These Doctors Don’t Know Anything

A Situation at Booth Memorial by Kate Schnur

It’s amazing how quickly you get used to thinking your mother may never wake up again. 

A week ago, my uncle woke me up from a post-dinner nap to tell me my mom had a stroke. We – my small collection of immediate family – assembled at NewYork-Presbyterian Queens, the hospital forever known to all Queens natives as Booth Memorial. We slept huddled in chairs, hoods over our heads, and listened to the ghost-like sounds of early early early morning news broadcasts while they ran tests and gave her scans; we were told in the actual morning that she would have a minimally invasive craniotomy that night. 

All I knew was that ‘minimally invasive’ did not sound like words that should go anywhere next to ‘craniotomy.’ 

No one really knew what would happen after that. All I knew was that “minimally invasive” did not sound like words that should go anywhere next to “craniotomy.” 

---

It’s a week later and the lobby is vibrating at 7 pm. Shift change. It’s begun to feel like I have never lived a life before Booth Memorial, always feeling vaguely nauseated, and with the expectation that every person wearing scrubs is coming to tell me that my worst fears have been confirmed: that this is how it will be forever. My family and I are waiting for some signs of “waking” – a word I have learned that has a spectrum of meanings and interpretations that you can collect while watching someone recover from a brain injury. 

But I can’t put off my job forever. So now, on this particular shift change, I’m balancing the thin paper cup of hospital coffee in the same hand that’s holding my cell phone; my wallet is shoved under my arm as I scan the seating outside the lobby cafe. On the connected shoulder, my school bag straps buckle under the weight of my laptop, its charger and extension cord, and the pile of still ungraded papers I carry with me at all times. My other arm is wrapped around the books I brought from home that I did not have time to shove back in my bag when we were ushered out of the ICU and I piled into the elevator with other patients’ attendants to find a place to kill an hour somewhere in the more public areas of the hospital. Draped over that same arm is also my puffy down coat that I use as a blanket. The revolving doors and picture windows do not insulate well against the New York March nights. 

This is my personal version of the copyrighted fitness routine that builds muscle through schlepping a collection of sundry, seemingly found, heavily weighted objects from one end of the room to the other. But instead of piles of tires, I weigh down my body with student writing I’ll never read, novels I’m teaching, and the monographs I need for dissertation research as I move through the six-mile triangle perimeter of my commute through the various neighborhoods of Flushing: from my childhood home, to the Queens College campus where I’ve taught for three years, and to Booth Memorial (or Queens-Pres, or whatever). 

I manage to find a table near a wall outlet – I depend on this time to charge my computer, since the outlets around my mother’s bed are, you know, generally spoken for. When I drop my belongings on the table and its surrounding chairs, I spill some coffee out of the pin-sized hole inexplicably located at the center of all disposable cup covers. I run back to the counter holding scratchy, one-ply napkins and flimsy plastic cutlery while still wearing my bag, not so much because I’m worried about the financial loss of a stolen computer, but more because I don’t know the last time I backed up the files of my long-abandoned dissertation chapters that I still call “in progress”. 

I settle at the table, organizing my papers into piles of priority, neatly stacking books on top of papers to protect them against the wind-suck of the revolving door, and – with some risk to the machine – I open my computer in the pocket of space still open. I untangle the charging cable and stretch it to the outlet. But the table is farther from the wall than I had originally thought and I can’t move it closer without disrupting the people sitting at the table next to mine.

I recognize them: a middle-aged woman and a man who has the same nose and looks a few years younger. They belong to the patient on the ventilator in the corner of the ICU room that is diagonally across from my mother. The woman, I presume the patient’s daughter, is at the hospital all day, every day. She usually wears the same yellow fleece hooded sweatshirt and unfitted jeans. Her hair is dyed light brown with untouched gray roots and is always tied into a frizzy ponytail with a dark green scrunchy. 

This is her hospital uniform. 

Everyone who takes the dayshift at someone’s sickbed has a hospital uniform. 

The base of mine is my formerly favorite jeans that have lost their luster and gained a hospital disinfectant smell I can’t wash out, my tops are an awkward layering of sleeveless tanks under long-sleeve t-shirts under sweatshirts under my winter coat and blanket scarf, so I’m ready for any permutation of hot or freezing in any part of the hospital. My hair is always tied back into a bun when it is out-of-the-shower wet, straight enough to force all of it into one hair tie. 

Though the rest of my family with “normal” jobs don’t make it back to the hospital until after night shift change, Yellow Sweatshirt’s companion – presumably her brother – comes at six, around an hour before. He always looks tired, but it’s the tired of a man who now has to go to the ICU after a days’ work. It’s not the same vacant expression of someone whose thinking is interrupted all day by the staccato rhythm of the sound of twenty respirators, that beep in temporary, often unnecessary alerts, in unsynced rhythm. He’s always wearing a dress-shirt and slacks, and I wonder how long he has to wear those clothes in this new workday schedule that includes nights in the ICU. 

At night, before my day at the ICU ends, I frequently catch Yellow Sweatshirt and her brother out of the corner of my eye, sitting with their mother. Unlike my own mother, theirs is mostly awake throughout the day, but she cannot speak because of her intubation. She wears the same puffy white mittens on her hands that my mother has on her left hand. The mittens are meant to keep the patient from pulling out their tubing.  They seem like their own form of torture independent of having machines breathing for you. 

I constantly find myself making assumptions like this about what it must be like to be a patient in the ICU. To find yourself with new disabilities, to live in (dis)harmony with the life-supporting technologies and prosthetics that the hospital provides. And then I constantly find myself realizing how ableist I sound, how clueless I am, and how much useless guilt I feel as a liberal scholar in an intensive care ward who has studied these questions of medical care in the safe sterility of the academy without ever having to live them myself.

---

My mother has only one glove because only her left hand is a threat to her intubation. The right hand is motionless next to her, and has been since her stroke. When I stare at it, I think sometimes that I see a finger move, the same way when I was a kid I would think I finally saw the picture embedded in a Magic Eye image after desperately staring at it for minutes. 

After this first week, I have grown tired of voicing these visions of reflexive wrist flicks and finger tremors out loud. Because while you’re worrying about whether your mother will ever wake up again, if she’ll talk again, if she’ll breathe on her own again, you also have to worry about constructing yourself as a reliable witness: a witness for the doctors who don’t spend hours at her bedside observing her every move, for the friends who call everyday and feel comforted in their own pessimism, and for the family members who need your observations to gel with their sense of medical expertise. 

My mother’s eyes are not open, but I’m sure she’s aware of the glove. She stretches her left arm across her body, trying to find leverage anywhere to pry the velcro open. 

I should note here that she never went for her tubing, just for the glove. 

Her attempts to get her glove off interrupt the cyclical movement of her left arm that started a few days after her surgery. Eyes closed and seemingly unresponsive to all stimuli except for the glove, she moves her left arm off the bed and draws it back in a straight line, until it arches and lands next to her head, forearm now resting on the pillow. She waits a minute and then lifts the arm again, bringing it in reverse motion back to her torso. She can repeat this motion for hours. It’s so casual, so graceful, and so bizarre that it seems like it must be purposeful, so repetitive it seems automated. 

Earlier today, before the shift change, I asked her nurse, Bernadette, if I could take the glove off.

“So long as you don’t let her pull out the works, honey.” 

I pulled her hand out from the netted glove, and I could feel the dampness in the fake woolen padding that supports the imprisoned palm. It smelled like sweat, dead skin, and rancid body lotion. I tried to turn the glove inside out to let it dry before I would have to put it back on my mother’s hand when I’m kicked out for shift change. The glove is meant to be cushy, but it is stiff as a board, and un-manipulatable. Admitting defeat, I left it on the nightstand next to her bed and tried to tent the opening so that the inside of the glove could air out. The material kept folding in on itself and – having spent too much time in the effort – I refused to give up. 

Finally satisfied that it would at least stay open for as long as it took me to turn back to my mother, I looked over to see her arm back at it. It was in mid-descent, heading back to the thin plastic hospital mattress. In mid-rise though, her hand stopped to feel the guardrail next to the bed. Her hand climbed up the metal fencing until it caught the fabric of my t-shirt. It moved around my belly, crawl-gliding up to the bottom of my ribcage and then back down to where my stomach met the railing. 

She continued that exploration for much of the afternoon. When I sat in a chair next to her, and my face was closer to the rail, her hand moved up and down my face, spreading across my mouth so I couldn’t breathe, grabbing my nose, cupping at the top of my forehead, grabbing at the ugly nineties-wide headband I was wearing to keep the hair that had curled out of my bun close to my head. She spent the day pawing at my face and stomach, once traveling up my body and grabbing my boob on the way to my face. 

I called her rude. She honked my nose and lowered her hand. 

I don’t know how – or whether – to assign this squeeze any meaning. What I think is agentive action, I’m later told, is no sign of anything at all. When one day I think she is making more conscious action, the next will follow with no seemingly deliberate movement, save for the constant sway of her left arm, but without its conscious exploring. I am comforted when her hand clasps my nose, but I don’t know if I have any right to be. 

When I was told to leave for shift change, the glove was still wet, despite my best efforts. 

---

Now, in the Booth Memorial lobby,  I become desperate to find a table that’s even closer to an outlet. I turn into the woman in the big plastic glasses hopelessly holding her charger’s extension cord, eyes combing the room for empty chairs and hidden outlets. I only have half an hour to restore my computer battery before I have to go back up to the ICU.  

“Miss! You can sit here!” 

I don’t realize he’s talking to me until the fourth “Miss” catches my attention. I turn around and I see Yellow Sweatshirt’s brother waving at me. Yellow Sweatshirt herself is pointing at the empty chair at the table. 

I’m terrible at talking to strangers. 

But I also really need the outlet. 

“I don’t want to bother you, and I have so much stuff with me.” I gesture with my head at my piles of books and papers on the table I had already claimed. 

“Nah, you’re fine! Bring it all over here!” 

I turn around to organize my piles into a slightly more draggable formation. Aware that they’re watching me, though, I panic and cram as much as I can carry into my bag so I need as little of their table as possible. A pile of loose paper is jutting out on a diagonal from the pouch of my bag, my wallet is just barely secure in a front pocket, and when I hook the bag under my shoulder the spines of two library books dig into the fleshy part of my tricep. Another file of papers is shoved loose into a folder and I drop that and another book on top of my laptop. The charger is now looped and bulging through the back of my bag and once I drop everything onto the table, I realize I left my cell phone behind. When I turn back after it, I see Yellow Sweatshirt’s brother picking my jacket off the floor. I’m not even sure it ever made its way onto a chair. 

At least I didn’t spill my coffee. 

Yellow Sweatshirt introduces herself as Yolanda and her brother as Jorge. Yolanda is a retired teacher – she recognizes me as a fellow traveler when she sees my loose papers and fancy grading pens – and Jorge runs a nonprofit formed in response to the most recent hurricane in Haiti. The lobby is too loud and his voice too soft and deep for me to hear the more detailed description of his work and I’m too nervous to ask him to clarify. 

They ask where I teach, what I teach, my research interests, and as usual, I give an answer that’s too long for polite conversation. 

In a hospital lobby.

When we’re each thinking about our respective mothers in the ICU.

And then there’s the awkward silence when we run out of out-of-hospital small talk, and we almost compulsorily transition to the in-hospital version that is in no way small and no one really wants to talk about. 

Yolanda breaks the silence. “Is that your mom?” Her head gestures back to the elevator bank we’ll all return to when we go back to the seventh floor in forty minutes. 

“Mhm. And you?”

“Yes.” A pause, and then Yolanda answers the follow-up question I didn’t ask. “She was actually here for a broken leg. On the fourth floor. And then…something happened. She couldn’t breathe. They intubated and moved her to the ICU.”

“And they don’t know what happened?” They both shake their heads. “Or what to do now?” 

Jorge adds, “They want to put in a trach; she’s been intubated for too long. But the doctor says that because of her age, once they do, it’ll be permanent. She won’t be strong enough for them to remove it. Ever.” 

I don’t know what to say. The finality is suffocating. “I’m so sorry.” I think longer, like there must be something else to say. But of course there isn’t. 

“We want to get a second opinion,” Yolanda adds. “There must be other answers out there.”

‘These doctors don’t know anything.’ 

I agree immediately, but I also don’t feel much hope for them. It’s true that I, too, don’t have much faith in Dr. Ramirez, the daytime ICU attending for our side of the room. But I also don’t have much faith in the state of geriatric intensive care in any other hospital across the country. I join them anyway in the usual chorus you hear among family members of hospital patients: “These doctors don’t know anything.” 

And I feel this. In this one week we’ve met four different doctors from four different specialties with four different predictions for how long it will take her to wake up and what we will find when she does. 

“She’ll wake up tomorrow and she’ll have full mobility back in six months,” her neurosurgeon told us the day of her surgery. Five days later and she’s still not awake. 

“She may never breathe again on her own,” Dr. Ramirez said last night, surprised it had never occurred to me. 

Because it hadn’t. She was breathing on her own when she was brought to the ER and was only intubated as a precaution against aspiration (doctor for choking on your own spit). I had spent nights thinking about whether she would be able to speak, to walk, to come home. But I had found comfort in her ability to breathe when she was in the emergency room. Like one certainty was ticked off the master list of unknowns. 

Tears streamed down my face with the weight of the unanswerable questions I had yet to consider. If this were any day before my mother’s stroke, I would have excused myself elegantly and found a private place to cry. 

But there is no privacy in this hospital. 

I learned this on the day of my mother’s surgery, the afternoon after her stroke. I could count on my hands the number of times I’ve seen my father cry that didn’t involve Holocaust documentaries. And when I walked in on him crying over my mother hours before the procedure, I couldn’t handle it. I was standing inside the doors of the ICU and turned back on my heels to go back out the same door I had just walked through. I found the floor’s one public bathroom and turned the handle. 

It didn’t budge. 

I pressed against the door again and it still wouldn’t move. I knew some poor person was in there and I didn’t care. I banged angrily on the door and shouted at the crappily laminated bathroom sign. 

I desperately searched for any corner out of the way, but the intensive care floor is cruelly open-concept. At the other side of the elevator bank is a nine-foot high plastic “7”. I ducked between the wall and the leg of the seven and sobbed. It was only once I was done that I had the presence of mind to realize I would have looked less conspicuous just crying on the floor in the middle of the family lounge, with everyone else. 

I tried the bathroom again and the knob turned. The lights inside were flickering; the walls and floor were the same gray tile and some of them were starting to peel off; the mirror hung at a slight angle like it was about to fall at any minute. I looked so hard into my own face that I couldn’t really see where my eyes were anymore, and the flickering lights made me seem like I was a side character about to die in a B-rated horror movie, or like I had become the monster myself, my pale skin already made to look sallower in the light now turned waxy and ghoulish, like it should signal my eventual decline into haunted barbarism. I sighed so hard that I felt my lungs rattle and my belly shake, and I thought to myself that I must remember how I look on this day, at this moment, because I may never again have the opportunity to know exactly what I look like when I’m scared shitless. 

I never cried in that bathroom or next to the “7” again. 

At this point, though, in the fishbowl of the Queens-Pres ICU, crying felt like sweating. It was something you’d rather not do in public, but was ultimately uncontrollable and relatively excusable. 

Ramirez disagreed, apparently. One could assume that he would be used to family tears as an ICU attending. Maybe it was my own lack of shame he found uncomfortable. He stood there for a few seconds watching my shoes before turning to the nurses’ station to grab a thin box of hospital tissues. The box was bright pink with purple trim and purple hearts. Nothing quite says Valentine’s Day like one-ply tissue paper. 

He didn’t even hand the box to me. He left it on the table at the foot of my mother’s bed where they leave the plastic water pitcher that’s standard across US hospitals. Returning his gaze to my shoes, he said, “For when you’re ready to clean yourself up,” and went back to the computer bank next to the door. 

These doctors don’t know anything.

---

“What happened to your mom?” Yolanda asks. 

“Stroke, last week.” 

“She hasn’t woken up yet?
I shake my head. 

“What are they saying?”

“Who knows? Everyone says something different.” 

And it really is everyone. It’s not just the doctors. It’s everyone. 

Everyone with Google access. Everyone with doctor friends. Everyone who sits next to a doctor on Saturday morning in synagogue. Everyone with PubMed credentials. 

We’re Jewish. Not to lean into stereotypes, but that’s…a lot of people. 

“The neurologist in my office says she should be awake by tomorrow,” my uncle says on the phone. 

“I’ve read a bunch of articles that suggest it should be another three days,” my sister writes over text. 

“The guy who sits next to me in shul says your mom will be just fine! But the man who sits on the other side of me says she should be dead already.” I admit this is fake, but if I had slipped it into the daily list of assurances and warnings I repeated to everyone who called, no one would call bullshit. 

“Your mother came to me in a dream and said she’s fine.” Lots of people called bullshit on this one: the dream of a friend from my mother’s hippie days, a friend she met thirty years ago in line in a natural foods grocery in Fresh Meadows. 

At first I judge myself for finding this last assurance to be the most comforting, but I eventually accept that if no one has answers, I’d rather go with the dream version of my mother than with a collection of MDs who put their name on a study published five years ago. Any version of my mother would probably know her body better than any doctor. And no version of my mother could tolerate being wrong. 

“These doctors don’t know anything,” Jorge says. 

“Well, they all seem pretty certain they do.” 

He laughs. “At least they’re confident.”

“We see you reading to your mom. It’s so sweet,” Yolanda says.  

“I don’t know. I’m hoping she’ll eventually wake up just so she can beg me to stop.” 

Yolanda laughs, not surprised to hear that Victorian literature is not unanimously popular with my students. 

“Our mom’s awake, but she can’t talk because of the intubation. We bought a white board, but it only came with one marker and it’s run out already.”

I sit up straight. Finally, after days of useless sitting, I have a purpose. 

“Do you want markers?”
They’re so taken aback by my enthusiasm that they don’t answer right away. But already I’m rifling through my bag. I’m not even looking where I put my hand, just shoving my arm further inside, pawing around until I feel the smooth, cool plastic of my pencil case.

I start pulling board markers out of the case and placing them side-by-side on the table. There are the colors that come in any small pack you can buy in the limited school supplies aisle of a pharmacy: red, green, and blue. Knowing how quickly they run out, and how quickly I lose them, I also invested in a “mega” pack this semester that included 24 markers with two shades of every color. I pull a pink and yellow out of the case.

“Don’t take the yellow. No one can ever see it. I’m really just taking it out now because I keep forgetting to throw it out.” 

They’re still staring at me, silent: confused, I assume, by my excitement. 

“No, we can’t take these,” Yolanda says, “you’ll need them.”

“No! Take them! I have loads!”

I then go on to search the random places I tuck away markers when I’m rushing out of class. The random, barely usable, tiny zipper pockets inside and outside my bag. My jacket pocket. The bottom of the chasm of my purse. Tucked in my copy of Wuthering Heights. I also feel the bulge of one digging into my thigh through the fabric of my jeans front pocket, but I opt to leave that one in there. There’s obviously a pile more sitting in a drawer in my office on campus. I’m sure if I just give myself a wiggle, markers will rain out of several orifices of my body. 

I teach literature. My skills are rarely useful to others, save for proofreading the odd email. Even now, the only reason I’m the one most often at my mother’s bedside is because I work within two miles of the hospital, and only have to literally be at work for six hours a week. I am my mother’s advocate purely by accident of circumstance. Being the only member of my family who actually knows how to use a semicolon does not seem to be a qualification for patient advocacy, nor does the ability to quote by heart semi-pornographic pamphlets from the 1920s. 

But I am leaking school supplies. 

My mother had a stroke. 

Their mother will probably never breathe on her own again.

But I have school supplies. 

I will always have school supplies. 

We make small talk about my classes for a few more minutes before my phone rings. The screen says “Dad,” and, seeing this, Yolanda says, “You take that, we’re going to go wait for the elevator,” and we all laugh because we know that in this hospital you need to give that elevator at least twelve minutes before it will come, stop, and have room for you to get in. 

They get up and I answer. Before I pick up, I already know the extent of the conversation. 

“Anything new to report?”

He knows the answer to this question before I open my mouth. He knows there’s nothing new because I would have called already if there was. When you talk five times a day, there generally isn’t anything new to report by its end.

Dad’s call is the first of the night as “The Men” descend on the hospital in the after-work hours. Last night, after I “cleaned myself up” for the sake of Dr. Ramirez, my uncle found me crying in the hallway and then told my husband, who’d joined five minutes later and saw my re-puffed eyes, “We just had a situation with your wife.” 

I’m a situation now.

What do they say about my mother when I’m not there to hear it?

Despite the slow elevator, we’re all back upstairs before rounds are over. Rounds should only take an hour, but usually go later. It’s a giant room with no privacy so it’s a HIPAA violation to have family present. But I also wonder if they’re worried family members would hear what their loved ones’ doctors actually think about their progress and prognosis. 

What do they say about my mother when I’m not there to hear it? 

I peek my head through the window to see if the doctors are still moving in one cohesive group from bed to bed like a school of tuna passing off information on new patients and updates on old ones, or if they’ve started flitting between patient beds and the nurses’ station. More often than not, I see them congregated by the bed next to the door, the last stop in the literal round they’re going to make that evening. I generally catch the eye of one of the nurses who signals to me with her fingers how many more minutes they need before letting people in. Tonight she holds up eight fingers.

I go to the lounge, which is packed with families eating dinner from the string of Chinese takeouts that line this part of Main Street. I sit on the floor next to the snack machines, wondering how many bags of McVitie’s salt and vinegar chips I can eat before I develop canker sores. By the end of my mother’s time in the ICU, I’ll find that the smell of hospital still permeates my nostrils every time I open a bag.

I can forgive my mother for a lot of things, but I can’t forgive her for ruining salt and vinegar potato chips.

I decide to forgo the chips for now, realizing that they won’t pair well with the coffee I’ve nursed past the point of tolerable coolness but now refuse to throw away. I look at the collection of chairs linked into a bench against the window across from me. There’s a family settled in them that I remember I saw crying next to a bed when I peeked through the windows of the CCU. 

It’s been a week, but it feels both as though I first entered this room an hour ago and also as though my life has always been this way. Time is an amorphous thing on the seventh floor of Queens Pres, which is fitting considering how many people who use this hospital are stuck in a neighborhood past when it was still called Booth Memorial. 

I’ll start to depend on the familiar faces in the ICU, especially after meeting Yolanda and Jorge. It’s not like we’re ICU buddies now. We won’t call across the aisle separating our mothers’ beds. We won’t sit together during shift changes after tonight. But we won’t just nod in recognition when we see each other, either. We will actually make eye contact and smile, and the more intentional, performative gestures make a difference.

The community of ICU patients will constantly rotate, and when I come in the morning and realize a face I’m used to seeing is no longer there, I’ll be too scared to ask where they went. But I will also feel jealous rage when I watch a patient transferred to a different floor, even though I know that nothing about recovery is linear. Leaving the ICU does not mean that you’re “healed,” just stable. 

Months later, my mother will ask me to tell her the story of what happened to her, of how she came to be in a rehabilitation facility in downtown Flushing. 

“You had a stroke. It was a hemorrhagic stroke on the left side of your brain. You had a minimally invasive craniotomy. You were in the ICU in Booth Memorial, and then you went to rehab in Glen Cove hospital. But then you had to go back to the ICU. And now you’re here.”