The Journey: In Reverse

Last night, after admitting my mother to the hospital for the third time in as many years, I began the lonely trek down the elevator from the 5th floor to the first, through the empty hospital corridors to the entrance that would lead to my truck. My husband volunteered to come and sit with us until I went home, but I told him to stay at work, there was nothing he could do there and his nature wouldn’t allow him to just sit for very long without his restlessness spreading like a virus.
Visitors use the main entrance as a general rule, but I used the side entrance earlier in the evening to admit Mom.
Now that wing of the hospital was dark and vacant. The only thing following me in these sterile corridors were the ghosts of experiences past. My journey through the hospital took me down several floors in the same elevators I used three years ago when visiting my mother when she “moved on up” from ICU to the critical care cardiac unit after her heart attack. That time, I hoped for her move up. This time, I hoped she would not be moved down.
It seemed like a lifetime ago and then it seemed like only yesterday we gathered around the screen where the cardiologist showed us the almost complete blockage of her artery. Mom would not give them permission to place the stint in the vein to unblock the clot. “What are her chances if I don’t sign these?” I asked the cardiologist. “She doesn’t have a chance,” he replied. “And if we allow it?” The wrinkled brow did not ease. “She’ll at least have a chance. I can’t say, given her age and the time she wasted getting in here.” I looked at my mother, so small on that table who was still shaking her head and mumbling, “No surgery.”
I signed the papers. I took the gamble and we won.
I entered the hallway where I once waited with a frightened and confused Mrs. Johnson (a woman whose husband had underwent heart surgery and was in ICU at the same time as my mother) until a doctor could lead her to her husband. We were two people, who didn’t even know each other’s first names, but we hugged and wished each other well as I watched her walk-run through double doors where her husband waited on a table.
What ever became of them? I wondered, as I had so many times before.
As I neared the last set of elevators, a maintenance man dragging two huge trashcans, the debris of a day where lives and families were allowed to go on – or where fate shattered them - startled me. Not wanting to be alone when I first entered the maze of corridors, I now wished I were.
I waited for the elevator to take me to the parking level, while gazing down the final hallway of my journey. At the end, a sign read “ICU.”