Six months after I graduated from college I signed up for ministry school. Because apparently, I’m the kind of person who likes school that much.
For the ministry school, I went to prophetic workshops and listened to sermons on miracles and faith and wrote things in my journal like, “Don’t ever take counsel from someone who is satisfied with lack.” I would speak up in class, talk about things that stood out to me in the lecture or the reading. I felt in my element. My words strong and unwavering.
I asked God to increase my faith. When I said that, I didn’t mean I wanted God to give my grandma cancer.
The Friday after my first class, my mom and I took my grandma to her doctor. The blow came just like it does in the movies, but also not anything like it. I felt like I had heard wrong. I couldn’t catch up to what the doctor was saying. He had gone so quickly from saying the biopsy came back and he had bad news to talking about referring her to an oncologist and a head and neck specialist. I couldn’t even remember the exact words he had used when I had to deliver the news to my aunt. Only words like “bone extraction” and “radiation” stood out. He spoke to my mom and me in English, my grandma sleeping in his chair. It was the first time I wasn’t frustrated by a doctor’s failure to talk with my grandma. I didn’t want her to know.
The entire 43-minute drive home I sat in the driver’s seat somewhere between crying, wishing I was angry with God, feeling like I was going to throw up, and telling myself that I served an all-powerful God. I’d look over at my grandma in the passenger seat and think, “She isn’t strong enough for this,” and then remember a dream I had when I was 17. I was in a white dress, my hair dark and long. I would walk down an aisle, stop and turn to kiss my grandma on the cheek. She looked older than she was then, but her essence was the same, strong and firm.
For a long time, I’ve told my mother that God “created” the medications that have kept my grandma alive so long through divine inspiration. He also gave the wisdom for the team behind the machines that dialyze my grandmas’ blood three times a week, the pacemaker, the 21 different pills she takes. But now, I find myself praying for a miracle and wondering if it’s my fault.
Maybe in some ways I was angry, am angry.
After 43-minutes we were home. I had to push my grandma up the walkway to our front door. I had to kick aside the neighbors’ kids’ scooters and bikes for the millionth time. After I got my grandma into the house, I went back outside, grabbed the scooters and threw them in the trash. By the time I came back for the bike, our neighbor was putting his bike in their garage. If they saw me, they didn’t say anything.
***
I grew up in a Pentecostal church where it was normal to see pastors deliver people from demons and for people in wheelchairs to stand and walk after praying for healing. I never saw how dangerous the rhetoric we use can be. “If we only prayed more, we’d see so many miracles happen.” Hadn’t I prayed enough? Hasn’t my mom prayed enough? My grandpa? My grandma herself? Our church congregation, hadn’t they prayed enough? Wasn’t my grandma’s healing just as necessary and important as every person I’d seen healed?
I couldn’t look my grandpa in the eye when he got home. My mom told me we wouldn’t tell him until we saw another doctor, but she told him before I even made it down the hall to the living room.
He didn’t want his dinner.
I still wasn’t angry at God. But I was angry at my cousins, who never come to visit. Angry that one of them texted me to ask how I was doing. Angry that the only way I knew how to describe what I was feeling was sending a text that read, “I want to die from how much this hurts.”
It was the kind of heart-wrenching pain that makes you want to stay home in bed all day—except you can’t, because you’re at home, and she’s not, and you have to go see her in a small room that is either too cold or too hot with not enough chairs for your family. So you go, and at the end of the night you’re exhausted, but the diagnosis keeps you awake for days, pacing the house with the lights out and the phone off.
Then you get angry at how they would never understand the dull, persistent, throbbing pain of having her mistake you for her dead sister. Or worse, not being recognized at all. Or understand what it means to cry inside a Starbucks at seven in the morning when “Near You” by the Andrews Sisters starts playing on the speakers. Even if the song isn’t about a grandparent, but she likes the song and it reminds you of days when she would leave the TV on one of those channels that play music, and this song would come on, and she’d say something about the song, and you’d wonder why you didn’t listen to white music much at home, but she liked this.
You let calls from your cousins go unanswered and texts from them go unread. Instead, you turn to friends you know love your grandma. Because she’d given them her blessing before you’d backpacked across Europe together, invited them to her home for posole, told them she was proud of them at your graduation or prayed for them when they needed comfort.
I am grateful for the friend who has gone through this before with her grandpa, who understands why this is different when it’s a grandparent you’re so close to. And who tells you she’s here for you too. I’m grateful for the friend who sends you Scripture daily because she knows you need it. And who also makes you a playlist on Spotify, so you can cry in the shower when you listen to it. I’m grateful for the friend who asks “How’s grandma?” because she’s his grandma too, not just yours. I’m grateful for the friend who will one day be a doctor and lets you vent about the poor patient care at this hospital and promises she will do better. And she tells you she’s proud of you for advocating for your grandma. And I’m grateful for “Impossible Year” by Panic! at the Disco. Because it is exactly what this year feels like, and, if you play it loud enough, you can’t hear your grandpa cry.
I’m grateful for the single pastor who came to the hospital to pray for her. Many of the others enrolled or teaching at the ministry school—which, they say, is preparing us to see miracles, perform miracles like Jesus intended—send texts like “I’m praying for your grandma and you” but not the “We will come if you let us” you need. I’m grateful for the friends from London who ask how she’s doing but don’t ask you what’s wrong. You hate people who ask what’s wrong.
Six days in, I broke. I called my oldest cousin and I let it all out. They’re going to kill her here. They tried giving her a blood thinner right before dialysis. They haven’t given her the right meds in three days. The doctor didn’t even come to introduce himself before surgery. I can’t find a single person in this hospital who’s good at their job. I had to ask someone in admin, and then she couldn’t even find her on the schedule. If we didn’t have someone with her 24 hours of the day, who knows what they would’ve done to her? I spoke to the patient advocate, the charge nurse, the hospitalist, and the case manager from this hospital and a person from admitting at the other hospital and I need to find a doctor with admitting privileges to get her transferred to the other hospital.
I felt better after the call. Not as angry. I was grateful for her. For letting me vent, loudly, as I paced 3 West and didn’t care if the patients whose rooms I was walking past heard. I didn’t care if the nurses whose station I lingered by, or doctors who stood outside doors updating charts, heard me talk shit about the doctors, the nurses, the aids, the phlebotomists, and every person whose mistake I had written down in my notes app:
11:16 student nurse woke her up, sugar 140
11:22 CNA woke her up again, BP 125/56 O2 96
12:15 down for the procedure
12:28 no one can tell me who is performing the procedure
12:32 called into an admin office, cannot find her on the schedule, said “some families don’t want to get involved with care (????wth)
I mean everything. There won’t be enough room to write every name and every detail of mistakes made during her visit on the survey they send in the mail. I’ll begin with “I know hospital staff have hard jobs, lots of patients, are understaffed, and work long hours but there is no reason a patient should have to wait 40-minutes while her IV drips blood.”
***
My grandpa deep-sighs more often than ever these days. He doesn’t cry in front of anyone, but his eyes give him away.
On the day my grandma was discharged from the hospital, her nurse (the only nurse who asked if I wanted water or coffee because “You’ve been here all day,” and the only nurse to ask if I had a question and say “I have to ask the doctor” and then actually come back with an answer, and the only nurse to say “My shift is over in 20 minutes, the nurse taking over is Jess”) said, “I’ve never seen a family have so much care for the matriarch.”
I felt pride. I knew the only reason my family is the way it is was because of my grandma. She taught us to stick together, to fight for each other, to be there for each other, to love each other well. My mom replied, “She’s taken care of me for over 50 years, so I’ll take care of her for another 50.” I nodded. His reply broke my heart. “Eighty percent of the people I work with have no visitors. I’ve never seen someone have family with them 24 hours of the day.”
I still wonder if I’ll ever wake up again without feeling nausea.