Karl was a man I shared a hospital room with recently, for 2 days. It was one of those rooms with a curtain between the beds. As I was rolled in, I introduced myself, but Karl did not respond. He was moaning slightly, an older man in his late 80’s or early 90’s, with scabs on his legs. The staff got me situated. As I lay there questioning everything about my strange day, Karl began to speak. I thought, of course, he was speaking to me.
“Oh, I don’t know WHAT’S going on.”
“Excuse me? Are you all right?” I said.
“Muriel, open the door. That’s it. I can see it.” He was speaking clearly. “Tell me why we need to call them today.”
I began to realize he was babbling. So, he’s got the Alzheimer’s maybe. He went on and I began to ignore him. My mind drifted back to my day. I had coughed up blood earlier. When I checked the internet about what that might mean, it just said, call an ambulance. I didn’t. I waited and it stopped. It started again and stopped. When it started the third time I went to the Emergency Room at North Memorial Hospital. After many questions, a chest x-ray and CT scan that were inconclusive (no cancer), the doctors were puzzled and wanted me to spend the night and be seen by a pulmonary physician the next day. So there I was, in that room with Karl.
I heard him trying to sit up in bed. The curtain next to me began to move. Then it started thrashing and I realized he was grabbing it, trying to get out of bed. Oh-oh, he’s going to fall. I reached for the flailing curtain and pulled it aside so I could see him. “Are you all right? Do you need some help?” He was grunting and struggling to get up. I used the call button to summon the nurse. Patrick, our nurse from Uganda, with a heavy African-English accent native Africans have from their colonial past, came in and wrestled Karl back into his bed. “Karl. You have to stay in bed.” Karl would have none of it and fought him for a while before laying back. “Oh, I don’t know WHAT’S going on,” he moaned.
“I didn’t know what to do,” I told Patrick, “I thought he would fall.”
“It is fine. Call me anytime. He should not be trying to get up. Just call me if he does this thing again.”
Patrick left and Karl did it again, then again and again for 3 hours. I realized sleep was going to be hard this night. As I accepted my fate and got into the routine of calling Patrick and he apologizing for Karl, I began to listen to the rambling sentences Karl was uttering throughout all this.
“Who got the bid? Did we get the bid?”
“Try putting the wheels mid-range and increase velocity.”
“Have I missed my bus?”
“Muriel, I can’t see you.”
“The data is correct! I’ve been over it a hundred times!”
“Is this the bus that is taking me to the hospital?”
“Oh, I don’t know WHAT’S going on.”
I started to realize I was hearing things from his life. They were so specific. It was if all the sentences he spoke in his life were randomly being selected from some bowl in his mind and uttered again. There were times he sounded like a child. “Gertie, you hide here. I’ll hide over there and they will never find us.” At times he spoke what sounded like German. He even sometimes used English with a thick German accent, as if he had immigrated here, eventually losing his accent. It went on all night and all night I listened.
The next morning I began to see staff changes, new nurses, draw more blood, new drugs injected through my IV and the whole routine of a hospital floor. I was getting annoyed with all these tubes and wires connected to me. They made it hard lay in anything but certain positions. Going to the bathroom meant I had to hold everything in order as I walked along. Karl kept his story going. I tried to make some kind of contact with him.
“Good Morning Karl. How are you feeling this morning?” No response from the other side of the curtain. I had noticed the nurses could get a response from him. They all spoke slowly and loudly to him. “He’s hard of hearing,” they said. Whenever I got up to walk around I would try to talk to him. “Hello Karl.”
“Who are you, “ he asked me once.
“My name is Michael Jensen.”
“I would like some rutabagas.”
“You can release the pressure slowly. No, no, no, that’s too fast.”
“We can finish this all later.”
That is all I ever got.
The nurses attended to him regularly and never heard more then a few sentences at a time. They don’t know it was all about his life, I thought. They never hear enough to put it all together.
“McElroy turned his figures in. 90%. That is what we had calculated.“
“Mama. Gertie has all the bread.”
“We have to water the garden again. Muriel. The garden.”
“You’re a new driver, aren’t you. I haven’t seen you on this bus."
“Can you believe what she said? He never went to Toledo.”
“Oh, I don’t know WHAT’S going on.”
Eventually, they came and took Karl away. “Where’s he going,“ I asked.
“Back to the nursing home,” they said.
The room was just me now. It was quiet. I was tired and needed sleep. Later, an older man came in. He looked around and was about to leave when I asked him if I could help.
“I’m looking for Karl,” he said.
“They took him back to the nursing home,” I said. “Oh.” He started to leave and I stopped him.
“Did you know Karl?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Was he born in Germany?”
“Yes.”
“Was he an engineer, did he build things?”
“Yes.”
“Was his wife’s name Muriel?”
“Yes.”
“Did he ride the bus a lot, use public transportation?”
“Why yes. How do you know all this? Karl has Alzheimer’s Disease.”
“He told me.”
I explained how I had been listening to Karl. He told me he wasn’t related, he had met Karl 18 years ago and thought he was an incredible man. I am back home now. The doctors don’t know what happened to me, maybe a blood pressure spike. I am fine.
I still think a lot about Karl and the way I learned his story.
