Nadia: The Woman with the Impossible Eyes

            “My name is Nadia,” she said as she moved through the thin curtain into the interior room where I sat shivering in a hospital gown on an unusually soft and comfortable examination table.  “Are you Mrs. Gamble?”

            “Yes,” I said, glancing at her nametag.  Her name bore faint resemblance to Nadia.  Twelve Letters. There was an ‘n’ in there somewhere.  “How kind of her,” I thought, “to offer a name I could pronounce, one I could remember.”  She smiled.  I smiled back.  Her eyes were large, the stuff of Bollywood, with natural kohl lining. They were elegant, soft, young, unafraid eyes.  They were so beautiful that, for a second, even this aging Baby Boomer wondered if I, too, could achieve such a smoky eye look with enough Mary Kay intervention.  That idea, mercifully, was gone in a blink.

            “Where did your family originate,” I asked as she tore into packages of electrodes and cotton gauze. 

            “Sri Lanka,” she said. 

            “Have you ever been there?” I asked.

            “Yes,” she said.  “Last summer.  My grandmother still lives there.  It was beautiful.”

            “Beautiful,” I tried to imagine it, blue ocean never more than a moped ride away, women in bright colors, long hair flying behind them.  All I know of Sri Lanka is the picture I have on my desk of my Child First sponsored child, Nipun, standing with his family in front of the project school with the camel colored yard swept in circles.  Nipun is not good at ‘maths’ but he loves to dance.  Sri Lanka.

            Nadia was the second person to greet me as I settled into the Echo Lab at Stanford Medical Center where I have been sent to see if the ‘brightest and the best’ the world of medicine has to offer can determine why, for no simple and obvious reason, the air that I breathe refuses to do its magic and fill my blood with oxygen.

            Choon was the first to greet me.  She was cheerful, eager.  “Hmmm,” she muttered slapping at the veins in my inner elbow.  “They are superficial.” Superficial? Like a stolen lunch at Marshall’s on the way to take home communion? The chick lit of veins?

            “Ah,” I said as she patted and tightened the tourniquet looking for a suitable vein that would not be needed for other tests later in the day. 

            “I need a pediatric needle,” she said scurrying from the room. 

            “Appropriate,” I thought feeling like a child, like the young child I had been 50 years ago with cut downs in her little legs and an old oxygen tent fuzzying the view from the windows of Stabler Hospital.  Suddenly I was that child again, closing my eyes and listening to the little box record player one of my mother’s students had brought to me.  It played 45’s.  Tab Hunter.  Red Sails in the Sunset.  Over and over.

            “You are hard to stick,” Choon said as she threaded the pediatric catheter that would push bubbles through my heart.  She attached three small syringes to the tiny needle and left the room again.

            “Why the bubbles,” I asked Nadia.

            “We need to see if something has been broken,” she said.  “We can see the bubbles going through if there are holes.  It will look like lace if it is broken.”

            To see if something has been broken.  Could it be that broken hearts could actually break hearts?  I remembered sitting in my friend Lynn’s living room in a rocker, no I think the chair was steady, retro polka dots. I was the rocker; the chair my anchor to the earth. 

            “It hurts,” I said, arms so tightly around my chest they nearly met in the back.  “Oh God, it hurts.”

            “I know,” she said.  “It’s awful.” 

            Could I at that aching moment have burst a stitch, unraveled a tiny creation stitch that bubbles can now go through? 

            I remember my ancient neighbor when I was a child, Mrs. Lee, tatting on the front porch.  She tatted lace for pillowcases and summer dresses.  She made me a set for my first wedding.  She could catch up any dropped stitch no matter how much time had passed.  Where was she when I needed her?

            “You are being very brave,” Nadia said.  I teared up a little. “Not brave,” I said.  “Yes, brave,” she said.

            I thought of all the centuries of brave women.  I thought of Queen Dido flinging herself from the great cliffs near Carthage.  Was she defying patriarchy?  Was she succumbing to a broken heart?  It depends on whom you read.  I thought of Perpetua and Felicity in the arena facing down the mad heifer, pinning up each other’s hair so no one would think they were grieving.  And of Rosa Parks who was just bone tired.  And all the ones before, between and after who somehow knew the power of a woman’s protest, of a woman’s blood.

            Does that power still flow through my maybe lacey heart?  Are there worlds yet for me to shape?  Words yet for me to tat together?

            “You are having a good day,” Nadia said as I gathered my things and left the room.  “Best luck to you.”

            “Thank you,” I said.  “And to you.”

            And now we are home.  The long drive is done for this week.  Robbie, the man who stitched up my broken heart is lying beside me playing solitaire on his cell phone. 

            “You were brave today,” he says, not looking up from the screen. Again I get a little teary.

            “I am brave,” I think and say a small prayer of thanks to God for Robbie and for the woman with the impossible eyes.

            Who has reminded you that you are brave?