Perhaps
aging, in various forms, is a sort of an earthly purgatory where one looks over
their life and corrects, at least in their mind’s reasoning, the paths that would’ve
been better to take – ones’ causing least regret. It’s where one’s life has
traveled that is the most entertaining, for lack of a better word; the
sometimes odd pathways from childhood years, to work and beyond. Alone at the window, Anna was often sitting
in a chair which was part of a dinette set that she and her second husband
purchased for their first residence as husband and wife, just after they were
first married; she reflected on their years together. Then with the whiff of a chilled breeze that
floats through the autumn air across to her face she is taken back to her
childhood, the love, the family closeness, and the sometimes terror that befell
her.
There
she lay, motionless on the bed waiting for the medical team of doctors, nurses,
and lab technicians to finish with her. Watching as the nurses pulled the
plastic tenting over her upper body, she screamed on the inside, anxiously
awaiting the time when they’d all depart and she could bury her face in the
white muslin sheeted pillow beneath her head.
She was not going to give them the satisfaction of letting them see her
scared, despite the fact that on the inside she was, in all her abandonment,
frightened for her life, at four years of age.
One can
only imagine the terror that must fill a child when they are whisked from the
warm bed and house that they know and love, off into the chilly and damp night
and into a place that was as sterile to her as it was foreign. It wasn’t the hospital itself that was
foreign to her but rather it was the private room; no one staying there but
her. Despite the faint glimmer of Christmas lights in the distance, as seen
through the prisms of raindrops on the window, all she could truly focus on was
the off white plaster walls, the green metal barred child bed she was placed
in, and the machine the blew the oxygen into the tent that encapsulated half of
the bed.
It was
well into the second hour of her infirmed imprisonment that the medical staff
left. She was ill and she knew it. Sometimes Anna would be able to run and play,
but in fall and winter, there were times that she could not. Plagued with an
asthma like condition which afflicted her bronchial tubes, she was usually confined
to bed with head colds that would be simple for you or I, but to her they could
spell trouble, for if the germ moved into her chest, her breathing and ability
to absorb oxygen could be seriously compromised.
