Enjoy.No sooner had I taken my place by my boyfriend’s bedside than the woman across the ward started acting up again. She was a small woman with a chaos of grizzled gray hair, milky blue eyes, and wrinkled lips pursed in perpetual belligerence. When we’d come to see my boyfriend that afternoon, she’d dropped her pen on the floor and gotten tangled in her various wires and cords trying to lean down and pick it back up. An hour or so later a nurse, coming to check on her, found her IV sitting beside her on the hospital bed.
“Margery,” the nurse said reprovingly, “did you take your IV out?”
“No I did not!” the old woman declared. Across the ward, we giggled. “I fell asleep and it came out, just on its own.”
“I see. Well, it has to go back in, okay?” the nurse said. Her tone said she didn’t believe Margery’s story any more than we did. “Let me just put it back in for you.”
Now it was after nine o’clock, and the old woman was yelling at the nursing staff. Evidently she’d been tinkering with the many beeping machines at her bedside, for the voice of a male orderly rose above the rest:
“Those aren’t your things. Those are our things. This is the nurse’s station.”
As Margery croaked back at the orderly, my boyfriend’s sister whispered to me, “I think she’s having a conniption fit.”
I concurred. It was easy to picture flames shooting out Margery’s faded blue eyeballs as she shouted at the nursing staff.
The orderly who’d spoken before said very slowly, “You’re in the hospital.”
“I know!” the old woman snapped. “Don’t I know it! Don’t I know it!”
She knew it, but she certainly didn’t seem happy about it.
Driving home that night, I said, “That Margery. She’s a character. I’m glad she’s not my grandma. She hardly seems like the milk and cookies type.”
“She is kind of scary, what with all the yelling,” my boyfriend’s sister agreed. “But I want to bring her some flowers.”
What would she do if we brought her flowers? Probably scream at us and throw them in our faces, we decided. But no one had come to visit her the whole time we were there, either in the afternoon or evening, and we thought that was sad.
I stared out the window, thinking about that. How would it be, I wondered, to be in the hospital with no visitors? I pictured Margery sitting in her bed, her lips pursed, hearing soft laughter and speech from our side of the ward and on her own side only the beeping of the machines and the steady slow drip of the IV.
The day of my boyfriend’s release, we stopped at Meijer to buy a bouquet for him and one for Margery. At the hospital we told him: She’ll probably just throw it at us. Still we were determined – but we put it off while my boyfriend ate lunch and changed out of his hospital gown. It’s no easy thing to bring flowers to a stranger, especially an old woman who pulls out her IV and yells at the nursing staff. At last my boyfriend’s sister took a deep breath and went over to her.
“Hi,” she said. “I brought you some flowers.”
I crossed my fingers.
The old woman’s lips parted in surprise, and the wrinkled face relaxed. Now she almost did look like the milk and cookies type.
“Oh, they are pretty,” she said. “Oh, aren’t they pretty! Thank you, honey, they’re lovely.”
“You’re welcome,” my boyfriend’s sister said, and she joined me on the other side of the ward.
She liked them! we whispered to each other. Broad smiles spread across our faces as we peered out from behind our curtain, watching her smell the flowers and straighten them in their wrappings. A nurse went to check on her and said, “Margery, did you get flowers? That’s nice, isn’t it? Do you want me to put them in water for you?”
“Yes, please,” said Margery. She gave up her bouquet long enough for it to be put in a vase, but once she got it back she kept it in her lap, gazing down at it in quiet contentment.
Wow, I thought. Look at that.
“Look how happy she is!” my boyfriend’s sister said. “Look how happy we made her!”
Finally my boyfriend was discharged. As we turned to leave, supporting him on our shoulders, the nurses said, one by one, “Thank you so much for bringing flowers for Margery.”
We didn’t save the rainforest – we didn’t feed starving children in Africa. But between the nurses’ thanks and the look on Margery’s face, I started feeling like maybe we’d made a difference.