Hospital Food
Abigail Denike
I’m convinced that the Popeyes on the Johns Hopkins campus is the most maliciously placed restaurant in the world. Amidst the buildings, connected by glass tunnels, stands this sadistic fast-food joint reminding people undergoing pancreas resections they cannot eat fried chicken, even though that’s the thing they want most in the world.
Looking at it from my window every day was a unique form of torture. The nurse who was there when I transferred out of the ICU said I was lucky; I got a corner room. A great luxury allowing me to see both the south and west faces of the restaurant, including the drive-through window.
By the time I started to feel taunted by Popeyes, I had been NPO for six days. Throughout the night I would wake up to take my pills and turn my head left, away from the poles supporting snaking wires and bags of fluid. I would look at the intersection below and the sign kitty-corner to my room. My mouth would fill with saliva. My dreams buzzed neon orange. That light never went off.
My pancreas had been cut in half. The half with the tumor had been excised and butterfly-fileted like a juicy chicken breast. The doctor showed me a picture of the dripping slab of meat on the operating table. Months ago, I had an ovarian cyst burst and I went to the hospital concerned about the pain deep in my abdomen. The tumor was an incidental finding forced reluctantly into my consciousness. He was outside the ER waiting for me, eating McDonald’s nuggets on the sidewalk at 4 AM. He looked amused by our surroundings; his brow furrowed like it did that night we met at a bar last Fall. I held my belongings in a hospital bag and stood in the spring DC air, numbed by the morphine. He took me home and tucked me in. Tomorrow, we would face the reality of an enhancing mass on a CT scan, but not yet.
I did the MRI with contrast, the lab work, and the fine-needle biopsy. I kept my head down. My primary doctor called and asked if I was alone. I said, “Yes, but tell me anyway.” I looked up to find he was there. I am still not sure how he knew.
I looked at that intersection as he sat braiding my hair. Doctors and nurses rushed below on the street in bright scrubs with hard-earned badges. The braid would fall out immediately when he would get up for his next meal. He kept trying, but each day it came out worse than the last. I didn’t mind.
I thought about whether he would get a sandwich or pizza for lunch today; the last few days he had eaten a sandwich. I thought about how hungry I was. I was hungry to understand how this happened. I wanted to know how I would get to be on the other side of the bed in a white coat when this had destroyed all my plans to do so. I wanted to understand why I suddenly missed my mom’s cooking even though I’d lived 2,000 miles away from her for years. I wanted to know if I was a disturbed person to feel excited waking up in a hospital room, a room I had longed to be in, even if it was not the way I imagined getting there. I wanted to know if I was being silly and unrealistic thinking about the future. Mainly, I wondered why he was still there, braiding my hair, when I got a cancer diagnosis six months after we met. Yet, his presence made it seem so simple. If you are hungry, eat. If you are tired, rest. If you are afraid, dream.
When he pulled around the car on my discharge day, my mom wheeled me out into the Baltimore sun and helped me in the passenger seat. We piled in. He drove us down the coast with his hands steady at ten and two. My mom whispered in my ear to never look back. I tugged at his sleeve, reminding him to pull over for fried chicken.
Abigail DeNike is a medical student at UMass Chan Medical School. She is originally from Washington State and was drawn to medicine in part due to her love for storytelling. This piece was awarded third place in the 20th annual Gerald F. Berlin prize for creative writing.
