I have the unfortunate habit of becoming inexplicably lightheaded--not frequently enough for it to be hypoglycemia, but enough to distinctly be a pattern–first at a fourth grade field trip, a few times while altar serving, and most recently, the last afternoon I ever saw my mother, standing at the foot of her hospital bed in the ER.
She was telling us--my dad, my sister, and me--that they were still in the process of finding her a room in the main body of the hospital, and from the preliminary tests they had done in the emergency room they feared it had been a heart attack. This was frightening; just as much as hearing her call out to Dad earlier, having collapsed after trying to stand, just as much as watching with my sister as they both left for the hospital, just as much as not knowing if she was going to be okay. I was worried, but at that moment I was focused on how the smell of the hospital, chemical and infectious, was seeping into my nose.
I had noticed it earlier, of course, just one of the many details the brain picks up naturally in a new environment, the smell of linoleum floors and cleaning solvent and medical fluids, but now it was too much, and I was becoming lightheaded, so I moved a foot or two back to be closer to the wall and out of the way. I crouched down with my head between my knees, just as Mom had told me to do after the first time it happened, all the way back in fourth grade.
When I felt less like my vision was about to dissolve into a tunnel of static, I stood up and returned to the side of the bed. The conversation was wrapping up, now: Mom needed to be taken to her new room, and we needed to get dinner, both for us and for her, so that she could avoid the notorious hospital food.
“I love you,” she told us, dark hair spread across the pale pillow, casual and unstyled as if she were at home. We parroted it back, and then we left.
__________________________________________________________________
The entrance we returned to had a larger lobby, less crowded than that of the emergency room. Dad guided us to the desk and started to check in with the nurse there, a young woman, short of stature. When she told us the floor and room number, I repeated it like a code in my mind, over and over.
The elevator opened into the fifth floor, and Dad used the surrounding signs to guide us to Mom. It was around the second corner we turned that I noticed the odor again. It grew stronger and stronger, and soon I found myself getting a bit dizzy. I called for Dad and Brynn to stop, and then I put my back to the wall of the corridor and slid down to ease the blood flow to my head. I focused on my breathing until the feeling subsided, but when I looked up--
When I looked up the hallway was empty.
I called for them, in case they were just around the corner and hadn’t noticed my stopping, and then I looked around each corner to check, and then I began to panic. I was supposed to stay where I was, so that they could find me, and this idea was bearable at first, but the corridor was empty and clean and all I could sense was the smell again. I’d never passed out from one of these spells before, but the panic in my heart instilled in me a fear that here would be the first time it would happen; here, in this empty hallway where no one would find me; and so I stumbled my way out of that corridor and into the next, repeating Mom’s room number like a prayer.
All of sudden I found myself in a lobby, again, similar to the one on the ground floor, and with great relief I walked up to the desk and shyly asked for directions to Mom’s room. The nurse looked down at me from the desk, though not very far, as she was short, and perhaps judging my age, told me she would call for another nurse to take me there. She asked if I had been separated from my family, and I said yes, and that they should be at Mom’s room waiting for me. Then we both waited in near silence for a while. I sat awkwardly in a nearby chair, and the nurse returned to tapping away at her computer.
In this way several minutes passed, until another nurse, short of stature (and here I glanced between the lady at the desk and the lady in front of it, trying to determine if perhaps they were related) arrived and smiled at me. The nurse behind the desk thanked her, and the nurse in front of it offered me her hand. I took it, and she led me through the hospital until we reached a door near the end of the hallway, where she knocked gently against the doorframe and informed my Mom that she had a special visitor.
I ran through the door and to my Mom, reaching across the bed to give her a hug. She was quite relieved to see me, as Dad and Brynn had already stopped by with her food, and upon realizing that I was not with them, had gone back out into the corridors to find me. She told me that I should’ve stayed put, and that perhaps she should call them now to let them know where I was.
At this point the nurse suggested that she lead me to my family, so that Mom could get some rest for tomorrow. I looked at Mom, who told me that tomorrow they were just going to do a more invasive test, and then she asked the nurse if she wouldn’t mind helping me find them. The nurse offered me her hand again, and so I turned to Mom and hugged her good night, and told her I loved her and that I’d see her tomorrow, and then I went with the nurse.
As we walked, the nurse chatted with me lightly. As I answered her questions, those of the general sort one goes through the rhythms of with their dentists and their GP and their distant relatives, I became slightly distracted by the smell of the halls. It was the smell that had been haunting me throughout the entire visit. As it had before, it grew in strength until it was all around me, and my tongue stilled and my head grew light. I stopped, prompting the nurse to ask if I was okay, but she looked the same as the nurse before her and the nurse before that nurse. The corridors, too, were uniform, the same corridors I had gotten lost in, the corridors in which Mom was now becoming lost. All at once the hospital seemed to dissolve into one great looping continuum, and with great fear I turned around and ran away from the nurse and retraced our path, chanting out loud the room number to which I had held fast for the entire journey.
I cannot remember if the nurse tried to follow me. All I could hear was the slap of my sneakers on the linoleum floor; all I could smell was that same terrible odor of clean and chemicals; all I could see were the sterile, white hallways encircled by encroaching static. I began to wonder if I should stop and recover from the dizziness, but in my mind the odor had become a pursuant entity, and to stop would be to succumb to it. So I ran on, until at last I saw the door near the end of the hallway where we had been before.
Mom was there! I was convinced that if I could just reach her, I would not lose her, and she would not lose me, so it was with great haste I tore open the door.
The lobby I entered was near empty, and through the windows I could see it was very dark outside. I spun around, because somehow this was the wrong room, the wrong floor, even, but the nurse was behind me, short of stature. We were of equal height when she was standing.
She was closing the door. I tried to move past her, still not comprehending where I was, to get back to the hallway with Mom’s room number, but she stopped me gently and informed me that visitation hours were now over, and that the rest of my family was very worried about me, and it was about time that we went home.
I turned around and Dad was marching over, angry and relieved all at once. Brynn was beside him, worry evident across her face. I still didn’t understand what had just happened, and so all I could do was let my trembling limbs be encased in my dad’s hug, and follow them out to the garage and the car.
We never returned to the hospital, and Mom never returned to us. What truly happened I may never be sure of, but as the doors slid closed behind us that night, like a parting taunt, I caught one last faint whiff of that insidious and chemical odor.
Nicole Podlipec is a sophomore majoring in Animation at the School of Visual Arts. When she’s not doing homework, she’s an avid bookworm who occasionally dabbles in sewing and writing.