The Translator- Chapter One: Eyes

My brother lies in a hospital bed in the peri-operative care unit of Vancouver’s General Hospital.
He has not shaven today, so a thick shadow has settled across his cheeks and the slight jowls that he can’t seem to lose.

He’s wearing the standard blue gown with ties at the back and snaps down one shoulder. The sleeves are short. A skeleton riding a motorcycle peaks out from his left sleeve. By this point, someone has already told him to put on the head cap.

A nurse comes to verify his chart and begins the usual questions. He’s flirty with her, trying to make jokes when he can. She laughs and keeps on with her questions. Any crowns or partial plates, birthdate.

“Have you ever threatened to hurt anyone?” she asks.

I laugh nervously from the chair beside his bed.

“No,” he says with a relaxed voice, with no tension in his brow. He doesn’t touch his nose or shift away from her gaze.

She doesn’t ask how he got here, or how the faint scars on his knuckles can be explained.

What he means to say is that he certainly has threatened to harm people, many people, even his shit heel father, but this fight wasn’t his fault.

And also that yes, if you, as a youngish Asian woman who’s used to getting hit on by suddenly vulnerable men in nightgowns, if you feel a tingle that this one might grit his teeth when you put in a line, or come out swinging from the anaesthetic, you’re on the right track.

I’m not a confessor here. I don’t have to tell her what he means. I’m not an interpreter. I don’t have to warn her. But I will.

“Just a sec,” I interrupt as he spins another one for her, answering “Five ten,” to her height query.

“I think you’re asking that harm question because sometimes people react badly to anaesthetic and become violent, right? Our mother had that reaction.”

I feel better for saying it, some degree of relief from warning them without giving away his secrets.

The nurse turns to me, “How long ago was this?”

I sneak a look at my brother, expecting to see an I told you so face, but he doesn’t even look at me.

“It was about five years ago. Our mom had anaesthetic, and she struggled, you know.” I gesture like someone fighting to get away. “I just mention it in case it’s hereditary.”

Don’t ask anymore. God, move on.

I’ve never personally seen anyone react badly to anaesthetic. When my mother was sedated, I’m not entirely sure what came first, the anaesthetic or what the resident had described as “combative behaviour”. It was the only time she ever went to the hospital without me, so I missed the show, how she fought against the paramedics and told them to just let her go home and die. When I arrived at the hospital, she was unconscious and being dialysed. I was not allowed in to see her for hours.

“How long ago was this?” the nurse asks again.

“Oh I don’t know, five years ago?” I say. Five years sounds better than three for some reason.

She closes the chart and places it on my brother’s bed, then releases the foot break. I wonder if my confession means that they will restrain him.

I lean over the bed and kiss the part of his brow left exposed by the too generous cap. His forehead is cool and clammy with nervousness.

While he is in surgery, they will make a small incision in the perpetual bag under his right eye. Through the incision, they will insert a plastic shim on the floor of his eye socket, to prevent his eye from sinking further into his head. The shim will prop his right eye up, hopefully even with his normal eye. The surgeon describes it as cosmetic, which I guess it is, if you consider wanting to look like you did last week to be a definition of cosmetic.

“Have it done,” I’d told him when he was hedging. “Let’s be honest, dude, you’re kind of a vain guy, and if you walk around looking like Igor for the rest of your life, you’re going to be unhappy.” He’d nodded, but it took the resident surgeon assuring him that no, they don’t take your eye out of its socket during the surgery, before he’d agree.

It’s our family phobia; you go in for eye surgery, and the doctors take your eyeball right out of your head. Like a leechee nut popped out of its skin or a hardboiled egg freed from the false promise of its protective shell.

Almost ten years ago, when my mother had cataract surgery, she had been terrified. Not a very serious surgery, just a trading in of a failing lens for a synthetic one. But as doctors love to say, it was not without risks. For my mother, whose degenerative nerve disease had already robbed her of the ability to hear, the risk of losing another sense was terrifying. I tried to sell her on the idea: only local anaesthetic on the surface of the eye itself, no need for glasses anymore! Home in hours!

But you are awake throughout it.

She came out of surgery shaking and crying. Drowsy grannies twenty years older than her lay quietly in the surrounding beds. “They took my eyeball out of my head!” She nearly shouted. “I felt it on my cheek, it was terrible. Oh my God.”

I asked the nurse if this was true and she said it’s not part of the surgery at all. I spoke slowly and deliberately so Mom could read my lips. “Mom, they did not take your eyeball out of your head.” This didn’t seem to calm her, the dream or hallucination held more sway than I could.

The family phobia might be my fault. When I was born, my eyes were weak. I had poor muscle control, one eye doing most of the work, while the other gazed vacantly in another direction. The layman’s term is “lazy eye”, though I don’t think that is fair. Neither of my eyes was lazy, more like co-dependent. When one eye tired of doing all the work, the other eye took up the task of focussing and let the tired eye rest. I had amazing control, and could switch eyes at will. It was only when I got upset that my eyes became uncontrollable, crying taking all precedence and both eyes sliding to the outer edge of each ellipse. My mother never let me cry long, setting us up for a parent-child dynamic that promised, at least for my early years, I would be protected from grief as much as motherly possible.

I suppose the problem of my lazy eyes was seen as more than cosmetic, because I was taken from our small town in northern Ontario to the Sick Children’s Hospital in Toronto three times in attempts to have the problem fixed. I saw eye specialists who ran tests and as my mother liked to tell neighbours, I was written about in medical journals. The first child of my age group to be given a new, more radical surgery to correct my strabismus, a surgery that promised quicker recovery time, but required that instead of simply rotating the eye and making an incision in the top muscle of the eye, the entire orb be taken out of its socket and the extra-ocular muscle be shortened.

I don’t know for certain that my mother had the story right. She did not get copies of any medical journals with stories of my surgery. I am doubtful that any doctor, having to repeat the same surgery three times, would want to publish results that must be seen as a failure.

I don’t remember the surgery, though I have foggy memories of hiding behind my mother’s legs while she spoke to a woman in a white coat. Across the hallway, there was small playground with a plastic slide shaped like a dinosaur, but no children played on it. I remember later being extremely thirsty and convincing another child to sneak into the kitchenette on our floor to get me some apple juice. I recall a sign being placed around my neck that read “Please do not give me any food or drink”. These are my only memories of surgery.

But my mother is gone now, and I have no more chances to challenge her on this story of my life. So for now, the family story goes that I had my eye taken out of its socket and placed on my cheek while they snipped and then sewed my eye muscles back slightly tauter and therefore easier to control.

The family story is etched in both me and my brother, and explains why he needed the resident surgeon to assure him that for a broken orbital, there was no need to put the eye out of its socket.

While the surgeons are shimming my brother’s eye, I kill time near the hospital grounds, shopping for a sweater because the day has grown colder. When I’d left my apartment at five this morning, I was sure that the cloud would burn off by noon, as is often the case in this city. Instead, the cloud lingers, and is now joined by a cold wind that seeps through my spring jacket.

In a clothing shop on Granville Street, a posh portion of the street called the Granville Rise, a young sales clerk interrupts my browsing by asking me how my day is going so far. I’m irritated because I know my answer will dampen her morning and I’m old enough to think she needs to learn a lesson in reading body language. So I tell her I am waiting for my brother to get out of surgery. She apologies and I leave the shop, the perfect black sweater still on the rack, further education for the sales girl on the consequences of prying.

When I return to the hospital, my brother is already awake. He is sitting up in his hospital bed, his eyes wide as he can make them through the swelling. Under his eyes, the bags have gone blackish. He’s leaning forward slightly, like his head has more intention than his body is yet capable of executing.

“I slept for a while, but now I can’t.” He sounds puzzled and worried.

“What time is it?” He asks me, even though he seems focussed on a large wall clock. “They said I have to stay here until two. But I just want to get the fuck out of here.”

He is breathing heavy, the beeps of his heart rate picking up. His blood oxygen is rising and falling every few breaths.

If I was a nurse, I would give him some Ativan. But the nurse chuckles at my suggestion. Ativan is for quitters, I imagine is the subtext of her tongue click. This nurse, a blond woman in her mid-forties, doesn’t know our family history. She removes the nasal prongs from my brother’s nose and he relaxes.

My brother and I know Ativan. When our mother was officially dying, she moved to a hospice. My brother and I packed her entire apartment, even her medicine cabinet. She had blister packs jammed full of pills, small windows into a medley of pain medication and anti-emetics. We found an assortment of half-finished weeks that were empty until Wednesday or Thursday, each unfinished pack a pharmaceutical document of a week when the hospital’s pharmacy took over. Since her Ativan was only for “as needed”, it couldn’t be put in the blister packs with her Prozac and heartburn medicine. So my brother and I split the bottle of Ativan before we dropped the rest off to the drug mart for safe disposal. We left a bottle of T3s untouched as further cover for absconding with the Ativans.

On my mother’s last day of consciousness, she asked for Ativan. As the world closed in around her and she told us that it was time, my mother took at least three doses. It was given freely, as any comfort measures are in palliative medicine. Many hours later, as her body slowly shut down, and her breathing became primal, like a baby bird in a shoebox, the bright green of the Ativan lined the cracks of her mouth. It formed bright green bubbles over her lips.

My mother did not die quickly. From the time she said to my brother, “it’s time, call your sister back,” to those final foamy green gasps, she laboured toward her death for almost twenty four hours. Not to make that sound quick, it was twenty four hours of nearly any minute now. It was thousands of minutes of don’t leave, don’t sleep, after all this, don’t miss the end.

But she was a bit early. She had a goal we had all come to believe in; my mother was intent on leaving this life on the anniversary of her own mother’s death. So when she said “it’s time” and it was just one day before Grannie’s deathday, we said ok, she pretty much made it, and when nine o’clock came, and my mother had been breathing only once every forty five second for hours already, we congratulated her on making it to midnight Eastern Standard Time, like her body was wise to time zones and knew that she’d made it to Grannie’s anniversary.

Her sisters sang Koombaya and other camp fire songs and held her limp hands which had become oddly warm. We lay down beside her in shifts, someone always at her side to press the pain medication dispenser as soon as it would allow another dose.

In the morning she was still with us. Still the slow breath. By now her eyes, which had remained open and unblinking, were foggy like a fish left in the seafood case too long. My brother sent her sisters home, promising to call if there was any change.

But we were selfish too. We wanted to be alone with her when she died. Her sisters had known her as a girl, but it was me and my brother who had raised her, made her an adult, and we wanted to be alone with her.

More hours passed. Sleep was an old memory for me. I begged the nurse to describe any changes to be watching for, “I need to know she is actually dying, that this is going to end”. She told me to watch for my mother’s extremities to go cold, as the blood retreated to the core and circulation shut down. She said that we could expect her arms to start to blacken from poor circulation.

Aside from vigilance, we coached her. “Come on Crazy Lady, let go. Go to the light. Your mother is waiting.” I reminded her of her hippy stories of astral travelling, that she should just start to disengage from her body. I told her to start with her feet.

In her final breaths, I held my hand over her heart and pressed. My brother stared at me in wonder, or maybe horror. I didn’t press hard enough to stop her breath, but just enough to give her chest something to resist. It had occurred to me that she probably needed to fight, even now.

They made us wait five minutes before they would call her time of death. Those moments were terrifying. Why would they wait? What if she did start breathing again? There are no heroic measures in the hospice. No ventilators or paddles to shock a person back to life. But what if through her sheer will, she just gasped again and announced she would not leave until she saw grandchildren, until we sorted out world peace?

When I got home from the hospice, my mother’s belongings gaping from more bags than I could carry, I took two of her Ativans and went to bed. It was four in the afternoon. My friends told me later that there was a terrible thunderstorm that evening. One friend who loved my mother well, told me he took it as a sign of her passing. But I heard nothing. I slept for fourteen hours without waking.

Less than a year later, I didn’t expect to be beside my brother’s bedside, helping him repair the damage of a very bad bar fight. I thought those pivotal experiences had changed us both. I expected he would take better care of himself, and avoid hospitals whenever possible.

When I’d called my brother days before, I was calling to invite him out for dinner. Maybe I had also called to tell him that my boyfriend had just dumped me. But this matter seemed more urgent, and so he received neither piece of information, just an offer to go with him for his surgery. His voice was muffled. It sounded like he had a mouthful of marbles. He explained there were stitches in his lower lip, but no teeth were lost. He said I could come with him to the hospital if I wanted.

After I hung up the phone, I looked around my apartment and it seemed in disarray. I walked to the closet with the intention of grabbing the vacuum, but found myself crumple to the floor in self pity. Too much loss. More loss than I can bear; I thought, my bare feet absorbing the cold of the tiles under me. Why would my brother make me risk more?

A day after my closet breakdown, I was feeling buoyant, the morning having given me some purpose; my brother would be fine, my dumping was now days old. It now felt like a fact, not a fresh wound. I was already tiring of telling the story, and people were telling me I looked great, despite whatever I was going through. It was something I was proud of, but also it made me afraid. How could I recover this quickly? Was tragedy really a skill I could learn? Wasn’t suffering what made us human? If I became immune to suffering, would that then bring my humanness into question? I thought of the plastic shim under my brother’s eye, unnaturally performing a task that bone once did. Were parts of my emotional range being replaced in a similar fashion? Under a microscope, would my heart appear a patchwork of scar tissue and plastic shims?

There is one more family eye story. I don’t remember what year it happened. It was after the cataract surgery, and at least a couple years before my mother went to hospice. Her health was getting worse. She needed a cane for balance. Her legs were like sticks and she couldn’t walk as far as she used to. You could see the deterioration in her face. Her cheek bones protruded as her body wasted, and her eyes looked heavy, like a stoner. She had little muscle control in her eyes. The doctors, especially the residents, were fond of asking her to track their fingers, up and down, side to side. Inevitably, she would move her entire head to follow the finger, and everyone would see that she could not stop herself from doing it. It made her embarrassed and after some time she refused to demonstrate her limitations anymore.

Then her eyelids started to sag. The doctor explained that we have muscle in our eyelids, of course, and as she lost muscle, her eyelids were opening less and less. It was recommended that she have a lid lift, to increase her optical field as much as possible.

My mother and I laughed at the idea. It seemed such a rich lady thing to do, get your eyes done. But she’d gotten through cataracts, and I think she hoped that if she had this done, the doctors would stop asking her to follow their fingers.

On the day of surgery, she was not convinced it was a good idea. Like cataract surgery, they need the patient awake through a lid lift. To let you sleep might mean unevenness. In matters of the face, symmetry is very important. We arrived at the eye clinic and sat in the waiting room. There was a video for my mother to watch explaining what would happen to her. It did not have subtitles, and she began to cry when the nurse turned it on. She begged us not to make her watch it, and so we turned it off.

I helped her change into her gowns, remembering the rule; the first one ties in the back, the next one in the front. “Tell them to put me under. I don’t care if I’m uneven!” She was nervous and spoke too loud.
I made the gesture of turning down the volume dial of a radio, but she ignored me.

The surgeon came by her bed to give her some instructions. He spoke into her medical chart, hardly looking at her. “You’ll need to say good bye to your daughter here, Patsy.”

“She’s deaf.” I said and he looked up from the chart.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Can you hear me now?” he leaned into her ear and shouted.

My mother flinched and looked at me to explain what he’d said.

I put my open hand to the side of my mouth, in the sign for Mom. “He didn’t know you are deaf. He thinks you are hard of hearing.” I said, over-articulating in a way that I hoped made the doctor feel foolish. Then I made the gesture for stupid, and then doctor.

“She’s totally deaf.” I said to the doctor.

“Oh, well that is a problem.” He said.

“Yes,” I agreed.

“We need to give her specific instruction during the surgery. To make sure we do an even job. She needs to understand when I say look left or look up”.

“I can teach you the signs for left and right,” I offered.

The doctor shook his head. “We’ll need you to come in with her.”

“What? What’s going on?” My mother interjected.

I signed apology to her and explained. “The doctor says he needs me to come in with you. You will need to look up, look left look right. He needs me to interpret.”

She nodded along with each of my phrases, “Tell them to put me under!” she wailed.

My brother and I sometimes played a game with our deaf mother. One of us would talk to her for a full minute, she would nod, and agree and say oh, at all the right places, totally keeping up her side of the conversation. Then we would pause. Narrow our eyes and say, “What did I just say?” She would then tell where she thought you were in the story.

“Your boss retired”.

And you’d discover that five minutes ago, when you’d thought you were breaking the news that you’d been fired, Mom had gotten it wrong. It meant the last five minutes of conversation were invalid. She’d pull out her notebook, and I’d write the real story out for her in caps. “I GOT FIRED. I HAVE NO MONEY FOR YOUR SMOKES.” And she’d say “Oh! I thought you said your boss had retired to the Okanagan.”

“Mom,” I signed as the doctor grimaced. “Give me your book.” She handed her notebook to me, and I wrote out the doctor’s instructions. I would suit up and come into the operating room to sign the instructions.

She squeezed my hand tightly, “Tell them to give me something.” I nodded and went looking for a nurse.

The nurse promised to give my mother something to calm her down, but not put her under. She handed me a cap, gown, and pointed to the box of face masks.

As I changed into my OR gear, I thought about what I was about to see. A surgeon was going to move towards my mother’s eye with a needle, and then a scalpel. I was to stand over his shoulder and sign to my mother his directions. There would be blood, my mother’s blood. The surgeon would narrow her lids enough to make her appear alert and maybe so much that they would be difficult to close. She might need drops everyday to keep her eyes moist.

As I walked into the operating room, my mother moaned and yelled ‘Put me under, Dear God, Put me under!” The nurses closed the doors to the operating room. “I gave her something to calm her down,” the nurse defended herself.

“I know”. I said.

My mother’s eyes were swabbed clean, and the doctor began his instruction. I signed along with him.

“OK, Now I am going to tell you to look left, look right”. I signed what he’d dictated. “OK Mom, the doctor will say look left look right.” I said it out loud while I signed it so the doctor would know where I was in the translation.

“What? What are you saying?” she cried. “Take off the mask so I can read your lips”. I looked at the doctor,

“No, you have to keep the mask on in an operating room,” he said.

I tried again. I signed I can’t. Her eyes went wild.

“Take it off!” she pleaded.

I pulled the mask down to my chin and said “I can’t. I have to wear it.”

“I think she’s too freaked out to read my signs.” I told the doctor.

“It’s okay, you can leave. We’ll be fine without you.”

I left the operating room, my mother shouting for sedatives, and took a seat in the recovery area. A nurse came by to check on me. “Thank you for trying.” She said and patted my hand.

“I’ve been signing to her for ten years.” I said as it sunk in. “But I don’t know if she has learned a single sign. She’s just reading my lips.”

When the surgery was done, my mother was wheeled out and helped in to a recovery chair. Other patients looked at her, wondering what had made this woman’s surgery so much worse than their own.

Without making the signs I said slowly, “You have to stay here until the sedative wears off and then we can go home.”

“They didn’t give me anything,” she said, her voice full of accusation.

“Yes Mom, they did.”

“You call that a sedative,” she scoffed.

In comparison, my brother’s surgery was uneventful. His eyes were more swollen that they’d been before the operation, but not by much.

“Does it look better?” he asked, and I shrugged, not willing to tell him how black his eyes were. There were mirrors in the bathroom and he’d see soon enough.