That Sound in the Graveyard

That Sound in the Graveyard

There is a kind of ringing in my ears that seems to never go away, but I guess it starts out more like a beeping sound and then, what I assume is my ears deteriorating, it turns into a screechy hum. Either way, it seems to get louder when I lay down in bed to sleep. Even when I bury my head into the pillow it’s still there:

“...Beep…eeep…eeee…”

I can’t help but think after twenty years of working nights as a nurse's aide for a nursing home there has been some damage to my brain. I lose sleep thinking about it. I always get out of bed feeling worse than when I went in. I have blackout blinds to help me sleep, but they only hide the light so my eyes can trick my brain into thinking the darkness I lay in is really night. Even when the ringing occasionally disappears, rarely do the blinds actually work. They do nothing to the sounds and thoughts in my own head, and so I sit there listening to the ringing as if I’m still at work.

One time, when I was able to doze off, I jumped out of bed thinking that one of my residents needed me. When I opened my bedroom door, instead of the little light above a resident's door calling me for help at midnight, I was blinded by midday.

Did you know the Cancer Research Agency classified the night shift as a category 2A, probable carcinogen. I looked it up as I laid in bed, and who knows what that means, but it doesn’t sound good, does it? “Probable” carcinogen, as if they aren’t certain it turns your own body’s cells into a growing mass that drains the life out of you like a parasite consuming your soul. I apologize, these days my mind seems to unconsciously explore the morbid without my consent. They do claim, whoever ‘they are,’ that working night shifts surely does shorten your life. I can confirm that, because now that I’m forty five years old I feel it in my back and knees. This might sound strange, but there is a certain smell as if my own vitality has been draining out of my pores. More than anything, though, I fear this continuous ringing I hear is a sign that my mind has started to fade.

I’ve been thinking about it so much I even decided to quit smoking recently. One day after work, the sun was rising, and I was preparing for bed at my home by pulling the thick blinds over my bedroom windows. I felt a sudden pain in my chest. I became light headed and I couldn’t, for the life of me, catch my breath. My heart pounded in my ears and through my rib cage, almost in unison with that ringing, like one of those movies where the character is in a war zone but I was only in the solitude of my room.

“...Beep…eeep…eeee…”

At first I was pretty sure I wasn’t having a heart attack because I knew I didn't have the symptoms, like radiating pain in one of my arms and sweating. The more I fixated on the idea, though, the more I was convinced I might die. I called my daughter but she obviously couldn’t do anything because she lived five hours away. I mostly called her because I just didn’t want to die alone. She started to panic, so I panicked more.

We hung up so I could call 911. As I waited for help in the dark space that now felt like a tomb, the impending terror made me wish I had stopped smoking a long time ago, and started exercising, and I probably should have started eating healthy. I wished I had spent more time with my daughter, instead of just hoping she would visit me. I had neglected all those things and now I was going to die alone. Not quite alone because I had a cat named Sherlock. He died a few weeks after the incident, but in that moment the condescending feline was no comfort either. I had even read that cats won’t wait an hour after you die before they start feasting on you like a meat sack they kept around for only that purpose. The article said they at first nibble the face, then take full on bites and work their way down. They found a forty year old woman one month after she died from a heart attack. The two cats she thought were her companions left only shiny white bones inlaid with their little teeth marks. The paramedics commented that they had never seen healthier cats.

I hadn’t looked at little Sherlock the same after I read that. His once cute black patch of fur that looked like a mustache on his mostly white body had turned him into a menacing villain. I made sure to lock the door and that he wasn’t lurking in the room with me. I quickly called my daughter back. She said she’d try to get there as soon as she could. When I heard the sirens of the ambulance I felt even more terrified like I was listening to the church bells at my own funeral.

They say your hearing is the last sense to go when you die. Who knows how they know that, but I was sure as hell I didn’t want that to be the last thing I could sense, having lost all my other senses and to just have that mechanical whooping in a dark room while I’m essentially blind, deaf and dumb. I imagined what some of my late residents in my nursing home would have heard in those last seconds before so many of them had passed, like the comforting voice of a loved one, or more likely than not, the lonely beeping of their call light waiting to be answered, dulled by the mass of all the other wanting lights.

When the paramedics came into the house my room was locked. I was too scared to move and let them in. They busted the door open. One hinge burst, the door half splintered and flung open. They did an EKG on my chest and told me I was only having a panic attack. I couldn’t have been more embarrassed in my life with all those electrical lines coming off my chest. I didn’t want to call my daughter back because, yes, I was embarrassed, but I hadn’t seen her in forever. I hoped, if she still thought I was dying, then she’d still be on her way to visit me. She had to cancel the trip so she could go back to working as a manager at a daycare center. That was when I decided to stop smoking cold turkey, and that was when I finally made the decision to quit working nights as a nurse's aid all together, especially if I was going to live long enough to see any potential grandkids grow up.

I put in my two weeks notice on a Thursday, but the management at the nursing home told me to leave that immediate Friday, after I trained my replacement of course, as if they already had someone lined up the next day to take my place. After how easily the management let me go, especially after giving them twenty-five years of my life, I was pissed off a little bit. I figured the sooner the better. They never really cared about us nursing aids anyway. I didn’t have a job lined up yet, and in the past I was terrified of being without work, even for a short amount of time. Back then I was single handedly taking care of my daughter after her father died. That’s one of the reasons I never left, but now that the nest had been empty for some time I decided to start taking care of myself.

On Friday, I waited at the nurses station for my replacement to arrive. We were supposed to meet a half an hour before nineteen-hundred, or six thirty for the layman. She was late.

The seven to seven shift almost sounded lucky if I didn’t have to wake up to the sunset every morning, and watch the beginning of my day grow darker and the end of it coincide with a tiredness brought on by the light. I hadn’t felt like myself in a while or had a clear thought, so what was on my mind that day wasn’t quite coherent. I fought these repetitive thoughts that I wished would stop popping into my head, something about catching a disease I knew I wouldn’t get, or that somehow I was developing dementia because I worked around residents with dementia for so long. I knew my thoughts didn’t make any sense but they kept recurring against my will. What continually triggered them was the constant beeping of the call light.

“...Beep…eeep…eeee…”

There it was, like a heartbeat, constant and wanting. I thought about answering the call lights, but I waited for the new girl. I had already gone to the storage room to pack my scrub pockets with a trash bag roll, gloves, wipes, tubes of sore cream, and anything else I could think of that the rooms might be missing. I realized I had forgotten to take out my lighter, since I didn’t need it for cigarettes anymore. I kept feeling inside my pockets and wondered if I forgot to grab anything else.

The nurse’s station was the center of the whole unit and it had four narrow hallways around it, where sixty-odd rooms filled with the elderly and disabled lived. I stood there wishing I was smoking a cigarette, but instead I rubbed my back. It was always in a constant state of throbbing pain. The same pain in my knees, but I didn’t want to bend over to rub those. I took out a bottle of Tylenol from my black scrub pocket and then popped two in my mouth, swallowing them dry. The nurses stood around me, looking bored and waiting to clock out of their shift. Only two nurses clocked in for the night shift. They all gave a quick nonchalant report to each other and then just sat around while the call lights continued to sound.

“...Beep…eeep…eeee…”

“God,” said one of the nurses in a pink scrub, while she flipped through her phone trying to use the pads of her fingers under her long colorful fingernails. A N95 mask was pulled down over her chin. “I hate working in this unit.”

“Why?” Said the other nurse from a mumble through her own mask, in a removed way like she didn’t expect an answer. Her scrubs had bull dogs and she was trying to look at the resident’s charts on the computer, preparing for the long night ahead.

One of the five aides for the day shift came up to the pink scrub nurse. The aide didn’t stand still. She moved from one leg to the other as if she couldn’t stop moving, like she had to pee. In one hand there was a plastic bag of dirty linen.

“Mr. Davies is still complaining about pain in his stomach.”

“Sure, which room number?” said the pink scrub nurse looking up from her phone, and then just repeated what the aide said but a little louder for the bulldogs scrub nurse to hear, who was taking over her unit for the night shift.

“Can you empty my med cart’s trash?” Said the pink scrubbed nurse to the aid before she went back to answer call lights, as if it should have been done by the aid a long time ago. Then she pointed to the overflowing trash can.

The aid didn’t say anything, put down the bag of linen, and emptied the trash and then went back to her hustle, now holding two bags out in front of her.

“Hey Momo,” said the bull dog scrub nurse talking to me, but she didn’t take her eyes off the computer. “You and the new girl will have some patients in my section tonight, and we are supposed to have two others from the agency, but we’ll see if they show up. The day shift ended up being a few short because the agency workers called in.”

“Okay, I’m just waiting for the new aid. We’ll find the day shift aid for the report, and then I’ll show her around.”

“Okay. We’ve been getting complaints from some of the families. Apparently we have someone on the unit stealing the patient’s pictures off their walls and out of their rooms,” she said in just as serious a tone as everything else she had been monotonously reciting from the notes for her on the computer. “If you could keep an eye out, that'd be wonderful. The patient in room 101 passed away and we have someone new who is a full assist, when you get a report the aid should know more. Also, please, please, make sure to turn those who need to be turned every two hours. We have too many patients with pressure sores.”

“Yeah, last week I noticed some pictures were missing. Wait, room 101, not Mr. Golding? Ahh, man, poor Mr. Golding. I knew he was getting worse.”

“Tomorrow, I have you in my section again.”

“Hold on, I shouldn’t be scheduled for tomorrow. Today is my last day. I put in my two weeks notice, but they told me today was my last day, after I train this new girl. They probably just have her scheduled under me by accident.”

“No, she's scheduled too. Well, I have you scheduled, so if you can work that’d be wonderful, otherwise they’ll have to get an agency to cover for you.”

“Bye,” said the day shift nurses as they were leaving early. “It’s been really slow. Hope it stays slow for the night shift.”

She giggled on her way out because she thought she was being funny by breaking the taboo of saying the jinx word: ‘Slow.’ I didn’t believe in superstitions like that. I only believed in reality, so it didn’t bother me. I figured there were enough hard things in life then to make more stuff up. The night shift nurse uncomfortably scrunched her face like it was a dirty word.

“Well,” I said thinking about being scheduled after they told me that was my last day. In the past I always picked up shifts when they needed me too. I felt bad, but the management never listened as if they were like one of those automated answering machines: ‘Say the name of the person you are trying to reach,’ and instead of hearing you they just give you the same automated reply, ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t quite catch that,’ and then, ‘You are now working for the next seven days and nights,’ so good luck with your personal life. All I said was:

“You know, I won’t be able to,” with a mixture of confidence and classically conditioned regret.

She looked dumb founded, and the only response I got was: “...Beep…eeep…eeee…”