I never should have left Vegas. I don't say that because something traumatic happened once I moved to California, I say that because what happens in Vegas, is supposed to stay in Vegas. However, much like gambling debt and STDs, I can follow you home. I oftentimes wonder how different my life would be if I'd never left my tourist-infested birthplace. Chances are, I'd be an entirely different person with different interests and characteristics. But knowing my luck, I'd probably be exactly the same. Only tanner. And more dehydrated. Possibly addicted to gambling.
Sometimes, though, I wonder if I'd still be sick if I had never moved. Maybe the lack of oxygen on the plane over the Sierras resulted in killing a few important brain cells in the anterior cingulate cortex (the part of your brain commonly linked to eating disorders- which means mine is fucked up). Ignoring this possible airline contributor, it seems I was predisposed to living a life plagued with the mental illness with the single highest mortality rate (Why couldn't I have developed that disorder where you spontaneously speak in various accents from countries you've never visited?). Lucky me happens to be a grade A example of a textbook anorexic- perfectionistic, female, low self-esteem, a deep-seeded need to please others, etc.
"I don't understand why she's doing this." My mother tearfully said to the on-staff weekend therapist my first full day there. "She's such a smart girl."
"Ha." The women laughed as she leaned back in her chair that she'd pulled up next to my bed. "Most girls here are. Straight A, honor roll. It's the high expectations that get them."
I hadn't met any of the other girls in the ward yet, being on bedrest and having the bed next to me suspiciously empty. I'd seen one boy being wheeled out past my door, followed by a parade of get well balloons and family members as he was escorted to freedom. He threw up a peace sign and smiled reasurringly at me, but I could only stare back blankly. He was the only boy the ward had seen in the past year, I'd later learn, and the only one that I would see during my stay.
Other than my brief encounter with the nameless boy, I'd seen other patients, but hadn't yet spoken to them. Being on bedrest, I wasn't allowed to eat meals with the others until I got wheelchair clearance, so while I ate my mountainous pile of peanut butter toast, granola, and soy yogurt in bed, the rest of the girls filed past my room in their wheelchairs and stared at me as they did so. While we were allowed our own clothes in the ward, all of us stuck with the "pajama pants and t shirt with a messy bun" look, since at this point in our lives, we seemed to seperately and unianimously decide that rock bottom didn't have a formal dress code. All the girls, although they had varying ethnicities and ages, looked very similar. Small, frail. Sunken in like shriveled old women. My room was across the hall from the dining room with only the nurse's reception desk seperating us, so they all stared at me through the small window and through my open door as they ate. One waved. I didn't.
"Why are they staring at me?" I asked my mother as she fluttered around the room, wiping things down with industrial-strength bleach wipes that recquired you to wear gloves, lest they burn through your skin.
"Maybe they want to be your friend."
"Sure. I'm sure they're super fun." I replied dryly.
"You don't even know them yet. Here, Colleen gave me this for you." She handed me a pink piece of paper. On it was the ward's schedule.
Breakfast- 8:00-9:00
Group Activity
Lunch- 12:45-1:45
Group Activity
Snack- 2:30-3:00
Free Time
Dinner- 5:45-6:45
Evening Snack- 8:00-8:15
A note on the bottom informed me that "Group Activity" could mean anything from meditiation to art therapy to acting class. Free time had to be supervised, but for the most part, we could decide what we wanted to do. If family was visiting (and for me, they always were, as my mother slept on the sad pullout next to my bed) they could wheel you out onto the balcony or into the "Family Room", but I was still on bedrest, so I was restricted to the confines of my bed until my vitals improved. Which, I was informed, would only happen if I ate as much as possible and moved as little as possible. This meant no: showering, face washing, teeth brushing, and unsupervised bathroom use. It was equal parts depressing and dehumanizing. And gross.
With my sudden surplus of bedtime, I found myself watching an awful lot of shitty hospital movies. I was in such an emotionally distressed state that I actually felt an emotional connection to the 'Katy Perry Movie'. When I wasn't watching the free to rent movies or calling relatives to assure them that I was still alive, I was crying. And if I wasn't crying alone, I was crying to any hospital staff that would listen. The aforementioned Colleen was a sweet, older woman who was the perfect nurse to be assigned to on your first day.
"Sweetie Pea," she said when I cried over peanut butter toast, "Think of yourself like a car. If you don't put energy into your car, nothing good is gonna come out of it, huh, sugar? Now, I know you don't wanna be here, trust me hun, none of the girls wanna be here, but you gotta make the best of it. I believe in ya, Sweetie Pea."
The days of bedrest all blur together in my head, since there's only so much of a difference you can feel between day and night when you insist that your mother keep the blinds closed at all times. The only determinable way to know were by the meals, visiting therapists, and rotating night/day shift nurses who checked your vitals every hour on the hour (unless you got an easily distractable one, who sometimes neglected to check your pulse for an entire day). But eventually, on my daily doctor's visit by the not-as-nice-as-doctor-Aubwan-weekday-doctor Dr. Lee, I was given the okay to be loaded into a wheelchair and pushed around by my mother to the various group activites.
My first group activity was Art Therapy, and since I ate quickly and without the other girls that morning, I was the first in the room, under the watchful eye of a nurse. It was an oddly warm room, since most of us in the wing suffered from perpetual coldness, and it was filled with an abundance of schoolroom art supplies. Buckets of paint, glitter glue, and scraps of paper covered every surface, and the room smelled like a preschool. But somehow, I took comfort in the simplicity of it all. Art was something I'd always used as a security blanket, and doodles covered everything I owned (if you happen to stay in my bed at LP, I may or may not have Sharpied something on the hand railing).
Eventually, the girls came in, one by one, some in wheelchairs, some without. They clustered around me and began asking me questions excitedly.
"What's your name? I'm Natalie." A blonde girl with her hair in a ridiculously high ponytail asked. The girls began to list off their names.
"I'm Kaylee."
"I'm Dulce."
"I'm Stephanie."
"I'm Lindsay."
The way they spouted off their names made me half expect the chorus to end with "...and we're the Powerpuff Girls!", or some equivalent. "I'm Maris."
"How old are you?" Natalie asked, as she was, apparently, the leader of this Island of Malnourished Toys.
"Fourteen."
"Oh good, most of us are about that age. Except Lindsay, she's twelve. But the rest of us are freshman. You got here a few days ago, huh? Just get on wheelchair today?"
"Uh," she talked so fast it was almost hard to keep up, "Yeah. This is my first Group Activity."
"Ugh, prepare for the worst. Esther runs Art Therapy." Kaylee, a petite brunette, said from her wheelchair that she was standing on, completely defeating the purpose of it.
"I'm pretty sure she's blind." Said Stephanie, an exceptionally tall and blonde girl who reminded me of a bird.
"She's not blind, dork. She had her pupils dialated last week and liked the glasses they gave her to filter the sunlight out, so she wears them all the time now." Quipped the Latina girl who'd introduced herself as Dulce. She was, undoubtedly the thinnest girl in the ward, and it was, admittedly, an unsettling sight. She turned to me and said, "Ay, chica. He hablado con su madre. ¿Gusta lo aquí?"
"Sorry," I said, feeling ethnically inadequate, "My mom never taught me to speak Spanish. Sólo sé un poco de la escuela."
"Oh, sorry. I just assumed."
A large woman wearing the long, rectangular glasses I'd only ever seen the blind wear burst into the room, holding buckets of liquid glue, starch, and newspaper. She appeared to be the Einstein of art teachers, with hair she must have styled after the genius himself it was so similar.
"You girls ready to start, mmkay?" She said as she slammed the tubs of glue onto the long wooden table in the center of the room.
The girls wheeled or shuffled into the chairs that surrounded the dining-room esque table. A paper plate was put in front of each of us, and newspapers were evenly distributed. "Today we're gonna be making snakes, mmkay?"
I was just beginning to notice Esther's annoying speech tendencies when she noticed me for the first time. "You must be the new one, mmkay?"
"Uh, yeah. Hi." The girls giggled around me for no apparent reason. This tends to happen when you have a room full of teenage girls, even crazy ones.
"You like art, mmkay?" She asked enthusiastically. I nodded and she continued. "Well we're gonna be making snakes, paper mache, mmkay? So you take a few large pieces and roll 'em up, mmkay? And that'll be your base, mmkay?"
She proceeded to demostrate how to make a rather sad looking paper mache snake, and we all half-heartedly followed suit. Considering that the class was titled "Art Therapy", I kept waiting for the therapy part to kick in. I thought that the snakes would end up being some metaphor for shedding our skin and starting anew, but at the end of the hour, Esther said we could either leave the snakes here, or put them in the "garden", with no mention of there being any point at all to the sticky and lackluster activity.
"There's a garden here?" I asked Natalie, since she seemed to know the most about the place.
"Well, kinda. It's just a balcony. I's big with fake grass and some lawn chairs, though. Sometimes, if it's nice, we get to eat out there. But that's only if there's only a few of us here, since they have to make sure we don't hide food in the potted plants or whatever." The babysitting nurse, who'd been playing some annoyingly loud iPhone game, looked up and gave Natasha a warning glace. Almost anything could be considered 'plotting' here, and it was defintely marked against you.
"Does your mom visit you a lot?" Stephanie asked. She always sounded like a girl at a sleepover who'd stayed up too late- silly and almost drunken.
"Her mama is always here, chica." Dulce said. "She's a good momma to have."
Dulce was much older than us, I'd learned. Seventeen, almost eighteen. I'd also learned that this wasn't her first time here, and she hadn't come back in the best circumstances. When she'd arrived this time around, they didn't think she'd ever make it to wheelchair, let alone go home again. And yet, through what her mother attributed to nothing short of a Catholic miracle, she'd started to improve. It turned out that Dulce and I had something in common. In the Mexican Catholic tradition, it was common to "give something up" in order to get something out of God. Her mother had given up her shoes for a year, my grandmother had informed me via phonecall that in return for my speedy recovery, she'd given up something she wouldn't reveal to me or my mother.
When I saw Dulce's mother walk down the hallway barefoot, pushing the frail Dulce out of the art room, I saw in her smile my grandmother. And for the first time since I'd arrived, I felt guilt where I usually felt bitterness.