I have spent more than one Spring Festival in a hospital, keeping watch by a bed. I have also been through the ICU twice. What happens in a hospital does grind human nature into the floor. It leaves blood all over the ground, and there is nothing you can do but walk around it. Step over it. Earn more money. Exercise more to prevent it. Pray that your genes are good and your luck is better. Buy some commercial insurance.
I could understand not having the money to continue treatment. I could not understand having money and still giving up. At the time, I could not understand it.
There was an old woman with many children and money, probably from construction and building materials, made before 2019. She was in her seventies, with fashionable, well-cut clothes. She had a bowel obstruction. She had probably been resuscitated in the ICU, but there was no immediate danger to her life. Surgery seemed necessary, but it was not done. Maybe the prognosis was poor. Maybe the follow-up—a stoma, a bag—was too much trouble. For now she was kept in the ward for observation. She drank a little water, only now and then, and moaned often. Her daughter-in-law watched TV dramas on speaker in the daytime and laughed out loud, as if no one else in the ward had anything to do with her.
I rented a folding bed and stayed in the ward. There were three or four beds. The old woman with the bowel obstruction was in the second bed by the south-facing window, her head toward the east. Her son was constantly on the phone, calling people. Visitors came every day. Several grandchildren in college were summoned too.
Then came what was probably the last day. The room was full of her relatives and friends, but they were not there to save her. They were waiting for her to die. Maybe that was what she wanted. As more relatives arrived, the bowel obstruction was renamed bowel cancer in conversation. The pethidine or whatever painkiller it was no longer went in. She moaned. There was a device, perhaps for treating the obstruction, that should have been transparent but had turned brownish yellow, and the room seemed to smell of bile.
In the morning, in broad daylight, the daughter-in-law looked ready to pull off the oxygen mask and breathing tube. Someone persuaded her not to. Someone suggested giving the old woman sweet potato leaves, a food she had liked when young. That would only block her up more, I thought. But I said nothing. I assumed someone would think of it. No one did.
At eight or nine at night I unfolded my bed, but with the room so full I could not sleep. I sat. Others who wanted to sit sat too. Relatives who had not seen one another for a while began to chat. More than ten people made the room noisy. Eventually the doctor told them not to keep so many people there—only one or two family members. The doctor came several times. One time was to confirm that treatment was being abandoned and to have the old woman's son sign. Several times he asked whether they really would not give a certain painkiller. No.
At three or four in the morning the daughter-in-law removed the oxygen mask. The lights were still on. I could not sleep. It was torture for me too. I waited in silence.
At four, the old woman could not hold on any longer. She stopped breathing. The daughter-in-law cried loudly. The relatives outside the ward heard and came in, and the crying spread. The doctor came and moved the rest of us in the other beds to another ward. Even there we could hear the wailing, like wolves howling. Mixed into it were fragments about changing her into burial clothes. Then she came out of the ward, into the corridor, and disappeared into the dark outside the building. Probably she did not go to the morgue. Probably straight to the funeral home.
The next day the sun rose as usual. At seven thirty I got up and folded my bed so I would not get in the way of the hospital cleaners.
Dickens begins A Tale of Two Cities with the best and worst of times, the age of wisdom and the age of foolishness, the season of belief and the season of doubt—a road that leads straight to heaven and straight to hell.