In an effort to stay calm while Dave was out of the room, I pulled out my iPod and clicked on my music. I went for my go-to playlist for calm, relaxing music, a list of slow classic rock songs that Dave had made and labeled “Classic Rock Mellow,” songs that he had introduced me to in our twelve years together—Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and so on. This was Dave’s favorite playlist. But as I clicked through the songs, I saw every single title with a fresh stab of excruciating pain. Not only were they Dave’s favorite songs, songs imbued with memory and meaning between us, but the titles!
Helpless
Wish You Were Here
Comfortably Numb
Stairway to Heaven
Knocking on Heaven’s Door
Are you freaking kidding me? I groaned, clicking off the music. I called Dave’s family back to let them know that we were at the hospital and that I was awaiting information. Had they ruled out stroke? they asked. I did not know. Had they hooked Dave up to the MRI immediately? I did not know; I did not know what was happening. Nelson and Andy wanted to speak to the doctor as soon as he returned.
About an hour later the doctor was back, and he told me that the team had enough data to determine that there was no bleeding inside Dave’s brain. This was great news! This meant that Dave hadn’t suffered a hemorrhagic stroke. The only other type of stroke was ischemic, and that, the experts agreed, was very unlikely. Dave was young, healthy. He was not obese or a smoker or a heavy drinker. That type of stroke was so improbable for someone of Dave’s profile as to be practically unheard-of. And besides, that type of stroke was so bad that, had Dave suffered one, he would possibly be dead already.
So then, it was something else. They would work hard to find out just what that was, but, phew, we had ruled out stroke! Maybe it would end up being something as harmless as low blood sugar.
I heard the exhales over the phone, the audible sighs of relief issuing from Nelson and Andy and Louisa when they heard this. Next, I called my parents to tell them the update. I could hear their sighs as well. “This is such a relief. I was really worried,” my dad, the incorrigible optimist, confessed.
My dad had just announced a week earlier that he was running for president, so he and my mom had been busy lately, to say the least. This night they were, mercifully, at home in New York. Just a couple of weeks prior we had all gathered as a family in New Hampshire for my father’s announcement. We’d stood on the podium with him, so proud that he was throwing his hat into the crowded ring. Dave had not been able to get out of surgery that day, so he had watched the coverage on television from Chicago. I had told him all about it when I got home the next day. We joked that our daughter would be allowed to watch television, but only so that she could see her grandfather on the debate stage. Sitting there, alone in that Fargo emergency room, all of that felt like another world, another lifetime.
“No bleeding in his brain,” I told them. “Which means the only type of stroke it could be at this point would be ischemic, and that is very unlikely, that would have been so bad that Dave would probably not even be alive right now, so they think they can rule that out.”
“Oh, that’s so great to hear, Alli,” my dad said. “Well, let’s hope for the best, then.” I hung up, promising to call back as soon as I knew more.
An hour later, the neurologist came in. He was a young guy, but he wore fatigue and concern like a tight mask on his face. He sat down with me in that blindingly bright ER, his face heavy, all of his body language seeming to indicate something grim.
He looked me in the eyes and explained that he had reviewed all of the scans. It turned out that Dave had had a stroke—the really bad, really unlikely one. Ischemic, not hemorrhagic. Why, he could not say. Dave had just been that unlucky. “He’s had a bithalamic midbrain stroke,” the doctor told me, with Nelson and Louisa and Andy listening on speakerphone. I could read so many things on this doctor’s face as he explained: Sympathy as he broke the terrible news. Fatigue—it was well past the middle of the night and he had been called in from home. Stress. But mostly incredulity; he had never expected to see this rare stroke in such a young, healthy man. He did not understand why it had happened—he could not tell me where we would be going from here. He could not even tell me if Dave would be waking up.
We did not want to keep the doctor from Dave for even a second longer than was necessary, so we heard what he had to tell us and then let him get back to work.
Andy got back on the phone with me. “What are they telling you?”
“They are telling me that there is just no way to know anything at this point,” I answered.
“That’s exactly right,” Andy said. “It could mean anything…it could mean anything from…my brother is going to wake up and be OK to…my brother is going to die.”
I called my parents back, broke the news to them. “You guys should probably come out here…in case, you know, you need to say goodbye.” I barely finished the sentence before the words faded, breaking into sobs.
“Of course,” my dad said. “We’ll get the first flight.”
I hung up, alone once more in the bright hospital room. I was shivering. I could not make sense of what was happening. I pulled out my phone and sent out a group email to close friends and extended family.
Subject: Need prayers NOW
Please don’t respond to this right now, I can’t take calls or emails as I am in an ER and need to focus on Dave and the doctors, but I need your prayers. Dave’s and my flight had to be diverted to Fargo, North Dakota, because Dave had a stroke. He is in ER now. We need your prayers. I will let you know more when I can. Again, please no calls or texts right now. I love you. Thank you.
Hemorrhagic stroke is usually the type you hear about in younger people. Young survivors often suffer loss of speech and loss of mobility. Many patients with this type of stroke begin their journey to recovery in a state of complete paralysis, without the ability to speak or process language. With long, grueling rehab and more-than-human dedication, many of these patients manage to overcome some, even many of these deficits, but it is a terrible fate for a young person to endure. We had been praying that Dave had not suffered that.
And yet, several hours later, once we had learned what had happened to Dave, my father-in-law, the neurologist, told me that he would have given anything for Dave to have suffered that type of stroke. Paralysis and loss of speech, he knew. Hemorrhagic stroke, the doctors and rehabilitation therapists would know how to address. But an ischemic midbrain stroke in a thirty-year-old? It was so improbable that there was not even medical literature available on how someone with Dave’s profile survived or recovered from such a stroke. There were no case studies that anyone could look to for guidance. And so it was impossible for any of us to know what it meant, and what hope, if any, we could have for Dave.
Chapter 6
New York, New York
September 2007
I was mortified when, on our three-year anniversary, Dave sent a humongous flower arrangement to my work at ABC News world headquarters. The flowers came the afternoon of September 24, arriving in the main newsroom, just feet from where Charles Gibson was preparing for his nightly newscast. I was off in a side room editing a news clip that had to feed out to college campuses via our partner MTVU, and so a senior producer had to sign for the flowers and track me down to deliver them.
“How could you?” I whispered into my cellphone in the bathroom, my voice like that of an embarrassed teenager scolding a parent for not parking in a more discreet location several blocks away. “It looks so unprofessional! My boss had to sign for them!”
“Three years,” Dave said, chastened by my horrified tone. “I thought a really big milestone deserved a big gesture. Full disclosure here: I ran it past my parents, to see if it was a good idea. And they thought it was.”
And to us, at age twenty-two, it was a big m
ilestone. We were one of the few couples who had navigated the shifting waters of college and then graduation and a move to the big city and life in the “real world,” removed from the coddling womb of a college campus, and we were still going strong.
But our new life in New York City was not going to be merely a continuation of our carefree college days, and that soon became very evident. Dave was in his first year of medical school at Columbia, up in New York City’s Washington Heights neighborhood, and I was living on the Lower East Side with three college friends, the four of us crammed into a three-bedroom apartment with one bathroom. Getting from my place to Dave’s took nearly an hour on the subway. “You might as well be living in Connecticut; it would take just as long for us to get to each other on a commuter train,” I lamented.
Fortunately, we had never had one of those symbiotic relationships in college, needing to be together at all times. I had a full life and so did Dave. We were both independent and focused on our various pursuits. This would, at times, prove to be one of the biggest challenges we faced as a couple—working to weave together our two individualistic natures—but, for the most part, it was a good thing. Neither one of us was overly dependent on the other. And for those years when our apartments were far apart and we were both working hard to gain a foothold in New York and launch our postcollege careers, that independence served us well.
I was working as a freelance production assistant at ABC News. Right at the time I graduated and returned to ABC, where I had interned in college, the writers’ strike began and the economy began to wobble. This led to a hiring freeze, and the staff job I had hoped for had been scaled back to a freelance position with hourly pay and no healthcare. My salary was such that, even in our cost-saving apartment, I had only a couple hundred dollars left over after rent each month to cover every other expense, and lest I state the extremely obvious here: New York is not a particularly affordable city.
While I loved so much of the work I was doing, after eight months I needed a more reliable job and a salary that would allow me to occasionally eat more than microwaveable dinners, and I needed healthcare. I applied for a full-time position as a daytime news writer at Fox News.
I love stories. I love weaving narratives with the written word. My whole life I’ve been driven by a desire to learn people’s stories, to get to the bottom of who they are and how they got that way. To ask questions and seek to understand what a person deems important. At age nine, when my family suddenly had a legion of state troopers around all the time—driving us, passing through our home at all hours of the day, accompanying us on family vacations—I earned the nickname “Little Miss Marple” because I was so curious to get to know them all. I was so eager to learn each of their stories. I’d get in the car, introduce myself to the state trooper (usually a middle-aged male), and immediately launch a volley of questions: Are you married? If the answer was in the negative, the follow-up was about a possible girlfriend; if the answer was in the affirmative, the follow-up was about how they’d met. Do you have children? Where do you live? Do you have photos of your kids in your wallet? If so, can I see? And so on.
These were the days before cellphones, and the troopers would communicate via radios using a series of numbers and codes. I listened intently, I eventually cracked their code, and it became not uncommon for me to take the radio receiver in hand and spout off the series of codes and numbers for the message that needed transmitting.
So, given these natural investigative inclinations of mine, coupled with my love of writing and my passion for history, I thought that journalism would be the logical career path. Working in that newsroom was exciting and fast-paced and I met interesting people, but, for some reason, writing news left me unfulfilled. Although I enjoyed much of the work I was doing, I was sort of a misfit in the industry. I did want to study the major events unfolding in our world, and the way in which individuals reacted to and shaped these events—but the panic-inducing deadlines and the rapid-fire pace of the twenty-four-hour news cycle were not for me. I’m far too much of a sponge—I soak up all of the good and the bad and the stress of my environment. I developed insomnia that first year in the job; I found my brain reeling all night, and I was unable to turn it off, struggling to digest the flood of information, panicking over tight deadlines or pending guest bookings.
I was told, at various points during my years in the newsroom, the following things:
You need to be snarkier.
You need to be more cynical.
The goal here is to provoke outrage.
Use shorter sentences.
Use fewer big words.
Get in and get out, keep it moving, fast.
A sentence that requires a comma is already too complicated.
Do you take happy pills?
I had never been a snarky, cynical person, and I did not want to become one. I did not want to be mocked by a stressed-out, grumpy manager only because I tried my best to maintain a pleasant and friendly demeanor. I liked writing sentences that necessitated commas. I liked playing with words and language. This emphasis on fast, fast, fast struck me as cursory and stressful. And I did not want to unlearn everything I had spent my entire life up to that point trying to learn as a writer.
I began to write fiction in my free time, almost as a way of winding down at the end of a chaotic shift in the newsroom—an opportunity to play with the big words and complex sentences and wide range of emotions and thoughts that were discouraged in my daily work.
Before long, I found myself completely consumed by this new hobby. Suddenly, I was rushing home from work to grab my laptop and get to writing. I would be surprised on the subway, at the grocery store, out for dinner, with a new idea for some scene or a character or a piece of dialogue, and I would run back to my apartment, worried that I might lose the idea before I could get it down on paper. It turned out that my desires to study human nature and unfurl narratives were fulfilled much more by writing fiction than by writing newscasts.
Energized and encouraged by this early part of the process, I kept going. Writing fiction became a secret pleasure, an indulgence for weeknights and weekends. It was the fun I got to have after work. But I did not see how I could actually make a career of it, or if I would ever be able to support myself through writing fiction. The words keep your day job rang sternly in my mind, and even though I was miserable in my day job, I knew that that was how I would pay the rent.
Dave was at medical school, wading through his own anxieties. No matter how hard he worked, it always seemed to him that his classmates learned faster, slept less, understood the material quicker, and were better at playing the game in negotiating hospital politics. It was one of the first times in Dave’s life that things were not coming easily for him, and that rattled him. He was not the smartest—far from it—and that was an uncomfortable place for him to be. So, he did what he had always done to carry himself through times of challenge: he buckled down and he worked harder.
Dave suddenly had very little free time, and certainly no time for reading that did not involve anatomy or pathology or some other medical topic, and so I remember how touched I was when I found him reading the early, rough fiction manuscript I had sent him. He had printed it out and put it in a white binder, and I still have the mental image of him sprawled on his bed, reading my words.
Around that same time, I found a sticky note on Dave’s computer. “She likes yellow gold like her grandmother. Not white gold. Likes the idea of three diamonds.”
I had told Dave in passing—I did not even remember when—about the fact that I loved my grandmother’s engagement ring. He had taken notes.
Dave’s Washington Heights apartment was nothing fancy; it was a glorified dorm room filled with other medical students, but it was so far uptown that it afforded a dazzling view of the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge. At night, as the sun went down behind the west
ern bank of the Hudson, the bridge would come aglow, spanning the broad river and glittering at the top of the New York skyline. Life in those years was not glamorous, nor was it carefree—as it had once been—but Dave was my constant. His love was rock-solid and unwavering during those years of microwave dinners and first-job angst. He shone bright and steady, an unmoving star in a big, expensive city where no other stars were visible.
Chapter 7
I spent that first night in Fargo in a chair by Dave’s hospital bed, shifting my unwieldy body in a futile attempt to get comfortable. A jarring symphony of chirping hospital machines filled the room, the oxygen being pumped in and out of Dave by an endotracheal tube that snaked into his mouth. I was so cold. Even under several blankets brought to me by the kind and concerned nurses, I could not get warm. Even though outwardly I appeared calm and composed, my body was shaking and shivering, and I would come to realize later that it was because I was in shock.
The nurses came in at regular intervals throughout the night to check on Dave, who remained in a coma in critical condition, so there really was not much sleeping to be done. At seven A.M., when it became clear that Dave would not be waking or eating anything resembling breakfast, a nurse asked me if I would like to have his toast and jam. I was not hungry in the slightest, but I had not eaten anything since our dinner at the airport Chili’s the night before—the Last Supper, I thought morosely—and I knew I needed to eat, so I accepted the offer. And then, realizing that I was eating for two and probably needed something more nutritious than toast with jelly, I asked for directions to the hospital cafeteria.
Beauty in the Broken Places Page 5