Page 26 of Woman on the Verge

He shook his head in disbelief at himself and his failing brain. They took him for his CT scan, and when he returned, he promptly fell asleep.

Over the course of the next several hours, various people came to take blood—so much blood—and check his vitals. Between proddings, he slept while I scrolled through more photos of the girls and perused Instagram, looking at photos of other people’s fun weekends, cursing their apparent bliss. Kyle hadn’t texted to check in. Merry had texted to check in too many times.

An internal medicine resident who looked to be about nineteen years old seemed to be the person who knew the most about what was going on. He said the CT scan hadn’t shown anything unusual and that they were waiting for some preliminary blood test results. He was cute in a Doogie Howser sort of way. The only thing that assured me that he was, in fact, not a teenager was the bald spot on top of his head. I was bored enough to google his name—Dr. Joshua Belton. There was nothing interesting, not even a birth date to confirm his age. I looked to see if he had a profile on Instagram. He did not. Or if he did, it was under a secret name. Millennials call these finsta accounts, short for “fake Instagram.” I tried to imagine his, tried to picture him making a sexy face next to the handle @drfeelgood. This entertained me for about two minutes.

A nurse came by with a plastic container that she called a urinal and hooked it onto the side of my dad’s bed.

“When he wakes up, have him give a sample,” she said.

She didn’t give me any instructions beyond that, so when my dad woke up, I told him he had to pee into the container. It did seem designed for such a thing, had a long, curved neck on it. Still, if I hadn’t known better, I would have thought it was meant to hold juice on camping trips.

I helped him sit up and scoot to the edge of the bed, his hospital gown opening in the back so I could see the crack of his butt. I turned away because I knew he wouldn’t want me to see that. But then, as if forgetting I was there at all, he took out his penis and placed it in the neck of the container right in front of me. It was floppy and small, and I thought I was going to burst out crying. I didn’t cry, though. Motherhood has made me quite adept at suppressing my own emotions to service the needs of others.

When he was done, I took the container from him and set it on the tray next to his bed. It sat there for a half hour before the nurse came to retrieve it. How much pee did this poor woman transport on a daily basis?

It was nearing three o’clock when Dr. Doogie Howser Joshua Belton returned to do a cognitive assessment.

“Okay, Rob,” he said to my dad. “I’m going to do some tests to see how your brain is doing.”

“All right,” Dad said, sounding up for the challenge.

“First, I want you to name as many words as you can that start with the letterF.”

“That’s easy,” Dad said, sitting up straight and confident. “Fart.Fuck... Can I sayfuck?”

Dr. Belton and I laughed.

“That’s my dad for you,” I said.

“Any others?” Dr. Belton asked him.

“Farm,” he said. Then he stopped. I guessed he forgot what he was supposed to be doing and was too confused to ask.

When Dr. Belton was sure they’d reached the end of that exercise, he moved on:

“Okay, now I’m going to give you five words to remember, and then I’ll ask you to say them back to me in a few minutes. Here they are:elephant,flower,red,door,pencil. Got it?”

My dad laughed a little, which is what we do in my family when we’re uncomfortable. I was fairly certain he had already forgotten the words.

“Do you know what hospital you’re at?”

Dad looked at me, as if hoping I would give him a hint or whisper the answer to him, as if we were two kids in chemistry class.

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“Do you know what county?”

He thought hard about this. It pained me how hard he thought.

“Daly County,” he said finally. Which is not a county. DalyCity, where he lives, is in San Mateo County. But we were at UCSF in San Francisco (which, incidentally, is both a city and a county).

Dr. Belton looked at me with his baby face, and I shrugged. Up until this point, my dad hadn’t said much, had been pleasant and easygoing and not obviously demented. I could tell that Dr. Belton was just then realizing how serious things were.

“We’re actually at the UCSF hospital, in San Francisco,” he said to my dad.

“We are?” my dad asked.

Dr. Belton nodded and moved along. “Do you know what month it is?”