my muscles have seized.

I have spent the past four hours trying
to decide what I should order from
GrubHub.

you’d think it’s my last meal. I think of
mashed potatoes, cream of wheat,
a pastry in a plastic shell no one opened.

over text my boyfriend says I should
eat the ramen I packed
in the suitcase I dragged
up the A and sweated onto.

I sweated on it again dragging
it up Fort Wash between my
Airbnb and my new place in
the clammy mid-dawn of
my first day of at the hospital.

I packed a pot but I don’t
want to boil water.

in my decision paralysis I watch
an episode of The Handmaid’s Tale. I
am crying by the recap. It’s cathartic I think

but when it’s over I still don’t know
what to order. I eat ramen from the
suitcase bust open on the floor.

when I’m done, I scroll through
GrubHub again. I used too much
water and the broth had no flavor.

I’m sitting cross-legged on my bed
so everytime I stand my knees
are angry, my thighs tight.

maybe I’m thirsty. I down an entire
dissolved packet of Pink Starburst
Drink Mix and wonder if I can order
boba tea.

maybe I need a shower. I do stink.
I showed up to the hospital sweaty
and never quite cooled down. I recoiled
from the blankets stacked four-high
on a dying woman who breathed faster
when she heard us but could not speak.
I worried she was hot but could not
tell us. I don’t want to die sweating.

the blankets were beautiful. They were from
her home, the top one at least homemade,
an emerald quilt atop thick pink felt atop
a soft white wool atop the hospital sheet.

is it a problem if she doesn’t eat?

Food is love, my attending told the daughter.
It’s distressing to us when our moms don’t
eat, but we know that it doesn’t cause them
discomfort or pain. It’s part of dying.

I write that explanation down in my
little black notebook, sad that my attending
borrowed my favorite pen and those words
are now immortilized in gapped papermate.

my uncle, the DO, gave me his little book
from residency. It is blue and filled with
medicines and syrups we don’t use anymore,
plus formulas for understanding arterial
blood gasses and his notes on pneumonia
and antibiotics.

my book starts with causes of nausea:
VOMIT (vesticular, obstruction, [dys]motility,
infection/inflammation, toxins) because my
first patient who ever died had such horrible
nausea she cried and someone thought
we had perforated her bowel. She came out
of ERCP crying and I thought of the medical
team who hadn’t wanted to say it was cancer
until they were 100% not 99% sure
but the surgeon had to make sure
she knew this operation was likely palliative.
It was hard not to hear her cries and think
it as much nausea as it was her grief
come to a head, an abscess looking
for the lowest pressure point to drain.

but it was also pain. I told the team
three times I thought she had pancreatitis
but they didn’t believe me until a CT
for another reason showed all that
fat angry, streaking around the pancreas,
which puts her nausea under the “I” in
my acronym, I guess. Never has anything
felt more futile.

I still don’t know what I want to eat.

I tell myself it’s the exhaustion of moving.
It’s the inkling of depression, the valley
between the peaks — after all, Doulingo
is reminding me that I just practiced Spanish
for 18 days straight and am in danger of
losing my streak — that it’s no different
than the couple of times I’ve missed
emails for a week. I tell myself it is just
coming off a vacation where all I did was
eat and drink. That is it my body reacting
to all my medication tweaks. So I shower,
finally giving up on dinner after I got all
the way to checkout and realized my five
dollar tuna sub would cost twelve dollars
seventeen, and I admit that meeting eleven
dying people today may have rattled me.