The sixth floor of River Bend Sacred Heart Hospital feels like its own little world, a bubble within a bubble within what passes for a metropolis in these parts, greater Eugene/Springfield. Hang a louie from one bank of elevators and you’ll find yourself in the neurology ward; a roger will deliver you into the Oregon Rehabillitation Center, or ORC as you’ll come to colloquially call it in no time at all. Over the last couple months I’ve had occasion to get to know both wings of the 6th floor–not as the patient, myself, but as some Frankenstein version of caregiver, cheerleader, and general third-wheel-in-the-way while my sister fights her way back from the profound ischemic stroke that she suffered in January.

Across nearly seven weeks, she dutifully pioneered my widespread access to the hospital at large: floors two (surgery, not to mention the cafeteria), four (ICU), double-dip-on-six (neurology and ORC), and seven (oncology…yet a whole ‘nother tale) are yes, yes, yess, and yes. Uh, Bingo, I guess?? Woohoo! Never let a tough situation rob you of ability to celebrate the little victories.

I find the hospital stairwell fairly early on; I descend and ascend those flights daily, sometimes hourly, to reap what small exercise I can from the stagnancy of bedside hand-wringing but I cop to a deeper vanity as well. The elevators are populated with visitors but the stairwells are heavily traversed by the doctors, the caregivers, the professionals. The little smile and nod exchanged by two someones on those stairs feels akin to seeing someone in the wild reading the same book you are. It’s a club, and for that brief moment in time, I’m in it. That I am but an imposter doesn’t even remotely cheapen the feeling in real time.

The ORC feels calm, determined even. Premeditated and intentional: this is the business of getting better. The Neurology ward is more hectic. There are more doctors darting in and out of rooms, more machinations of beeping and booping. Here there are answers, yes, but also many questions, and more questions to follow those. The nurses and CNAs hustle, nonstop; maybe there are fewer of them here, maybe there are just more activities to keep them occupied elsewhere. At one point we wait 40 minutes for someone to respond to the electronic page that my sister needs assistance. I don’t note this to begrudge them: if I have learned anything at all through this experience it is to hold a profound admiration of these professional caregivers. The nurses and therapists and certified nursing assistants give diligent, heartfelt–bordering on loving, at times–care to their wards. To my sister, at least. I won’t speak for the other patients. I’m guilty (self-awarely so) of being misanthropic and jaded but there are times in this hospital that I feel awash with an ethereal inspiration from bearing witness to the conscientious selflessness on display by this care team.

I develop a new crush every day it seems. Young, passionate nurses and CNAs swirl around me and I fall for their charms and sometimes they for mine, the stoic, performatively-helpful brother. First was H—-. Not much of a crush, but let’s go with it. She just has such a warm disposition and is so wonderful at her job and she’s the very first individual in all of this that treats my sister like a bonafide human being that I can’t help but develop an affection for her. The energy of these experiences is so intimate that the connections formed prove difficult to catalog into easy monikers. Nurse C——. Green but tall and pretty and full of earnestness. Later there’s a therapist M—–. She and I flirt shamelessly and it is all ok because we both know that she goes home to her fiancee and I go back to the bench in a hospital room and sometimes to have even one genuine twinkled eye in a day is reason enough. Of course, there’s L—–, also a therapist. I’m smitten, there. I’ve never found anything in this world more compelling than a person excelling at what they do. Worry not, I don’t make overtures at these young women in their workplace. But when you’re sad and overwhelmed and sleeping in the corner of a hospital room even imaginary intrigue can be a welcome lifeline to bind you with better days.

Painting with broad strokes: Doctors are dicks. In this story they certainly don’t fare well in comparison to the other caregiving heros. Largely men, they tend to be condescending, often unprepared for these “debriefs”, needing of gentle caresses to their egos all the while. (Maybe I should’ve been a doctor…I sound qualified.) There are exceptions. Dr. F—-. His blunt enthusiasm sweeps me up unfailingly. Dr. K—–. Ok, maybe not at the top of his game, but his habit of taking accidental screenshots whenever so much as touches his cell phone is endearing through and through. I’m not the patient, so endearing is a win sometimes. Endearing saves me from fixating on the inexplicably poor communication between the various specialized doctors, even after firm prompting and reminding. Dr. Y—- may well be a phenomenal surgeon but is forever relegated to my mental dog house (not that anyone is asking) due to communication standards that fall so utterly short of professional it boggles my mind. This is not fun hyperbole, my mind has been cast into a prison of bogglement. I ask myself, how are people not dying on her watch? Or are they?? Perhaps we can chalk up all the many rhetorical questions which litter my writing of late to this very prison. Let’s do that, and never look back.

How do you write about someone else’s traumas, when they aren’t really yours to tell? One way, I guess, is you make the story your own: you become the main character (see above). Maybe it is possible to do this without feeling like an emotional vulture but I certainly haven’t mastered it. The issue I’m trying to get at it is not just one of narrative voice–it is experiential. In this saga I am neither entirely a bystander nor at the true core of the crisis. Or is it the inverse, that I am both at the core and at the periphery? The latter feels more right to me, and more right that I’d believe it’s right because of course I’d think my domaine knows no bounds. Still, a funny thing about these kinds of protracted crises, one can feel caught in a ongoing, ill-advised toggle between losing your own sense of self entirely with the sense of having dug in your camp on someone else’s lawn. This is not my circus but at the same time, like, here I am, peanuts and all. I haven’t yet figured out how to reconcile that.

More: what is the equation for reconciling selfless actions rooted in selfish thought? Truth: I quit my job and abandoned my personal plans to come here, to meet this day. Truth: I am an unlikely caregiver because I feel no sympathy for the patient. I do feel laser focused on the work: the nitty gritty of the path of recovery. I see too much work to do in this room to give any space to empty sympathy. I really, deeply strive to believe I am living in a state of empathy, though there are moments of doubt there, too. Truth: both in-hospital and since discharge, nearly every minute of my every day is devoted to some aspect of care. Truth: I am a glutton for positive affirmation; here I go main-charactering the situation to lap up all those casually-dropped lauds like a starving puppy. At least a puppy completes the cycle of affirmation; I just feign indifference. Truth: I love my sister and want to preserve for her the possibility of a life that she is currently incapacitated to service, the hobby farm, the animals, the dreams of you-pick pumpkins and dahlias and all the rest. Truth: that dog is an asshole, those babydoll sheep pampered and purposeless, those chickens victims of their own squalor. I find the whole lot of them entirely without charm and find myself stupidly screaming obscenities at them in the pre-dawn dark some days. Sheesh, the duality of man, indeed. Truth: the patient has been robbed of life-as-she-thought-it-would-be. Truth: the selfish caregiver spends time decidedly not-thinking (and failing) about what toll this will exact on his life.

Truth: I’m doing this because this is the type of person that I want to be. Truth: I’m not sure that I actually am that type of person though. I also want to be Kris Kristofferson, but wanting doesn’t make it so.

So, onward we go. We’ve left the big top behind and have taken our circus on the road. It has been nice to be “home” but maybe we already miss the spectacle, the applause, the sweet/salty/savory morsels of easy affirmation and reward. Here there’s no one to say, “Careful, the wrong person sees you doing that and they’ll hire you,” or somesuch, no matter how many times I pick up a piece of trash or arrange the pillows just right. What’s that refrain then, the journey is its own reward? I guess if there’s one aspect of all this that I believe myself adequately suited for it is the ability to put my head down and focus on the composition of that journey–the step-by-step, day-by-day–without dwelling too, too much on parsing the end destination. That knowledge will be paid for with no other currency than time and effort. To paraphrase the best of Brooke’s doctors, nobody can predict with certainty the extent and timeline of her individual recovery (and the motivations of anyone who tries to sell a different story should be examined carefully). If that degree of uncertainty is unsettling to me, I can’t properly fathom what it must be like for her. Already, though, she has progressed further in her rehabilitation than early prognostications told us to expect, so we meet each day as new and focus on the variables we can control and only very occasionally write thousands of words on a blog page detailing the fissures of our own self doubt. I mean, measured solely in terms of word-per-day ratio of existential kvetching, I might just be doing better than ever!