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Ava’s Fainting Brain

Patrick Douglas Legay

    It was easy to get thinking of the sick as just shit-bags in need of emptying. Hospital work was mostly shit work, and so much of it.
    At first I didn’t clue in to how careful I had to be with the horizontals who were heading to the big way out. Like Ava. Apparently, she had suffered some bad fainting spells and when they got around to really checking her out, taking the pictures, they saw that big, tangly spot on her brain. By the time I got to meet her on the ward, she was bedridden, a radiated skeleton. But even so, apart from all that, something about her was beautiful and it didn’t seem like anybody else saw it.

    When I came in to check her fluids, she would smile and wave and softly clap her hands, reach for her phone, snap a few shots of me, and show me pics of myself leaning over her with different filters applied and explain whether she thought the light looked good or bad, and which she might delete or keep.
    She said she used to take photos on a real camera but not much came of it, no fame or fortune, just a few magazines, and she taught it — old school photography — and that’s how she lived until they closed the program and now she was living with her son. She was supposed to be babysitting them but her grandchildren had to keep calling her son’s work because Ava’d be dropping out on the floor.

    This one time I sat in the chair near her bed as if I had come in for a visit and she took pics of me and told me all about it. Another time I was switching out her bag quietly, professional, while she was pretending to sleep and she woke and said she didn’t hear nothing, I didn’t wake her, she just could tell I was there.
    So I sat and talked with her after I got done with her paraphernalia, and she told me, quietly, like a secret only between us, how she was now sure (pretty damn sure after lying there watching for so long) that this wasn’t a hospital, and that there was a grand story of all, a god’s eye view, but it only existed like any other story existed as an ordering of thoughts in people’s heads, and we act like it’s something that exists in the world but it doesn’t, like hospitals don’t exist, for example: We think of them as their own whole thing that have an address and a sign and an architecture, people work there, it’s a place, but they’re not their own thing other than us acting it out, playing hospital, and so accordingly we make it, like when the doctors, who are just like any old people when it comes down to it, come here and behave a certain way, and the same for the nurses and the patients and the orderlies and the grandchildren and the people that install and maintain the equipment, every one of us acting like people cannot be healed without being treated as clinical, and even in the moments when we act differently, like if I were to kiss you, and pull you on to this bed with me, even then this would still be a fucking hospital room.
    I gasped, she laughed softly, took in some very fast breaths and then fainted.

    I pressed the button and went out into the hall shouting for the doctors. They came and acted out their work and later I heard from the nurse that Ava’s poor brain was dying so they might just go ahead and try removing the mass surgically which would either save her, leave her in a coma, or kill her.
    Ava’s family came to speak with the doctors. They never said much to me except hello and maybe thanks, and days later when she finally woke I could hear her voice talking with the nurses and her family and when I got up the guts to go in to do my part she smiled through the bandages and thanked me and let me know how tired she was and I told her not to worry and just rest up.
    Apparently, when her tests were looking even better than expected, the doctors sent her home, and it was only a couple days later when the nurse told me all about this new self-shitting wrinkly now in Ava’s bed.

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