The Big Day, Part 2

The surgery will take less than two hours. Joe stays at the hospital while Misha and I go get something to eat. We decide on Los Polomas, mostly because it’s close, but also because they have margaritas. We sit outside in the shade. It's only 90 degrees and feels cool compared to the 98-degree scorcher the day before. We order our drinks – frozen for her, on the rocks for me – and although I hate to see anything go to waste, I can’t finish but half of mine.

It’s been about an hour by the time we get back. Misha drops me off and leaves to run a few errands; I find Joe upstairs in the waiting room, asleep on a loveseat, Allison’s shirt bunched up under his head. When he wakes up we talk for a while, not about anything in particular. It’s nice. Given the mayhem three teenage boys and Joy manage to produce around their house, we don’t usually find ourselves in a position to just sit and talk.

Suddenly Dr. Slater is before us. He sits in his dark blue scrubs and says that everything went well. Perfect, no problems, Allison did great. She’s already in recovery. A nurse will come out and get you soon. He has his bag with him – I assume after four procedures, he’s finished for the day – so we shake hands, thank him, and bid farewell. Then we wait. Misha comes back and we tell her we spoke to Slater.


We wait. We’re anxious. A nurse finally calls out “Allison Gay?” I pick up my ‘camera bag’ with one hand – a canvas tote Allison lent me with her name embroidered on the side, in bright orange – and with the other hand, I grab the hard case carrying my three wireless microphones. Joe and I walk back to recovery, which happens to be the area just outside the curtained-off pre-op room she was in earlier. (It’s a small hospital.) Allison’s lying down, still hooked up to her IV, her head back, her eyes closed. She doesn’t look so hot. I don’t tell her this. (Okay, she looked fine, considering, but she looked like she was in a LOT of pain.) I smile and rub her feet. She can barely open her eyes. I'm reminded of a picture of myself: I’m standing in my living room, my midwife supporting me on one side, and Rob on the other – hour 33 of my labor with Tallulah.

Leaving the Hospital

I return to the waiting room to switch places with Misha. She goes back and I sit down and pull out my notebook. Before I can even get a pen in my hand, though, my mother’s walking toward me saying that it’s time for Allison to go home. Huh? She’s only been in recovery, I don’t know, 20 minutes. Misha shrugs, shakes her head, goes to get the car. I gather up my things and go back through the doors that say 'Hospital Personnel Only'. Joe and I follow the nurse who pushes Allison in a wheelchair. Misha and the car are waiting when we come outside. Allison, still delirious, reaches up to a spot on her neck just under the incision. She pulls her hand away and there’s blood on it. The nurse dabs it with gauze. Needless to say, we feel a little rushed.

At home in bed, she’s in excruciating pain. It still hurts too bad to open her eyes, and the pain medicine prescribed to her, hydrocodone, doesn’t seem to be working. Not that this is exactly surprising – no one said transforming into a cyborg would be easy. It’s just that the doctors and nurses had so much to say about the nausea. Yes, she’s nauseated, but nausea pales in comparison to feeling like your skull’s been cracked open. Should we call the hospital? Dr. Slater? Allison decides just to take another dose. Not too long after, she’s feeling a little better. She can at least open her eyes and speak.

I take the kids to buy flowers for Allison. They were worried when they first saw her come in the house and go upstairs to her room, especially since Joe was carrying her. I don’t think they knew exactly what was going on, but they certainly knew something was very, very different about the way she was acting, the way we were all acting, for that matter. And we were acting different in a wrong way, not in a happy-let’s-party way. We all reassured them that Allie is just feeling bad and needs to rest, but kids know far more than what we tell them.

At Whole Foods, the kids fight over who gets which flowers, but soon it's settled: Joy chooses white roses, Tallulah chooses red roses, and Finn picks yellow.

Recovery begins.