How strange I must have looked, trembling, clutching my tray as I made my way, zombielike, through the cafeteria, listlessly selecting a Greek yogurt and a cup of fruit, an orange juice and a coffee. At the table, my hands shaking as I poured milk into my coffee, I took stock of where we were. It had been about twelve hours since Dave had lost consciousness. I knew I was going to have to begin the miserable work of letting people know that this had happened. I would have to inform Dave’s work that he had had a stroke and we were in Fargo. My mind still struggling to make sense of it all, I sent out a cryptic email to Dave’s four coresidents: “Can one of you please call me?”
Greg, one of the co-residents, called first. All of the guys knew that Dave was supposed to be on vacation in Hawaii, and Greg clearly sensed that something was amiss.
“Greg, I’m in Fargo, North Dakota, with Dave. We didn’t make it to Seattle.” I took in a long inhale. “Dave had a bithalamic midbrain stroke.” There, I’d said it, the first time those serious, scientific words had come out of my mouth—words I did not yet understand. The medical team had told Dave’s family via speakerphone, and with my own family, given their nonmedical background, I had simply used the word “stroke.” But here I was, trying it out for the first time. What did “bithalamic” even mean? And what was a midbrain stroke?
“Oh no,” was Greg’s immediate reply. Two words, but his tone said it all—his words came out tinged with disbelief, shock, and horror. “Oh no” is right, I thought.
“I’ll let you know as soon as I know more. Please just tell the program, OK? And ask around if anyone in the hospital knows any experts on this type of stroke?”
I wasn’t aware of it then, but with that phone call back to Rush University, the wheels were set in motion for Dave’s employers and colleagues to rally to find answers and to support him. Their answers would eventually lead us right back to where we began. But at that moment, all I knew was that I needed to force myself to swallow that Greek yogurt. And I needed to tell a few more people.
Next, I texted Dave’s best friends. “Please call me.”
Peter, the mutual friend from our college years, called first. I told him what had happened.
“I can’t imagine what you must be going through,” Peter said, a rare gravity in his voice, a voice that so often delivers side-splitting humor. “Please just let us know what we can do…absolutely anything…for you guys.” There it was again, that same devastating mixture of disbelief, shock, and horror. I tried to wrap my head around what the news must have sounded like to others; how I would have felt to hear from a close friend that someone our age, someone so healthy and active and alive, was lying comatose in an ICU in Fargo, North Dakota, and that we had very few answers.
I knew that my parents and Dave’s parents were scheduled to land in Fargo by 11:00 that morning and would be at the hospital by 11:30. As luck would have it, they had booked the same connecting flight from Minneapolis, and they would be arriving together. I went back to Dave’s hospital room to resume my bedside vigil, accompanied by the machines’ chirps and rhythmic hums.
My mind could not compute it all, could not connect the reality of the devastation going on inside Dave’s head with the silent, placid image of his resting frame. He looked so beautiful, so at peace. Dave, for as long as I’ve known him, has always had great skin; his cheeks have this rosy flush. It had always ticked me off—the fact that he could roll out of bed looking great, even after four hours of sleep and chronic sun deprivation, while I would have looked like a haggard vampire in his place. Even that day in the Fargo ICU, his beautiful face appeared rosy and full of health.
I sat there, rocking myself as the baby kicked in my belly, making her presence known. I was grateful for those kicks, for the confirmation that she was still moving around in there. Please God, please. I’m so scared. Please let him be OK. Please have him wake up. Please, God, hold Dave in Your hands. I recalled the words of a hymn I’d sung in the youth choir so many years earlier:
Dear God, I am so sorrowful; is there no other way?
Dear God, if it is possible, let this cup pass away.
I looked up when a nurse entered, arriving on the new shift as morning brightened over Fargo. She had a soft, kind face. She looked at me for a moment and then I saw her features crumple. “Do you have someone coming to be with you?”
“Yes,” I answered. “My parents are on their way, and so is his family.”
And just like that, the nurse began to weep. This reaction, so sudden and raw, filled me with a leaden sense of dread. “Why…why are you crying?” I asked, taken aback. What did she know that I didn’t know? I think a part of me was hoping that Dave might just wake up. That he would yawn and blink, look around, dazed by the foreign surroundings, and ask: “What happened?”
“It’s just that…I know how hard this is going to be for you. And, you’re…” She pointed at my belly before looking back to Dave. “Sorry, I’ve just gotten so much more emotional since having kids of my own. Can I give you a hug?”
I let her give me a hug, though this well-intentioned exchange was actually doing more to alarm me than give me comfort. She knew how hard this was going to be? But I myself did not yet know what was happening, what our outlook was—did she know something I didn’t? Did this mean that Dave would not be waking up?
I’m not sure if it was right then, or sometime around then, that a bizarre thought popped into my head. I can only attribute it to the shock of the situation, the fact that I was struggling to process all that was going on. I thought: I guess we aren’t going to make it to Hawaii, even for the end of the week. It was sinking in, in an odd and disjointed way. On the one hand, I had the very real fear that my husband might be dying right before my eyes. On the other hand, a part of me had still been holding out the irrational hope that Dave might simply wake up, that we might be able to resume our lives, even salvage part of our longed-for babymoon.
This nurse’s hug shook me from that fog of magical thinking; we were not going to make it to Hawaii in two days, or even later in the week. We were not going to be going anywhere, anytime soon. Dave was in a coma. I did not know whether he would wake up. And most horrifying of all—if he did wake, we did not know what, or who, we would find.
Chapter 8
Dear Dave,
When does Tuesday stop and Wednesday begin? It begins with you, in a coma, on the hospital bed of the emergency room in Fargo, North Dakota. That’s a sentence I never thought I’d use to describe our lives. You are wheeled, unconscious, to scan after scan, and I, left behind in the room, huddled in a fetal position, am wondering if you are dead or not. The doctors can’t figure out what the hell is going on in your brain.
They tried several times to rouse Dave that morning. When the neurologist entered, I felt a sense of relief to have him nearby, to have him in charge. His face appeared tired yet fully focused; he asked me how I was doing and then he turned to Dave.
He leaned over the bed and pressed his hand firmly onto Dave’s chest. “Dave, open your eyes.” The doctor said it several times, his voice loud and authoritative. Dave showed no response.
We took turns that morning trying to wake Dave. They had me talk to him, hold his hand, apply pressure to his chest in the same circular motion, all to no avail. We’ve all heard the stories of people who wake from comas and tell their loved ones that they felt their presence, heard their words, even as their bodies lay motionless. In case that would be the story with Dave, I spoke to him all morning. I talked about our baby. I played some of his favorite music. He did not respond.
The hour neared for my parents and Dave’s parents to land, and I kept my cellphone close, knowing they would call when they were approaching. At quarter past eleven, the doctor returned to the hospital room. “Let’s try again.” He took his place on the right side of the bed while I took Dave’s left hand.
“Dave, open your eyes.” He pressed his palm into Dave’s chest and made circles on Dave’s sternum. My focus was pulled away from the bed momentarily when my cellphone began to ring. “Dad cell” showed up on the caller ID. But before I could answer, I saw something I had not been expecting: Dave’s eyes fluttered, blinking, and then, the miraculous happened. Dave opened his eyes. The three of us in there—doctor, nurse, and wife—all reacted with giddy jumping up and down.
Dave looked around before his eyes landed on me. “Hi, my love!” I exclaimed, staring into my favorite green eyes. I distinctly remember back to when Dave and I first began dating, how much I loved his eyes. He has these thick, long eyelashes (which I always hoped he’d bequeath to our daughter) that surround almond-shaped eyes, green with flecks of yellow. I have never stopped loving those eyes. And in that moment, looking into them, I burst into a tearful smile. “Hi, honey! You’re awake!”
Dave looked at me, wordless, his expression vacant. He blinked his eyes, but showed absolutely nothing with them. I slid closer to the bed. “You’re in Fargo, North Dakota, honey. You had an accident on the plane. But you are safe here. You’re getting the best medical care possible. And I’m here with you, and your parents and Andy are here. They just called, they are going to be here any minute.”
Several blinks. A blank expression. No words.
“Let’s see if he can follow a command,” the doctor said. “Dave, squeeze your wife’s hand.”
Dave blinked again, his expression still devoid of all understanding or feeling. I leaned closer, holding his gaze with mine. “Squeeze my hand, honey. Squeeze my hand if you know how much I love you.”
Dear Dave,
I asked you to squeeze my hand if you knew how much I loved you. You squeezed and squeezed and squeezed.
Chapter 9
That first awakening and brief flurry of activity exhausted Dave, and he went right back to sleep, but not before his parents and brother were able to see him with his eyes briefly open. The air in the hospital room suddenly pulsed with a heady mixture of euphoria and relief and hugs and high fives. Dave had woken up! As dazed and groggy as he had been, he’d nevertheless heard me and responded to my voice. He had obeyed a command with a purposeful movement.
“He looks so strong,” my dad said, staring at Dave’s motionless body as he drifted back into sleep. It was true, he did; from the outside, the athlete’s frame was still whole and intact—broad chest and strong arms and healthy coloring. But he was intubated, his inhales and exhales still being regulated by the endotracheal tube. With the most basic of human functions beyond his brain’s capacity, Dave was being administered fluids by an intravenous tube, his bladder being regularly emptied by a catheter into what looked like a large Ziploc bag. He had developed pneumonia from aspirating the orange juice they had tried to administer to him on the plane, so a series of tubes and baggies was in place to empty his pneumonic lungs. Needles punctured his skin in various places. He had wires attached to his chest and head. The clicks and beeps of the various monitors reminded us every second how unstable his condition was. His hair was a tangled mass from where the wires and nodes of the EKG had been attached. But in spite of this, his body looked strong.
We had a family powwow and decided to take shifts by the hospital bed. Not knowing how long our stay in Fargo would be, we booked a couple of rooms at a nearby hotel and dug in for the long haul. There was really no further planning to be done; it was very much a situation in flux. For me, a perennial planner, this was foreign and uncomfortable and added to the dread surrounding the entire situation; I hated being so utterly unaware of what was happening and what we could do about it. I hated not having a plan.
My family members were fielding the phone calls and emails and text messages that were pouring in from hundreds of friends and relatives, so that I could focus exclusively on Dave and his medical care. Though I was deliberately delegating that duty to others, I knew that a powerful surge of prayers and loving thoughts were flooding toward us all day. There were friends who arranged to have food delivered to the hospital room so that we did not have to leave Dave’s side. There was a friend who spent hours on the phone with hotels, airlines, and tour companies to get our entire ill-fated babymoon trip refunded.
I spoke to two people on the phone that day. The first was my sister, Emily, who wept with me from her home in New Jersey. At more than eight months pregnant and with a toddler at home, Em was not able to fly to Fargo. “I just wish I could be there with you,” she said. “This is all so fucking unfair, Alli; I’m so sorry.” Em told me that her two-year-old daughter, my goddaughter, had been saying all day that she wanted to call Dave.
The second person I spoke to on the phone was a colleague of Dave’s. The Rush community had mobilized with gusto to try to help Dave in whatever way possible. I received a call from one of Dave’s friends and co-residents, named Yale. He let me know that he had informed the Rush neurology department of Dave’s stroke, and they all felt very strongly that we needed to get him back to Rush, where they have a world-class stroke team and one of the country’s top neurology intensive care units. Yale introduced me to a doctor in the neurology department. This man, who knew of Dave in passing as a colleague, reiterated the desire of his department to treat one of their own. “Alli, we want Dave back at Rush. But…he’s very sick. We can’t move him until he is stable enough to handle the plane ride.”
Hearing those words filled my stomach with a leaden heaviness. He’s very sick. I knew it was true, but to hear it spoken aloud made it that much more of an inescapable reality.
Late that night, walking from the hospital to the hotel—Dave’s nurse’s direct line written on a piece of paper in my hands and her assurance given that it would be OK if I called throughout the night to check in—I looked around for the first time at the city into which we had so suddenly and unexpectedly dropped from the sky. It was a balmy evening in early summer, and the Fargo night had come alive, with people crowding the main strip, live music spilling out of restaurants and bars, a scene filled with laughter and drinks and carefree conversation. In Chicago, people welcome the return of the warm weather with a giddy determination to make merry—I imagined that this would be equally true in a city like Fargo. I passed apartments with lights on, television sets tuned to the late-night news or some reality-TV singing contest. I thought about all the people living their lives on the other sides of those windows. It was Wednesday, a weeknight. People were home from work, cleaning their dinner dishes, thinking ahead to the next day or the coming weekend. I envied them all.
That night, alone in my hotel room, I called the hospital several times to check in on Dave. “His face is calm, his brow isn’t wrinkled, which tells me he’s not in pain,” the kind nurse told me. I then called my brother Ted and his wife in Austin, Texas, and asked them to pray with me over the phone for Dave. I sat on the floor of the hotel room next to the electrical outlet, my dead phone plugged in to the charger, and we prayed and cried. After that, I pulled myself up and crawled into bed.
Dear Dave,
I had a dream last night that you told me Jesus was holding you by the hand, and you told Jesus about the situation: you had suffered a stroke on an airplane. Your wife was expecting a baby, our first.
“Yes, I know you,” this dream version of Jesus told you. “I’m familiar with your story. And let me just tell you that I’ve received more prayers for you than I’ve ever received for anyone. I hear, and I’m on the case.”
I awoke feeling comforted by that dream. I had a sense of peace that Dave and I were being supported from around the world by the thoughts and prayers of so many loved ones. If ever the power of prayer could work its magic, as I believed it could, then surely we had a very strong chance of getting to the ear of God.
The next morning I found Louisa by Dave’s bed, her head down on his leg, looking like she was asleep. I stepped into the room and sh
e turned toward me. “Were you sleeping?” I asked.
“No.” She shook her head. “I was just praying.”
I slid a chair beside her and stared at Dave’s motionless body. He was in a loose-fitting hospital gown, intermittent splotches of blood caked on his skin from all of the needles that had pierced him. I stared at those blood splotches, their color varying from a rusty brown to a startling scarlet, depending on how recent the pinprick was. As an English major in college, I had been especially drawn to Shakespeare. In Shakespeare’s plays, there is so much emphasis placed on blood—not in a ghoulish, grisly, Halloween-corpse sort of way, but, rather, through the themes of family lineage and inherited grudges and the questions of legitimacy and power. King Henry V marries a French princess—the daughter of an erstwhile enemy—because she holds the blood of France’s royal family in her veins and he hopes that their union might heal a war-torn England. Hamlet is at risk from his evil uncle Claudius because he carries the blood of the murdered king, his father, within. And, of course, the play Romeo and Juliet sees so much blood spilled over inherited grudges passed between families over multiple generations. Even a comedy like As You Like It sees the heroine, Rosalind, forced to flee to the Forest of Arden because she is the legitimate heir, through her blood, to her father’s duchy.
And it’s not just Shakespeare; everything from the Bible to The Lord of the Rings to Game of Thrones takes up these themes. Even the Harry Potter books deal with the issue of bloodlines and legitimacy and heritage and power. Hermione is not born of pure wizarding stock, so she is derided as a “Mudblood.” Members of the Weasley family are labeled “blood traitors” because they, though pure of blood themselves, are willing to associate with those who are not.
Beauty in the Broken Places Page 6