By John Janelle Backman
Five years ago, my shower’s sliding doors and my wife fell apart, and I froze on deciding which to address first.
Even now there’s a slight dent in the frame of the right-hand door. The dent is on the top, near the roller, which is also askew, making the door chatter when it slides. Actually, chatter is an improvement: for an entire year the doors weren’t even there. Instead, we had a shower curtain that I jury-rigged on Saturday, April 3, 2021. Our adult daughter bought us the shower curtain on the fly—we couldn’t go out and buy it ourselves, since both of us had just come down with COVID-19—but in her haste she forgot to get hooks. Having no mechanical ingenuity for problems like this, I had just launched into a panic when somehow bungee cords popped to mind. I scurried to the car in my bathrobe, retrieved a bungee wad from the trunk, disentangled the cords in the bathroom, wrapped each cord around the top of the shower’s door frame, and popped the bungee hooks through the small plastic holes in the shower curtain. It held, just.
This had to happen fast because I was hell-bent on showering, door or no door, before sending my wife to the hospital. Her oxygen level was 83 before the shower. We knew that was low, but after eight hours in an ER on Thursday night (April 1) we couldn’t bear the thought of another visit. At the same time, my body couldn’t bear the two days of sweat glazed on its skin. So, I set up the curtain and showered and rechecked her oxygen, and this time it was 80 and she wasn’t lucid and we had to go.
I should have known it would come to this, because of what happened on Friday, the day between Thursday night’s ER visit and Saturday’s 83 and 80. Up till then the shower door had been flawless—no dent, straight roller—but then I walked downstairs from bed that morning and saw both shower doors hanging at crazy angles off their tracks. My wife told me she’d blacked out in the shower and fallen and taken the doors with her. Off we went to another doctor for an infusion, which was supposed to work but didn’t, which brought us to Saturday and the shower curtain.
Only weeks later did my wife come home to continue her recovery and I read the one-sentence diagnosis on her printed care summary. I ran web searches on every unfamiliar term, which was most of them, and kept finding the phrase often fatal. That explained the sheer strangeness of that half hour between 83 and 80: not just the insanity of hanging a shower curtain in the face of death, but the force that drove my body to it—terror expressed as exultation. The fear of plummeting oxygen levels came out as I can do this: I can jury-rig an emergency shower curtain and take the necessary steps to save my wife, call the doctor and get an ambulance to our door and convince her to go and walk her out to the gurney. What turns terrified into capable I don’t know, but it left me clean and bereft after they’d whisked her away and I sobbed like she wasn’t coming back.