The Two Kinds of Decay

Blood and Shit

My shoulders still allowed my arms to rotate behind me, but my hands were too weak to resist even the slightest pressure. I couldn’t wipe my ass.

It’s hard to wipe someone else’s ass. After asking for a few extra swipes, I’d feel embarrassed, and then I’d say to hell with it even though my ass would itch like hell later and I wouldn’t have the strength to scratch it.

One of my nurses was a year younger than I was. She was the kind of person who would visit her brother and his family and see the house wasn’t clean and then clean the entire house. And she really knew how to wipe an ass. With a washcloth soaked in hot water, and then with a dry towel.

I thanked her so profusely the first time that she was moved to explain. I could wipe shit all day, she said, smiling.

Even blood didn’t bother her. Blood is for life, she’d said another time, when a line had popped out of my arm and I’d shot a blood geyser all over my bed.

I watched her clean up messes that horrified me, and she was cheerful, always.

One day she told me about the phlegm that formed in cancerous lungs. Sometimes she had to suction that phlegm. And sometimes it was black with necrotic tissue.

The young nurse said she’d never got used to the odor of that phlegm.

Sometimes I could hear people being suctioned. And sometimes above the slurping sound I heard the people yell in pain or in fear at seeing their own dead selves being sucked out of them.