95. Hospital McDonald’s

Some things, like seeing your boyfriend have a seizure and need to go to the hospital to get an MRI, are not okay. But even in the worst moments, we can find a little bright spot, like a special treat. 

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I’m Nora McInerny,

And not everything is going to be okay.

You know that. I know that. There are things in this world that will never be okay; tragedies that shock and confound and change the world around us, secret betrayals that shake our inner sense of order and safety. 

Everything happens to other people until you are other people.

It was October when my boyfriend was taken to the hospital for a seizure at work, and November when he finally left…he’d had an emergency craniotomy to remove the brain tumor that had been growing inside of his big, beautiful head. There had been no signs – sure, he had some headaches, but didn’t all of us soft-handed ad kids who spent their days in the glow of our monitors? 

The hospital was in the middle of our city – between where he and I lived together in a tiny little house on a busy street where people left their beer bottles and coffee cups on our front steps and where I’d grown up on a quiet, leafy street just a few blocks from one of the more beautiful lakes in the city of MInneapolis. 

Aside from being born myself, I’d never been inside a hospital until my mother dropped me off at the Emergency Room door in the middle of a workday, leaned over me to open the passenger side door and told me to “go in there and be a woman.”

I was not a woman. I was a girl of just 27, which at the time felt more like 17 or 7. Definitely not old enough to be going to an Emergency Room in the middle of the day. Definitely not old enough to answer the questions the nurses had for me. Definitely not old enough to take Aaron’s phone and call his mother, his sister, his aunts…because if he did it, he knew he’d cry.

Aaron seemed fine, but if you have a seizure out of the blue they will ask questions. They will check you out. They might even admit you to the hospital, place you in a wheelchair and wheel you down into a very cold basement to wait in a line to get into a machine and take a look at your insides.

That morning, I’d left for work earlier than Aaron had. I’d stopped at our coffee place – the coffee shop northeast in minneapolis – and paid for the cup of coffee I knew he’d stop to get in an hour or so. I went to meetings, and so did Aaron, and in between them we sad on gchat and just…chatted. Just burned company and client time talking about…going to home depot. About how this night would be our very first halloween together and we’d get to hand out candy for the first time as…cohabitators.

It’s hard to talk about falling in love without falling into tropes and platitudes but guess what? Sometimes they’re true. Sometimes you find a person and everything is easy and fun and you spend an entire year feeling like you fell into a Taylor Swift album that is ONLY the love songs.

We’d had a year of dates and dinners and movies and driving up North on little day trips and staying up all night talking. Of moving in together. On our second date we talked about how many kids we wanted! It was good. LIFE was good. EVERYTHING WAS GOING TO BE FINE!

We’d woken up as our normal selves, and somehow been catapulted into this alternate reality. I knew, when they closed the door to the MRI room and Aaron gave me a thumbs up from the little rocket ship they were strapping him into, that we were entering a before and after. Whether or not there was something wrong, i – WE – would not be the same. 

It takes a few hours between getting an MRI and finding out what they SAW in the MRI. Aaron and I were starving. I’d heard hospital food was gross, but I’d still like to be offered some, ya know? But when I asked about it, the nurse leaned over and said, “oh, just go to Mcdonald’s.”

I’d have loved to just GO TO MCDONALDS but I didn’t have a CAR. My MOM dropped me off. And I wasn’t going to leave my boyfriend just to go out and get a Big Mac Meal or my personal favorite the two cheeseburger meal!

No. She said. There’s a mcdonald’s here.

At the hospital.

And…she said…they have twist cones.

If you know McDonald’s you know two things: the ice cream machine never works and the only cones they offer any more are VANILLA which is BONKERS who at McDonald’s do I need to contact about this!

The nurse gave me turn by turn directions and after geting lost for a long time, I found it. A hospital McDonald’s. Tucked into a hallway. With a reasonable line. And she was right…they had twist cones.

A new app called Instagram had just come out, so I took a picture of my cone, and of Aaron’s. And he and I sat in the hospital together and drank cokes and ate fries and burgers and cones and acted like everything was just fine.

It wasn’t. 

But you know what was?

Those twist cones.

In the days between that MRI and the brain surgery, we got so many twist cones. For me. For Aaron. For his parents. His friends. 

That hospital McDonald’s has since closed, and I get it…but I’m also strangely sad about it. 

On the list of things that are not okay and never will be, I can confidently say: brain cancer. Brain tumors of any kind, really. Cancer. Dying young.

But if you have to face any of those things…a twist cone doesn’t hurt. Unless you’re lactose intolerant or vegan in which case, you’re just going to need another treat, okay? The okay thing is a treat in an unexpected place at an unexpected time.

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