When the Lights Go Out(41)

The job is at the hospital. The position is in billing as a medical coder, one I have ample experience in after all those years working for a pediatrician in Green Bay. And so now, I spend eight hours a day reading through patient files to figure out what they’re to be billed for; I enter data; I submit to insurance companies; I mail invoices to patients. It feels good to be doing something with my days, to be earning an income.

And yet the position comes with its fair share of downsides too.

Yesterday as I sifted through patient files, I came across a little girl, a toddler killed in an auto-ped accident. In other words, she wandered into the street when her mother wasn’t looking and was hit by a passing car on the roadway, a four-lane highway that cut right through town. The little girl (and though I, myself, never laid eyes on her, I conjured her up in my mind anyway, her tiny, broken frame still clad in a pair of denim overalls with blood-stained pigtails in her light brown hair) was transported to our hospital by ambulance, and there, received a multitude of treatments, from a CT scan to assess brain damage, to an operation to control internal bleeding and swelling in the brain. A decompressive craniectomy, as was noted in the extensive patient chart. There were blood transfusions. She was on narcotics for pain. An anesthesiologist was called to deliver a local anesthetic to put her to sleep for the surgery. The surgery itself lasted six hours, and each of these items came with an exorbitant price tag, one the family’s shoddy insurance company was loath to pay. For six tortuous hours while the little girl’s mother, I can only imagine, sat on a chair in the waiting room, biting her nails to the quick, a neurosurgeon, along with a team of doctors and nurses and scrub techs, removed part of the girl’s brain to allow room for the swelling inside.

Still, she died.

By the time the paperwork made it to me in coding and billing, it had been days since the angels carried her away. Her mother no longer stood within the hospitals’ walls, sobbing for her child. Her body had been removed from the morgue, transported to the funeral home, buried in the ground.

And yet for me, it’s a fresh wound. One that will stay with me for a long time to come. As I typed the billing codes into the system, I cried for a little girl I’ve never met, tears snaking down my eyes and onto the computer keys, knowing that she will never truly be anything more than a name and a social security number to me, but still it makes me cry, grieving for someone I don’t know, consumed with the unwanted knowledge that healthy little girls—like the sick and the elderly—die too.

But there are perquisites to the job too.

I wear a name badge that gains me access to every nook and cranny in the whole entire hospital, including the birthing center, where I can watch newborn babies being tended to in the nursery, lying immobile in their rolling bassinets, bundled like burritos with knitted hats on their perfectly pink and misshapen heads. I didn’t seek them out—in fact, I swore to myself that I would abstain from visiting the newborn babies—but I saw them anyway when a pair of grandparents-to-be stopped me in the hall and asked the way to labor and delivery. I had no choice but to lead them there, to steer them through the mazelike hospital halls, through the double doors and into the unit where the newborn babies caught my eye.

And now I stand there for what feels like hours, staring through glass, coming to terms with my fait accompli. No workday passes without at least one visit to the nursery room and as I sit at my desk coding patient files, it’s all I can think about, seeing those babies. Getting my fix. I’ve come to know the nurses now—thanks to the frequency of my visits. They address me by name, sometimes holding up the newest infants so I can see their puffy, half-closed eyes, their still-bowed legs from being cramped inside a warm, cozy uterus, their cone-shaped heads from being suctioned through their mother’s vaginal canal and into the world.

When they ask, I tell them I’m training to be a nursery room nurse myself, that I’m in the process of earning my associates’ degree in nursing and, that as soon as I do, I’m going to apply for a job here, in our hospital’s nursery room. I tell them I come to watch and learn, to see how the experts do it. I flatter the nurses so they don’t think it odd that I spend every free second away from billing and coding staring at babies who are not mine. They smile and say how fantastic that is and sometimes, if I’m really lucky, they sneak me inside so I can stroke the soft skin of a tiny babe.

Though that, of course, isn’t the real reason I come.





jessie

It’s not yet ten in the morning when I leave the Pughs’ home. The day stretches out before me like the Sahara, massive and deserted and dry. And now I’m even more agitated than I was before, all nervous energy with nothing to do. Nowhere to go. No one to talk to.

I carry with me in my bag a printout of the newspaper article I found on the Pughs’ laptop, grateful when Mrs. Pugh called down the hall that she was stepping out for a bit, and I was able to send it to the printer without her hearing me. Because if I knew one thing, it was that I needed to take the article with me.

I hop on Old Faithful and ride. I turn aimlessly, unplanned at each intersection, my head lost in the clouds. I move in circles so that three times I pass by the very same delicatessen without meaning to. I speak to Mom. I ask her questions about my lack of a birth certificate, my missing social security card, the girl in the article. Who is she, and what does she have to do with me? Does she have anything to do with me? Tell me, Mom, I scream in my head. Tell me!