Robin and Mary's New Orleans Misadventure: The Denouement

     I can only fit so much into those newspaper columns, and I was determined to finish this chronicle without an endless slew of "To Be Continued"s.  Thus I rolled the universe into a ball for the newspaper, then worried it was choppy and incoherent.  So here I have expanded on this week's newspaper piece a great deal indeed.  If you think I've been TOO complete, feel free to read in increments.

Part III:  Robin and Mary’s Mardi Gras MisAdventure:  The Denouement

By Robin Ford Wallace

“I imagine alcohol was involved?” 

That’s the first thing the bearded young doctor said to us when Mary was wheeled into the curtained-off treatment cubicle in the ER.  

It struck us as an odd thing for a doctor to say; but later, after he had come back shaking his head grimly over Mary’s X-ray, we wondered if he wasn’t a doctor at all but someone who had escaped from a nearby asylum.  I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d whipped out a rifle and shot her.  Whatever happened to, “You’re going to be just fine”?

However he delivered it, though, the message was clear:  Mary had broken hell out of her leg.  It would require enough pins for a bowling alley.  Mary, who hadn’t been in a hospital since her tonsillectomy at 6, was here for a while.

So it began:  People began arriving in the cubicle to ask:  How old are you?  How tall?  How much do you weigh?  Do you smoke?  Apparently nobody wrote down the answers because the next person would ask the same questions. 

At perhaps the 10th repetition, though, there was a surprise:  The orthopedic surgeon noticed the age Mary gave didn’t match her year of birth.  Her birthday this year fell on Mardi Gras; she knew that.  But she’d been in denial about which one:  This one had a zero at the end!

This orthopedic surgeon was a tiny, beautiful Asian-American woman, young and modern, but what she did next could have come out of an old Western, or the song where Lorne Greene saves the life of Ringo (“But a spark still burned so I used my knife”).    “This is going to hurt,” she said.  “Now or later?” 

Mary said to get it over with.  The doctor put her little hands on Mary’s leg, reared back and –

Oh – my – God.  Such screaming. 

I slunk off to the waiting room.  Mary was pumped full of dope but still in terrible pain.  The doctor said she’d operate in the morning if it could be arranged. 

It could not.

I am flopping around here trying to find words to tell you the reality of Mardi Gras in New Orleans.  It’s huge, overshadowing.  Wherever you need to go, there’s a parade between you and it, sometimes two.  I think sooner or later they’ll have to outlaw it, it’s just too dangerous.  But people love it there and the nurses in the ward would call, “Happy Moddy Gras” as they went off shift, like we say, “Merry Christmas.”

Mary was prepped for surgery three times that first couple of days, Saturday night into Monday.  But they never could get the surgeon and the equipment in the same room at the same time, and on Monday afternoon they gave up until after the holiday.  So Mary just lay there until the surgery finally happened the ensuing Thursday, at $1200 a night.  She didn’t have it, or health insurance.

I didn’t, either.

I spent Saturday night wondering if Hell was a waiting room.  This one was full of Mardi Gras casualties, young revelers and old drunks and a middle-aged couple gorgeously dressed for a ball.  Their names would be called and off they would walk or hobble to their final destination.

Nobody called mine!  I hadn’t asked for medical attention, though as the night wore on it became clear I hadn’t emerged unscathed from being hit by a car after all.  My right knee began to swell and throb as I shifted miserably in the hard plastic chair, and when I got up to check on Mary I dragged the leg like Igor.  I just hadn’t wanted to be scathed!  At ER prices, I couldn’t afford to be scathed!  Anyway, all I wanted now was sleep.

Sunday afternoon, I got my wish, courtesy of two Chattanooga friends who had traveled to NOLA with us on the train-turned-bus, then gone their ways, planning to meet us later.  One of these, Jeannie, had since mysteriously gained access to a car; the other, Elizabeth, to a house on Dauphine where she was dog-sitting.  So they swooped in with the one to deliver me to the other.

I’d asked them to bring our luggage from the Frenchwoman’s place in the Ninth Ward.  They had, and they’d also brought the Frenchwoman!  So everyone paid respects to Mary, then off we four sped into the streets of New Orleans, Elizabeth Andretti-like behind the wheel.  The Frenchwoman turned whiter and whiter, and finally leapt out at a stoplight and vomited into a trashcan.

It is true the Frenchwoman was unused to car travel.  It is also true Elizabeth drives with a certain dash.  As she does everything!  I cannot mention her here without noting she is the source of the fashion angst that keeps cropping up in this narrative:  She never goes to the grocery store without a feather boa, minimum.

On our way we stopped at a wonderful downtown grocery store, Rouse, a New Orleans institution.  I mention this because of course all we foodies got separated as we gaped at the goodies, and when I checked out – after wandering bedazed for what seemed hours, so I was worried they’d left me – I took the wrong door and ended in a city street.  Then I found the parking lot and realized I didn’t know what the car looked like!  And then I realized I’d spent all the money I had on me, my wallet was in the car, and my cell phone had died!

I had almost given up, and commenced to keen, when Elizabeth mercifully emerged from the store and walked straight to the car – where the whole time the Frenchwoman had been sitting in the passenger seat!  She was hunched over biliously from the car ride but still visibly and inexorably the Frenchwoman, like a beacon.

Anyway, we got to Elizabeth’s dog-sitting house and there I slept until Monday, when our friends returned me to the hospital.  By then my every fifth word was AUGHHH as I stepped on the dog’s chew toys or tried to dress.  So I was resigned to scathehood, and from the hospital I hitched a ride on the institution’s shuttle bus to an urgent-care clinic Mary’s nurses told me about, for an X-ray. 

There I was examined by a peppery lady GP with the peculiar name “O’Bear.”  Or so I thought until, two days later, having at last found a drugstore and succeeded in locating the prescription she’d given me at the same time, I saw her name typed out:  Vicky Hebert, M.D.  It’s French and pronounced “A. Bear,” and apparently it’s the New Orleans equivalent of Smith or Jones.

Dr. Hebert gave me joyous tidings:  My knee wasn’t broken, just bruised.  But when I asked how to get back to the hospital, the news was not so good:  “You can’t.”  There were not one but two intersecting parades today, Dr. Hebert told me, so neither taxis nor trolleys were running.

Thus I set off on foot – note singular! – Igoring it along beside one of the parades, and paced by a float carrying the usual Greek god, plus a clump of men dressed as chefs – hell, maybe they were chefs – throwing beads.  It still hurt when I stepped wrong but I was so elated I wasn’t broken like poor Mary that I was walking on air, and I quoted Shakespeare cheerfully to myself about love’s light wings o’erperching walls 'n stuff.  

But mostly I was thinking about: food.  I hadn’t been able to interest Mary in takeout orders– she had to use a bedpan and said it all just turned into poop – but New Orleans is partly about eating out and I hadn’t had my crack at that part.  I was torn between poboys – authenticity – and Vietnamese – proximity; there was a restaurant right beside the hospital.

But when I went in to check first with Mary, the nurses were just packing her up to be transferred to the big bleak charity hospital across town.  They said I could ride in the ambulance with her, and since she would have a private room at the new place I would be allowed to sleep on a cot beside her.

This hospital, University, was in a bad section of town and when we got there the staff warned me not to venture outside at night.  So I dined that evening from the vending machines in the basement, and subsequently I would eat the food off Mary’s plate that she wouldn’t touch on the poop principle.  So much for the fabled cuisine of New Orleans!

At the first hospital, Touro, everything had been posh and carpeted and everyone was nice to us except one nurse with an ugly voice.  At the second everything was bare and tiled and everyone was mean to us except one little sweetheart nurse who had dimples and called Mary Twinkletoes.  She was the only one who could make Mary smile.

I slept on the cot until I had to leave town, not just because I had nowhere else to go – I mean, there was that – but also because I was worried that the big mean institution would kill Mary if I didn’t remain vigilant.  Mary said, “Don’t be ridiculous, Robin; I really believe in socialism.”

But if it was socialist in décor, that hospital later sent Mary a bill as running-dog as anything I’ve ever seen!  Mary said Touro was more reasonable about adjusting downward. 

Anyway, that next period was our really miserable time.  If I’d worried the nurses would neglect Mary, they did anyway come every four hours through the night to check her vitals; then the bright young residents rolled in with their stethoscopes and their new white coats at 6 a.m.  It didn’t bother Mary because she was too miserable during the day to do anything but sleep or watch television; but for weeks after I got home I couldn’t sit down in my reading chair without passing out.   

People kept putting paper bracelets on Mary every time she was transferred or prepped or sedated, until she had a collection on her wrist she had me photograph because she said it was as close as she would get to racking up Mardi Gras beads.

Mary was depressed.  Well, that’s inadequate.  It’s not wrong but it doesn’t cover the facts.  Mary, who is usually hopeful and friendly and New-York tough, your veritable little Yankee sunbeam, was a small shrunken figure under the sheets with a whispery toneless voice, who wouldn’t turn off the TV. 

And on Tuesday morning – Mardi Gras, and her 60^th birthday – she tossed me out of the room so I could witness the holiday, and she could suffer alone.

I limped down Canal Street, incidentally getting socked in the left eye by two strands of beads thrown from the usual parade – 

A word on parades:  All that nonsense you hear about procuring Mardi Gras beads via a roguish display of the full frontals?  My frontals aren’t that full and anyway I promise you they stayed primly within their sartorial confines, I was in no mood here, but I was dodging beads like shrapnel!  At Mardi Gras you have to run faster than I do to come home beadless.

– and thus arrived at the French Quarter where we began this chronicle, and where I saw a T-shirt with the New Orleans motto:  “Sin.  Repent.  Repeat."

Sin?  Mary and I had only wanted to drink a little beer and watch the fun in the Quarter.  Where’s the sin in that?  But the Big Easy smacked us to the mat on day one while others stayed drunk in the street all week and took no harm.  Really, we later speculated Mary might have landed more gracefully from that bicycle had she been a little more lubricated.  

Anyway, what sense does it make I should be hit by a car and Mary should be the one with $100,000 of medical bills?

I think the message here is there’s no logic in destiny:  No matter what those Baptist preachers say about sin and subsequent perdition, you can’t tell God what to do.  

And you sure as hell can’t tell New Orleans! 

END

Robin and Mary's Mardi Gras Misadventure, Part II

     Everyone has been so sweetly eager for Part II of our misadventure it has made me terrified to post it!  I am bound to disappoint.  And here's something else:  I did want to talk a little about the insane health care situation we -- mostly Mary! -- got into, so the fat lady ain't sung yet:  There is, I'm afraid, going to be a Part III.  Sigh -- 950 words is just not that much space for a person of my proclivities.  I kill about 200 blowing my nose.

Robin And Mary’s Mardi Gras Misadventure:  Part II

(We resume this narrative where Part I left off, with our hapless heroines following a subtly menacing Frenchwoman into New Orleans on oversized bicycles, amid signs and portents that made streets flowing with blood look like BALLOONS AND A FRUIT BASKET.)

Mary and I followed the Frenchwoman out into the Ninth Ward, which had been deep underwater during Hurricane Katrina.  The houses were modest and some were missing altogether, along with churches and schools that had never been rebuilt.  Still, the residue of that terrible flood gave the place a certain seaside ambience and from the standpoint of somebody riding a bicycle it was anyway flat.

And it was spring!  It was early February but in New Orleans azaleas were blooming and lantana, and those Japanese magnolias that take a girl’s breath away.  I circled back to admire them, always bringing up the rear. 

Outside places are my chief joy but I am willing to admit I move across them with the ponderous sick inevitability of the Russian Army.  I do eventually roll into Berlin, but perhaps others find me pokey.  Mary would zoom past me like an SST, smirking, and the Frenchwoman said:  “Myself, I ride 25 miles each day without fail.” And another time:  “I love to eat and would be big as a house if it were not for my bicycle.”  (This was at lunch, while I was cramming something in my mouth.) 

We helped the Frenchwoman with her pet project, a “street library” for the Ninth Ward children.  That day it was in a community garden.  We read kid-books about gardening, then planted raised beds into which, despite our best efforts, the children sowed enough seeds for Kansas.  “These are my friends from Chattanooga, Tennessee,” the Frenchwoman told them.

Mary corrected her that it was Dade County, Georgia, and the Frenchwoman said:  “Whatever.  Just keep ze children from killing each other with ze hoes.”       

Mary and I enjoyed the children but were unaccustomed to their rampageous ways, and when they had dispersed I said, with feeling:  “I understand beer is sold in New Orleans?”

The Frenchwoman replied:  “But we will be late for ze parade!”  So we rode on. 

A word on cycling:  There is a reason bicycle pants are padded in certain key areas.  Neither Mary nor I had ridden a bicycle for so long in years and by midafternoon we had discovered that reason.  But we rode on!

Things I remember from that long, long day are: the Mississippi River, the levee and the “wedding cake houses” built for riverboat captains. We visited an open-air market where I snuffled hopefully around for beer but found only handcrafted soap.  We’d meet men and the Frenchwoman would introduce us – “These are my friends from Chattanooga, Tennessee” – later explaining confidentially:  “One of my former lovers.” 

A terrifying drawbridge separated us from the main part of town.  I took a picture of Mary and the Frenchwoman watching it lower after letting a ship pass.  When it was down again cars zipped across looking like the Scary Traffic scene in cartoons.  We felt like bugs about to fly into the zapper and the Frenchwoman allowed us to push our bikes through an underpass, but she said coming back that night we must cross the bridge or risk murder.

Later, my husband said, “You were riding bicycles in traffic?  At Mardi Gras?  Where people are drunk?  Without helmets?” 

But I never thought about helmets, only:  hats.  Mary is an artist and dresses with a certain flair.  The Frenchwoman was, well, French.  In the bridge photograph, Mary wears a hat with a feather and the Frenchwoman a small flattish affair she’d chosen after discarding another, pronouncing:  “Eet ees not me.”  With my jeans and cotton BOPs (“big ole panties”), I was consumed with fashion angst. 

We rode on.

Night fell as we watched the (endless!) parade.  There were marching bands and Greek gods and people in malevolent masks throwing beads.  It went by so slowly I felt it was the sidewalk moving instead, with me on it, and I realized I was dizzy with fatigue.  Across the street a shop sign flashed POBOYS and BEER and I ached with longing.

But it was not to be!  After the parade the Frenchwoman said:  “This is a madhouse.  I know a quiet Italian restaurant nearby.”  So back to the bikes!  And after that:  “Ze jazz club opens at 10.  It is just a few blocks.”  

It was never “a few blocks.”  It was miles.  The Frenchwoman charged ever forward, sailing through red lights without pausing.  I think it was the jazz club she was aiming for all night, that someone special was in the band.  But what a scene from hell that was!  Men in tutus, blowing cigar smoke at us.  We rode on!

It had to end somewhere and it did.  The Frenchwoman went through a green light on Chartres Street, then Mary, and I was bringing up the rear as usual when a car slammed into me.

There were brakes screeching and people screaming and I realized I was dead.  Then I thought:  OK, maybe crippled.  Then I got up from the pavement without a scratch.  So.  Maybe I really am the Russian Army.

The Frenchwoman offered to call a taxi but I didn’t want to be any trouble:  How would we get the bikes home?  So we climbed back on.  And not 10 minutes later, for no apparent reason – fatigue?  saddle sores? – Mary went sailing in slo-mo off her bicycle and –

Splat! 

It was some kind of cosmic error, I expect, but our joke in the ensuing days was:  “Robin got hit by a car and Mary’s in the hospital.”

Let’s leave the story there, the Frenchwoman alone with three bicycles – I don’t care, I hate those bicycles! – while Mary and I speed off in an ambulance to an ER, only to be greeted with the words:

“I imagine there was alcohol involved?”

(To be continued…)