Gooden Infirmary

Posted on October 1, 2002 in Encounters

Frances now recuperates in the infirmary named for her father, Bishop Robert Gooden at the Episcopal Home in Alhambra.

The physical therapist was due and the nurse who brought the pain killer had not shown up. So Frances decided to fetch it herself. She slid her good leg — the left one — over the edge first, pulled the chair near, stumbled, and fell. “I was helpless,” she told us later. “I couldn’t reach the panic button because it was way over there.” She pointed to a black eye staring out from a metal face plate. “I just laid there.” The nurse showed up moments later. The empty bed alarmed her. “She couldn’t see me because I was under the bed,” she told us when we visited on Sunday. “Of course they made this big show. Everybody was in here heaving me back up. They were scared to death that I would do it again. I told them they didn’t have to worry.”

She had another bit of exciting news. It had rained the other night. The downpour muscled into the room across the hall. Staffers moved the occupants into her room. “All you ever do around here is lie there, so anything different happening interests you,” she averred.

A nurse’s aide came in to check on Frances’s roommate, a dozy 98 year old Mexican woman who spoke only Spanish. While Frances filled us in on old news that Lynn knew very well, the aide chatted with the roommate behind the pink curtain. When she finished over there, she came to comfort Frances. “Frances,” she simpered. “Do you want me to change your diaper?”

Lynn and I knew when to get out of the room. We stood in the hall, watching pink-collared maids wheel blue buckets around. Patients moved themselves up and down the hallway by kicking along in wheelchairs. The more mobile tenants watched an old musical in the day room. I went to get a drink of water from the fountain. An old woman who had appointed herself guardian of the spigot giggled when I pressed the button and no water came out. I smiled at her dotage and found my drink at another tap.

For Frances this limbo was a temporary arrangement. Others, it seemed, had taken up permanent residence. Artifacts purchased in their independent days like fine old scrolled walnut dressers and pictures such as a large madonna graced their rooms in sight of the bed. One woman had grey plastic-covered cushions next to her bed: she had a habit of rolling over the guard rail and onto the floor.

A Filipina nurse darted up to me. “Are you Frances’s son?” she asked. Lynn explained that we were the grandchildren or, rather, that she was the granddaughter and I was the grandson-in-law. The nurse said that she was “really worried about Frances. This morning her appetite was not good. She just wanted to sleep. And when I woke her to take her medicine, she spoke to me in a language I didn’t understand.”

“French,” filled in Lynn. “She speaks French.”

“Yes, and I told her ‘Frances, I don’t understand that language. Speak to me in English.

“I’m worried,” she sighed. “I’ve never seen her like that before.”

I calmed the nurse’s anxiety by writing our cel phone number on a piece of paper for her. “We live two hours away down by Irvine,” I explained. “But if you can’t find Herbert, you can call us.” She thanked me as the aide invited us back into the room.

Frances confirmed the nurse’s story. I noticed that when she spoke, her words rolled as if they pooled in the bottom of her mouth and then spilled out. Yet her mind, at times bewildered, seemed good to me. Though memories ambled through her with some disregard for their relevance to the current subject, she knew who we were and could amicably kvetch about some of her neighbors in the other residence hall like the paranoid woman who would not be vaccinated because she didn’t want them injecting poisons into her body.

After a few minutes, we decided that we’d exhausted her. My own body murmured the warning that if I did not get to a bed within two to three hours it would stop wherever I was and force me to rest after the involvements of the weekend. We said goodbye and promised to be back. France was delighted and waved goodbye.

Lynn got on the phone to her mother as soon as we got into the truck. She reported her opinion that her grandmother was doing well, though she soft-pedaled the story of the waking confusion and didn’t mention the fall from the bed. I drove the truck west down Valley Blvd. until we came to the yellow tumulus mounds where the Long Beach Freeway died after marching north from the sea.