I spent a month in Reno one day

I spent a month in Reno one day. This is a joke I told often as I sat in the ICU waiting room of Washoe Medical Center in Nevada. It never got any funnier, yet I felt compelled to repeat it as new people were introduced into our circle of despair.
In reality, I spent a month in that ICU waiting room. It is extremely accurate in its name, “waiting room”. There isn’t much else to do there. Unless of course they called it the “hoping room”, in that case it would describe the life of the people, waiting and hoping, that was all we did.
As the days went on we made friends with the other “waiters”, all with the same dull expression on their face. We would glance in the direction of the new members of our exclusive club, what are you in for? Car accident, you? Snowboarding accident. Oh. We all jumped when the heavy white door would swing open. We all cringed when we watched a family being called into the conference room. The news was never good. Good news was shared immediately in the waiting and hoping room. Bad news was saved and sheltered until the words could be spoken behind closed doors. Away from the hopers who already were holding on by a thread. No… we could not hear bad news in the waiting and hoping room. It just couldn’t be done.
Marilyn’s mom and aunt knitted all day long, in between visits into the circle of pain and suffering that went on behind the big white door. Only two people at a time were allowed to pass through that door to the place where the smiles were painted on while tears of pain and suffering dripped down your face. Most came out through that door sobbing like a child who just lost their puppy. Uncontrollable, heart-wrenching sobs that became as common place as exchanging smiles or handshakes when you meet someone.
Some only had two people waiting for them in that room. We were 3000 miles from our home on Long Island but we had the most people there, about 10. When the doctor said, “Tell anyone that wants to see him to come now”, we took that to heart. Streams of friends and family raced to JFK airport to make the 5-hour trip to Reno in the dead of winter. They left their jobs and their families to see him one more time. Or so that is what we thought.
Comas are hard to predict. The longer you are in the coma the less chance you have of coming out of it. The initial diagnosis was the worst it could possibly be. The lowest score on the Glasgow Coma Scale you could get was a three. That was what George was, a three. A three meant he did not open his eyes, did not make any sounds and had no movement even in response to pain. A three meant he might never see his unborn child. Just 6 months along, my sister sat with pain for two, not just herself. A three meant my children would lose their favorite uncle, the one who babysat more times than my sister and made ice cream waffle sundaes for breakfast. A three meant I would lose the brother I had always wanted and had found just 7 years before when he married my sister.
Nan’s family was called into the conference room many times. We held our breath for them, the husband and the two children in their 20’s, who eventually were forced to make the most devastating decision a family can make, when to pull the plug, when to give up and walk away from the waiting and hoping room. I desperately wanted to leave that room, but only with my brother in law, certainly not alone with that decision weighing heavily on my shoulders.
Jose’s family got good news frequently as they waited. There were a lot of them, his parents, his younger siblings, and his girlfriend who waited and hoped and filled the waiting room with bags of junk food, which included every fast food chain in Reno. He would live, but riding that motorcycle was definitely going to be impossible after the loss of that leg. It was good news that all he lost was his leg. We worried with them for his life and head injury. Yes, life could go on as an amputee. It was something we celebrated with snacks from the cafeteria.
The waiting and hoping room was closed for two hours during the day and from 10pm-8am at night. This forced us all to leave. If not for these rules we may have stayed forever. We had lunch from 12pm-1pm every day and dinner from 6pm-7pm. Life was so structured, so regulated. We began our mornings with coffee and a banana. A bit of a advice, don’t ever enter into a crisis situation with a pregnant woman. All I wanted was to indulge my pain and sorrow in ice cream, candy and fattening buttery delicacies. She ordered us fruit from room service. You cannot drown your sorrows in fruit. We ate at the hospital for lunch, soup and salad bar every day- broccoli cheddar soup and salad with ranch dressing, every single day, for a month. Dinner was our big excursion out of the hospital, especially after we were in Reno for ten days and moved from Harrah’s Casino in the high rollers room to the calmer confines of the hospital apartments. We were closer there, just in case.
We very rarely left that building but when we did those dinners out were filled with deep emotion. We never knew what we would find when we got back. Of course we all had our cell phones glued to us but with a crisis they tend to take care of the crisis first and then call later.
I had to leave for a week in the middle of the crisis. I had a conference in Florida that I could not miss. I tried to get out of it but I couldn’t and I agonized over this for every second leading up to my departure until I could get back to my position in that waiting room. I got the call when I was sitting in a movie in Florida that I had forced myself to go to for some peace from my overactive imagination.
“He opened his eyes”, my mother screamed into the phone. She had flown in and taken my place among the other waiters and hopers when I had to leave. “What does this mean?” I yelled back as I exited the painful screening of Cheaper by the Dozen. “Well, not much” my mother responded disappointingly “but I just feel like its something, right?”
It was something. He progressed from there, albeit very slowly. Time stood still for us that month in Reno. Life somehow had gone on around us but the lives of our fellow ICU friends and the others who waited and hoped never changed. It was hard to go back to our lives before. George was never going to be the same and neither were we. We felt scarred somehow with deep wounds that would soften but never heal completely. We felt unsure and we felt ill prepared for the future. The future that included words like Traumatic Brain Injury, memory loss, cognitive difficulties and lifetime care.
Waiting and hoping is what we did like it was our job. And it was, for the month I spent in Reno one day.