The Call

I take one tentative step inside my sister’s room in the Critical Care Unit. Debbie lies motionless, diminutive among the machines that perform her body’s functions. The ventilator’s rhythmic WHUSH interrupts the cacophony of beeps, rings and buzzes sounding from the machines attached to her body by wires and electrodes. Her feet and ankles jut out from beneath a thin white blanket. I wonder if she is cold.

“The ambulance just left with Debbie,” my mother said on the phone three days ago. “It doesn’t look good.” My sister got out of jail after an arrest for driving under the influence, went home and swallowed all the pills she could find. Her husband, Garry found her on their sofa, unconscious and barely breathing.

“She took about three hundred pills,” Mom said. “Garry found the empty bottles on the floor. She took Xanax, Valium, Vicodin, and some muscle relaxants.” I’ve expected the phone call since, at seventeen years old, she chose Aerosmith’s song, “Seasons of Wither” as her requiem.

I was four hundred miles away, in Memphis, separated from my family by a snowstorm. Three hundred pills?  How did she drink that much water? What kept her from throwing up? Three days later, she was still unconscious, and I drove to Kentucky to watch my sister die.

We hadn’t spoken for months, and I couldn’t remember our last argument. I probably said something hurtful, to which she responded by cursing me, at which point we stopped speaking, our sisterly banter most of our lives.

 Debbie’s hair, once long, fine and blonde, is chopped short and dyed black with purple and scarlet streaks. It lays clumped in greasy mats and tangles on the pillow around her face. Her face is thin and drawn; her cheekbones threaten to pierce through the skin, which is leathered and splotchy after hundreds of hours in tanning beds. At forty-seven years old, she wears the scars and wrinkles that her addiction and the accompanying pain, sadness and misery have wrought. Edges of tattoos, which I’ve never seen before, peek out from the neck of her hospital gown. Her fortieth birthday gift to herself was a pierced navel. The last time I saw her, I noticed that she’d pierced her tongue. Years ago, a rehab counselor told my parents that addiction halts a person’s mental, emotional and intellectual growth, meaning my sister is a perpetual teenager.

Pads cushion the bed rails like a baby’s crib. Bands of cloth tether Debbie’s wrists and ankles to the bed, the result of an episode yesterday morning during which she thrashed her body against the sides of the bed.    

            Hospital vigils for my sister are familiar. The previous overdoses, accidents and suicide attempts were practice runs for this. The air hangs heavy in her room, cold and hollow as death. I watch her lifeless body, and I think, We have lost her this time. Debbie is gone. A stereo speaker behind her head whispers soft music into the room, a technique intended to calm her fitful comatose sleep. I hear the opening chords of “Let It Be”, and Paul McCartney’s mournful voice reminds me that this world has battered my sister.

My mother, widowed and seventy-three years old, stumbles into the room, weary from the fatigue and worry that have haunted her since my sister fell in love with getting high, thirty-five years ago. I wish my father were here for her to lean upon, but I’m relieved that he’s been spared seeing his youngest child like this. She had been sober for two years when Daddy died eleven years ago, her short-lived sobriety her last and best gift to him.

“She looks pitiful lying there, doesn’t she?” Mom says.

“This situation is pitiful,” I say. “Where is Danielle?” I ask about my niece, my sister’s daughter, twenty-one-years old, who has been the responsible party since she was old enough to walk and dial the telephone. Mom says that Danielle has gone to buy Valentine’s Day cards.

Debbie entered the world swinging both fists. Eight weeks premature and weighing less than three pounds, she survived Mom’s toxemia. She matured slowly, skinny and bald as an onion until her third year. Small but fearless, she climbed higher and challenged every dare, unlike her older sister, who preplanned and thought out most every move.

            When she was twelve years old, I found Debbie unconscious on the parking lot of a local burger joint and hangout in our small town, clutching an empty bourbon bottle to her chest. She couldn’t know that her first bourbon binge would light the fire of addiction in her.

My mother’s brother, Russell, was the only acknowledged alcoholic in our family. He regaled us with tales of his drunken bar brawls, his hooker girlfriends, his caustic retorts to teetotalers and car salesmen. He once checked himself into a hospital for alcohol rehab. Days later, the nurses found him still drunk, searched his room and found two half-gallons of Wild Turkey under his bed. A friend who owned a liquor store had visited him daily since his admission.

Debbie’s spiral into the darkness of addiction ran a fast track. Before she took her driver’s test, she smoked marijuana every weekend and experimented with pills. Soon she tried cocaine, crank, crack and virtually anything else she could buy, beg, borrow or steal to swallow, snort or inject. The arrests for DUI, the car crashes, the overdoses, the suicide attempts, and the arrests devastated our family, while Debbie remained impervious to the wreckage.

I’m haunted by the sadness and hurt in my grandfather’s eyes, when, a year after my father died and three months before their sixty-ninth wedding anniversary, my grandmother passed away, and Debbie responded by getting loaded. The night of the funeral, Debbie overdosed and attempted suicide.

Debbie’s consequences lack the comedic flavor of my Uncle Russ’s escapades. Debbie has suffered loss and detriment – she’s been fired from jobs, beaten by abusive men, homeless, forced to run drugs to earn her fix, without a car or driver’s license, and lost custody of her child. When Danielle was six years old, my parents gained custody of her. I read about twelve-step programs. I read that an alcoholic/addict will not seek help until he/she hits “rock bottom”. After each of Debbie’s calamities, I wondered, “What else can she lose? Is Debbie’s rock bottom the grave?”

Mom and I stand by her bed and watch her, still as death, and I am certain that I will never hear her voice again. The next morning, against all odds, she awakens. She tells the doctors and nurses that she attempted to end her life. But, when I walk into the room, she slurs, “It’s no big deal. I took one too many Cymbalta”. Tests begin mid-morning to assess the levels of heart, lung, liver, brain and kidney damage. She is scheduled for treatment in Progressive Care and psychiatric evaluations while Garry arranges transfer to a substance abuse facility.

I’m back in Memphis now. Debbie refused tests and treatment and checked herself out of the hospital. She went straight home from CCU. I try and believe that she hit “rock bottom” and that she wants life more than getting high now. Meanwhile, I wait for the next phone call.