When a family member is given a low chance to live the family hears a piercing alarm that refuses to turn off. My uncle Paul’s roommate, whom we’ll call John, made a call to my uncle’s close friend Pat, telling him my uncle’s breathing sounded off. John asked Pat if he should call 9-1-1, but Pat came to pick him up and take him to the hospital instead, assuming that maybe something was off but everything should be fine. Upon arriving at the hospital, my uncle was immediately sedated and put on a ventilator. The nurse explained that if they hadn’t taken my uncle in when they did, he would have died. He is only fifty-nine years old.

The alarm starts ringing.

The ventilator is doing one hundred percent of his breathing for him, as the doctors do multiple tests on him. He’s had pneumonia in the past, which everyone assumes to be why he got to be in such a severe state so quickly, but how he got to this point of needing hospitalization is the question. The covid test comes back negative. The flu test comes back negative. Nothing is coming back positive. The only thing known is that his lungs are coming back almost completely white, lacking oxygen. 

I wake up to the alarm. 

As his lung tests come back, he is diagnosed with Legionnaires disease. Right around the same time, San Diego State University shuts down one of its buildings after a faculty member is reported with a case of Legionnaires. As time continues on, seeming like years but apparently being only a few days, he slowly gets better, but the doctors say it’s happening too slowly. His sedation vacations, when he is not completely sedated, last fifteen minutes, the only times we can talk to him, hoping that he can hear us. My dad makes the drive out from Arizona to California to see him, but I can’t miss school. The fear in my body begins to choke me as I begin to think that he might not make it. There have been no conclusive thoughts of whether he is likely to make it. We have just been told by the doctor that he is “very sick.”

As I reach over to turn the alarm off, I become annoyed to find that it is not there. 

My other uncle, Steve, begins to take calls from all of the nieces and nephews who can’t be there, along with any family members or friends who want to talk to Paul. When I call him, the only thing I hear is the scratchiness of the phone. I wish that I could hear him say that everything will be okay. Without being able to see him myself, the only information I am able to get from my Uncle Steve and my dad is that he isn’t doing well. He is given antibiotics for the Legionnaires, and the doctors have to continue flipping him from his back onto his stomach, which helps his breathing to improve, to give him time for the antibiotics to kick in. The doctors lower the ventilator to sixty percent, having realized they were pushing him too fast, move it back up to one hundred percent, and slowly lower it back down to eighty percent. 

I search around the room with my eyes for the alarm, to no avail. The ringing has become a major disturbance, and I don’t know how to make it stop. The alarm is so loud, it seems like an air raid siren. Blaring, the sound is deafening and horrible.

As we wait for the antibiotics to kick in, the doctors finally inform us he has a twenty percent chance to live. We waited over a week to get information, only to receive horrible news.

I stand up and frantically search around the room, the ringing seeming like it may never end. The alarm is like a car alarm constantly going off outside my window in the middle of the night. There is no way to ignore it, and it keeps me up all night long. 

I try to keep a positive outlook, telling my mom that we need to stay positive. He truly is one of the strongest people we know. He’s a fighter. Yet for some reason, my brain keeps contradicting my words, and all I can picture is going to the funeral. 

I call the police to get the car alarm to turn off, but no one comes. There is nothing to save me from the constant blaring sound of the alarm going off outside. I give up looking for the alarm, accepting the nauseating sound that will never end.

Some may consider me lucky since there's a chance he won’t die and, if he does, I got to pick what I said to him last. Even though I am given the alarm clock, I am allowed to push a snooze button, a time to prepare myself for the real waking up. Yet when I walk around my college campus and fear randomly instills in me that my uncle has died, after which I feel guilty for not believing in his ability to fight, I don’t feel lucky. When I have no idea if what I’m saying to him is really being heard or not, I don’t feel lucky. When I’m not able to go see him because school doesn’t give me enough days off, I don’t feel lucky. Nothing about the situation feels lucky to me, and the alarm just keeps ringing.

I ask for updates throughout the day, calling my family members and the hospital, hoping every time that somehow he has miraculously begun to heal. No one can provide me with any information that I want; instead, all I get are little updates about how he changes every day. As the two-week deadline approaches, the usual amount of time a patient is allowed to be on the ventilator before they have to be taken off, discussion of tracheotomy surgery begins. This procedure involves sticking a tube into the windpipe by making a large incision in the throat. While this is most likely his best bet, this can also cause long term damage if he gets better. I realize that long term damage isn’t the fear at this point. The fear is short term living. 

With the alarm constantly in my head, I continue to look for little ways to locate it, things I would normally never think of, begging it to stop. 

Just as the alarm can’t be found, the results are not there. And what are the results? I constantly hope to hear that he isn’t going to die. That he will live and have to suffer through the long process of recovery that comes with Legionnaires. I hope that he will be a crazy case that miraculously heals, with an immediate, full recovery. The alarm keeps blaring . . .