The Sounds of Care

On illness, control, and dignity.

Photo by Anna Sophia

What I love most about mornings is the sound of life restarting. The pipes that run between our apartments tap out a kind of Morse code.

Maria leaves for work at eight. The pipes groan under the weight of her shower, or the dishes she washed the night before. Lisa showers at night, usually after dinner. She’s had a hacking cough for a month now. She should probably get it checked out.

There’s an orange cat I’ve been watching. He’s feral. He still has his balls. I want him. If I stand very still outside, he sometimes walks toward me, but never close enough for me to touch him.

We are a loose-knit group paying too much to live in Los Angeles. I don’t like some of them. We live in our units on the same plot of land. All of us struggling.

In the ICU, there are other sounds. Beeping. Hurried footsteps. Someone screaming down the hall. The blood pressure cuff squeezing and releasing around my arm. I find it comforting. It feels almost like touch.

When I wake up, I don’t know what has happened. I’m on antibiotics, nutrients, painkillers. An oxygen tube runs into my nose. Everything feels ordinary. Doesn’t everyone need an oxygen tube? I think. How do I get one for my house? It’s nice, having extra air. It feels like I’m not even breathing.

I’m strapped to so many IVs that a nurse has to disconnect them for me to use the bathroom. Which is frequent. On the first day, I can’t walk there on my own. A nurse lifts me by the armpits and helps me off the bed.

It’s infantilizing. And somehow, I enjoy it.

Forget cutting, risky sex, or drugs. Just neglect yourself long enough, and you’ll be rewarded with needles, pinched faces, no name, just patient 102.

I’m looped up, off my psych meds, and pressed for an emergency contact. In a moment of soft-bellied vulnerability, I give them my family’s information. Mistake. Mistake. Mistake.

If I’d been lucid, I would have insisted on no visitors. But they caught me weak, barely able to drink through a straw, ulcers singing with each swallow. My mother and sister arrive, and I can’t understand why they look so upset. I’m obviously fine.

I can’t see myself from their perspective. Can’t imagine how I must look to them, after walking past rooms of car accidents and dying elderly patients. I feel annoyed. Smothered. So I speak very little as we survey each other. It has been almost two years since I’ve seen them.

I tell them I’m okay, that I’m comfortable, even as I hiccup uncontrollably and then moan in pain. I don’t want their concern. I don’t want anything except to remain suspended there, alone, the only light coming from my blood pressure monitor.

I feel clean. Collared. Temporarily exempt from self-hatred.

I don’t cry once. Not when my arms are brutalized by 3 a.m. blood draws, mottled purple and black, the veins so blown it’s unclear how they keep finding them. Often they don’t. I’m stabbed repeatedly. Sometimes, with two nurses, after one tries six times, gives up, and apologizes.

I smile weakly. Like—what can you do?

The only time I cry during my entire stay is around the third day—don’t quote me, time doesn’t exist in hospitals. One of my nurses comes in and tells me a family member has called. Their first assumption was that I’d overdosed. They weren’t exactly right. It wasn’t an overdose. I just stopped caring. I’m not sure which is worse.

They yell at the nurse. Demand access to my medical records. She refuses. When she tells me about the call, I apologize, mortified. She shakes her head and says it happens all the time.

They care, she says.

Then she asks why I don’t want to talk to them. I tell her my story. She holds my hand and says, Can you keep a secret? Then she tells me hers.

I feel awe. And grief. I realize I am part of a quiet constellation of women who have been hurt. For her to share her story with me feels radical. A small act of defiance against the people who failed her.

She came to the States at eleven. Lived with a distant relative. Worked her way into nursing. Nobody is going to save you, she says. You don’t let them win. You be brave and love your life. And remember—it’s our secret.

When she leaves, her perfume lingers in the room—something woody, vanilla. After the door closes, I cry quietly so I won’t wake anyone. Not for myself, but for the violence and difficulty of being alive. Even a good life carries grief: illness, breakups, accidents. No one is spared.

I feel embarrassed by my earlier irreverence. At my lowest, I asked myself who would care if I died. I decided it would be easier for everyone. Then my best friend tells me she is having a breakdown because of me. I stopped taking Xanax that day.

I spent the next few days on the floor, waiting for a replacement. My skin crawls. My thoughts turn feral. I keep repeating the same sentence—I can’t believe I hurt her—as if saying it enough times might undo it.

Depression hijacks your thinking. At first, I didn’t know what this Substack was meant to be. I thought it would cover my life, fashion, and maybe culture. Instead, it became a record of losing the plot.

I didn’t plan to open my mind like that. I couldn’t write about anything else. I wanted to tell the truth, even when it made me unlikable. After nearly dying twice, embarrassment lost its authority. At a certain point, you stop editing yourself for likability. You live with what you are.

I am poor. My career is strange. I speak too bluntly and ask questions people aren’t ready to answer. Under capitalism, poverty, and plain bad luck, there are few things no one can take from you.

Dignity is one of them.