I am lying on a gurney, waiting to be prepped for an abdominal exam. Dark green curtains hide the rest of this sterile hospital space. I am freezing. I wait, curled up like a cocoon inside some heated blankets that the nurse gave me. The vinyl floor reflects the harsh overhead light. I wait. I am a patiently waiting patient.
Suddenly, a loud voice pierces the air. A nurse slides the curtain open around the adjacent cubicle. With a heavy foreign accent, she begins the intake procedure. My neighbor slurs her speech, as if she just woke up. She sounds old.
Judging by the ensuing questions, she must be here for a colonoscopy.
‘When was the last time you drank, Maam?’ asks the nurse.
‘I drank a gallon of liquid. That was a week ago and nothing happened. I couldn’t move my bowels. They sent me home because it was the wrong day. So this time I did the prep and things started two days after the prep. Nothing but diarrhea'.
‘Oh, wow. But what time did you drink TODAY?
‘Before seven thirty in the morning.’
‘What time did you have anything to eat, like bread or anything’?
‘Nothing.’
The nurse coughs profusely. ‘I hope you are not sick’ says my neighbor.
‘No I am alergic to my cat. Do you have any pain?’
‘Oh yes’
‘Where?’
‘In my head, I have a headache. I fell and I have a headache. And in my belly. Especially when I have to move my bowels. It feels like I am going to burst, but nothing comes out. Maybe a little piece, maybe this size.’
More coughing: ‘Tell me about your teeth can you open your mouth for me?’
‘Very bad. I had some surgery done.’
‘Any loose teeth?
‘Nothing. I don’t have any up here. This one was pulled three months ago and now there are all kinds of growths inside my mouth.’
The questions keep coming. Some, she already answered. The nurse must have amnesia.
More questions. My neighbor starts to lose her patience. ‘Why don’t you look up my medical records, for Christ’s sake. Don’t you have a computer? Why all these questions? All I want is for someone to look up my ass!’
My neighbor now embarks on a lengthy monologue. Is she still talking to the nurse? But the nurse already left. Now, nothing can stop her. She tells the hospital air how she survived the Holocaust, how she had been a Flamenco dancer and had lived in Israel. She owned a cab company called ABC. She goes on telling nobody and everybody her entire life’s story. Probably all invented.
‘The world is mad,’ she says. ‘Palestinian babies getting killed. Biden supporting the killing! I am done! What’s the point of living? I am talking and talking and nobody cares, nobody hears me!’
Finally, I cannot stop myself: ‘I hear you!’
A long silence.
‘So you are my invisible neighbor.’
I ask: ‘What’s your name?’
‘Sophia’.
‘What’s your last name?’
‘Do you have grandchildren?’ I asked.
‘I have 39!’
What a vivid imagination. But I was wrong.
‘My husband gave his sperm to a sperm bank before he died. And some of those children, when they turned 18, traced their sperm donor. So they traced Roberto and then, me. I met a few. Wonderful kids.’
She tells me about her two children whom she never sees. She loves nature, has never done any harm to anybody. She loves to feed the animals in her yard: the deer, the coyotes, and the birds. Israel is evil, she says. She is ashamed of being Jewish. She is ashamed of being a human being.
We both wait and wait. Finally, another nurse comes, this time for me. My invisible neighbor sees him go by and shouts at him. She wants to go home! She has been here since 9 o'clock, for Christ’s sake. More shouting and waiving.
The nurse is moving me somewhere else, so he can hear what I am saying. As I get wheeled by her cubicle, I finally get a glimpse of my neighbor. A frantic woman with thick grey hair, surrounded by a group of nurses who are trying to stop her from ripping all the wires from her body. I wave at her, but I don’t think she sees me.
Epilogue
I found Sophia on the Internet. A 1997 Boston Globe article with the title: ‘Survivor has lived many lives – All on the run’. Everything she said is true, lying there, in her gurney, talking to the air. This 86-year-old woman, this pain-in-the-ass patient, has lived a life so rich that any nurse should be impressed. Instead, they feel sorry for this poor old woman, who lives by herself, far away from her children.
But I saw a woman who knew how to survive. She was born in Poland when Hitler invaded. Orphaned at the age of two, she was taken in by her grandmother who abandoned her a few years later. Then she was taken in by Lena Küchler-Silberman, a member of the Jewish resistance who saved children during The Holocaust and helped to resettle them afterward. Lena is considered the most famous “surrogate mother” of child Holocaust victims.
Sophia was finally adopted by a French couple and ended up in America. She married a talented man who taught her how to be a Flamenco dancer. She lived and performed in Israel. She came back and started her own taxi company.
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