smiled and explained that she was fine, and that she'd have a half order of lasagna. The waitress walked away, backwards and staring, as if removing her gaze would cause great harm to both of them.

My mom's decision not to wear her beanie could be the brain patient's bra burning, but even more extreme, because people like boobs way better than head trauma. In retrospect it's one of those things that keep you afloat when too much silence has you thinking about the past. So many of those things that I was unsure about, well it turns out that simply being with her in embarrassed solidarity was enough. But back to another pride point: hauling ass on Interstate 25, escaping one hospital and trying to find another. The cliff.

I'm driving too fast and talking on my cell phone and my mother's cell phone. I'm speaking to Sarah on one, who's at work and searching for any medical professional who'll speak to me on the other. My mother would open one eye, because sometimes having both open gave her seizures, and she would remind me to be careful and to slow down, but I was in a zone, some place where years of futility had me pushing my Toyota Corolla to new mechanical heights. I pushed myself to somewhere beyond the doubt, a place where you can tell your nauseous mother that you've got everything in control.  

Dr. Eugene O'Neill is a funny guy, maybe a bit crazy, but as twenty-somethings who didn't think much about health, Sarah and I simply plucked his name off the Internet so we could have a physician to put down for our work insurance. That random and thoughtless act would bring us to a major intersection in our lives, where not only had we become my mom's caretakers, but where we'd beg a stranger with a PhD a favor: We needed him to sign for my mom to get into Swedish hospital.

That's the part where the clock has never moved slower or ticked so damn loudly. It's when our family doctor stared across the table at me and my mom--a woman who's most vital organ was held in place with gauze and staples, and who's forehead skin rested directly on her brain's outer membrane.

He paused before proclaming, "I'm a family doctor." Dr. O'Neill continued. "If you were to have a sprained ankle, maybe a headache, then I could help," he said, looking up at my mom's elaborate headdress.

"Can I see what you've got going on up there anyway?"

My mom and I tangled hands as we worked together to get to her latest scar. Dr. O'Neill has intense blue eyes, the the kind that cut you open that leave you no choice but to believe he's a serious professional. On that day, they softened into the curiosity of a little boy. I could tell, he was going to join us over the edge.