Dear Dave,
You were wiped at the end of today, after two outdoor excursions and a kick-butt PT session, so now you are in bed. We spoke about the exciting few days we have coming up, and you asked if you could sleep at home on Sunday when you have your day off. My heart aches, because God, how I wish you could sleep at home. A little over two weeks left of this—you know that I am counting down the mornings, days, and nights. In the meantime, I love you so much and there is nowhere else I would rather be than here in this room with you.
Dear Dave,
Today was a good day. I picked you up at ten A.M. with Peter and Jackie. We took you to your favorite restaurant for Sunday brunch. You were so excited to be out in the world and at your favorite spot that you were a bit goofy and a bit impulsive with your language, but that’s OK. You ordered your go-to smoothie and ate an omelet and then we walked the short distance to our new place.
I loved showing you around our new place, loved watching you see all of your familiar items, beloved photos, worn-in furniture. But the best was just how happy you and Penny were to be reunited. She jumped on you so excitedly that you have scratches on your arms now to show for it. She cried and whimpered and licked and showed you how much she’d been missing you. Together, we walked her to her new dog park and you cleaned up her poop. Then, we came back, and this next part was quite possibly my favorite part of the entire day: we did nothing. We did absolutely nothing, but we did it together, and we did it at home. We snuggled on the couch and talked about our new apartment. We both dozed off and took naps (all three of us, if you count Penny).
We woke up just in time for our visitors. Your friend Steffen came and your parents came and Erin and Annabel and Will, and Mike and Marie and Cooper. It was happy chaos in our apartment, with you loving your screaming niece and nephews. We walked around the new building and checked out the rooftop lounge and sundeck. We walked with the kids to the dog park and played outside a bit. Annabel kept trying to put the pebbles from the dog park into her mouth. Then we came inside and ordered Lou Malnati’s pizza. It was such a good day. Such a good day that I didn’t know how I would survive the fact that it was over.
When it was time to come back to RIC, we were both incredibly sad and tearful—we snuggled the entire car ride back as your parents drove us. I just keep trying to remind us both that it’s only two weeks until you are out for good. How amazing will that feel, to be together every day? We will never take it for granted again.
Dear Dave,
The beginning of another week. Our second to last week. We just need to get through this. You are starting to become more aware, which is an awesome thing. But, as you become more aware, you are starting to ask questions. You are starting to realize the enormity of what happened to you, and that brings with it a heavy medley of emotions.
Dear Dave,
It sounds so cliché, but you really are getting better and better each day, and it is so exciting to see.
You and your dad went through all of the characters in The Lord of the Rings today.
Dear Dave,
Today was another day forward. John L was here—he flew in for the day just to visit you. You were loaded up because tomorrow is a day off, so today you had two physical therapies and an occupational therapy session. No nap. We walked outside—you took John to the beach and we sat in the park.
By this evening you were completely wiped. As you were settling into bed, you asked me what happened and I went through the whole thing with you and there was an awareness and a comprehension that I haven’t seen yet.
At first you felt really good and optimistic as I laid out all of the reasons why you should feel hopeful and proud and encouraged. You liked my line that you are “my superhero.”
You shut your eyes.
And then you opened them. And you turned to me. And your face was so strained and tense that I literally thought you were playing with me, like, teasing me. You’ve been in a very teasing and playful humor all day. So I asked: “Are you joking, trying to freak me out right now?” I thought you were kidding around, it was such an extreme look, and one I have never seen before. But you shook your head, no, you weren’t doing this in jest. So I got up and came to your bed and asked what was wrong and your answer was: “I’m scared.”
So we talked about your situation again and I laid out just how many people are here for you and advocating for you and with you. That you will not ever be alone on this journey. That I am here beside you at every step of the way, as is your entire family and all of your friends.
But you told me that you are scared because on Monday you are to go to the John Hancock building with your speech therapy group. You are scared to be in that tall building. You’re scared you might get left up there or you might fall off the building. So I asked you if it would make you feel better if I joined you and you said yes, so I will come to the John Hancock building with you on Monday.
And then I told you a story. I told you that every night before I leave your hospital room, I pray over your sleeping figure. I pray for Jesus to hold you in the palm of his hand so that you would have rest and peace and hope and comfort and healing. I pray that the Holy Spirit would be working in this room and in your brain and in your body and in the capable hands and minds of your incredible medical team. And I pray that angels would be surrounding your bed all through the night. I told you that on the flight from Fargo to Chicago, we flew at the same time but I was on a commercial flight and you were on a medical plane. I prayed the whole flight that there would be angels surrounding your plane and inside your plane, overwhelming you with grace and safety and peace and comfort. And I know there were—because my plane went through terrible turbulence on that flight; yours went through none at all. I told you that I believed that that was because the angels were guiding your plane and making your path smooth, as they will continue to do. We must continue to have faith.
You liked that. You also said: “Gosh, I’ve been through a lot.”
That’s the understatement of the year, to be sure. But the fact that you made such a statement is promising to me. It shows me that you are processing and reflecting and understanding and reacting. You have been through a lot, and you realize it.
Chapter 25
“What’s the name of my dog?”
“Wanda!” Dave exclaimed, smiling as he said it.
“Wanda the…?”
“Wanda the Wonder-dog!”
That became the daily greeting between Dave and his rehabilitation physician, as Dr. Richard Harvey would stroll into our room, flanked by residents and trainees, early each morning on his daily rounds.
Dr. Harvey was another one of the colorful and kind characters who entered our lives in the months of the stroke and recovery and quickly became a member of our team. The head of physical medicine and rehabilitation at RIC, Dr. Harvey was a tall, lanky man with big glasses and a big smile, a stethoscope draped around his neck. He loved yoga and mindfulness, he believed in the importance of staying optimistic, and he always wore his pants just a tad short, revealing a colorful sampling of his quirky sock collection.
Having learned that Dave was a dog lover, Dr. Harvey began to use questions about his own dog as one of his daily orienting tests for memory. At first, Dave could not remember that Dr. Harvey had a dog. Then, after a few days of repetition, Dave could remember the dog but not the name. “I want you to remember, Dave: my dog’s name is Wanda. OK? Wanda the Wonder-dog.” Dr. Harvey pulled out his phone and scrolled through a series of pictures of Wanda: frolicking near the lake in Michigan, sunning herself in the grass, leaping to catch a ball. “Tomorrow I’m going to ask you again, OK? Remember Wanda. It will be part of your daily orienting test to see how your memory is doing.”
“All right,” Dave agreed. Would he be able to remember? I wondered. Physically, Dave was getting stronger each day. His balance was improving, he could c
limb a few stairs, and we would soon be able to take him outside for longer walks. But his memory improvement was lagging. Several times throughout the day, in addition to asking Dave about the date and location, I now started asking him: “What’s the name of Dr. Harvey’s dog?”
I tried to be there for these morning visits between Dave and Dr. Harvey. For starters, I liked Dr. Harvey. His daily positivity and humor were refreshing, and it was my chance to confer, my time to ask questions or relay questions from Dave’s other family members.
One morning in midsummer I hurried down the hall to make it in time for the early rounds. My routine was to wake up, walk the dog, eat a quick breakfast, and get into RIC. That day, however, when I strolled into Dave’s room, it was empty. I guessed that I had missed Dr. Harvey. Knowing that Dave could be in only one of three places—physical therapy, occupational therapy, or speech therapy—I sought him out on the floor. He was not in the rooms where speech therapy and OT were held, so I made my way down the hall to the gym for PT. As I neared, I could hear music and laughter.
Like all inpatients, Dave was not allowed to use the treadmill without being hooked up to straps that hung from the ceiling, in case he lost his balance and fell. Frankly, it was sort of sad to see: my strong husband, an athlete who had won every physical accolade the college athletics department had offered, now so unsteady that he could not so much as walk on a treadmill without what looked like a horse harness. And yet, that day, I did not notice that. That day, I noticed that when I walked into the gym, Dave was walking sideways on the treadmill. To be more precise, Dave was dancing, doing the grapevine, injecting a fair amount of rhythm and sass into his steps as he kept time to the song playing on the gym loudspeakers. I still remember the song, by a group called Walk the Moon. It’s a fun, upbeat melody, the type of song that, in another life, Dave and I would have loved dancing to at a wedding.
I said you’re holding back
She said shut up and dance with me!
I stopped in my tracks and watched. There Dave was, dancing on the treadmill while throwing a ball with one therapist and answering another therapist’s trivia questions. My mouth fell open. I looked at the nearest physical therapist, and she nodded at me as if to say, I know, right? What she said aloud was: “He’s cracking us all up with his moves!”
Dave and I love to dance. We are both terrible dancers—my moves are just slightly better than Elaine’s on Seinfeld, on a good day—but we love to dance. We fell in love dancing. Our courtship in college played out largely to dancing, primarily at a seedy New Haven bar called Toad’s Place, where one can get beer for a penny and dance (when one’s shoes aren’t sticking to the floor) to a predictable playlist of Bon Jovi and Journey and Michael Jackson. Here Dave was, dancing his heart out as if he were back at Toad’s—having a blast doing it and making us all laugh as we looked on.
Dear Dave,
You kissed my belly and said, “Good night, Lilly,” before going to sleep tonight. You kicked butt in PT—you walked sideways on the treadmill while throwing a ball and answering questions.
I’ll be going home to our new apartment and it will be empty. My goodness, I miss you.
All of the memories that were supposed to be ours, would have been ours in an alternate life, a life when you had not suffered an inexplicable stroke at age thirty. It feels so cruel. So today when I see you I cling to you and tell you how much I love you, and I can’t stop thinking Thank God you are still here with me. I’m watching you fight sleep, your eyes slowly getting heavier, and all I can think about is that I just love you so much.
* * *
—
There were ups and downs every single day. My sister gave birth to her second child, a healthy baby boy, that July, and Dave and I were able to FaceTime her just a few moments after her delivery to “meet” our little nephew.
The next day was clear and sunny, so Dave and I decided to take a walk to the nearby beach during one of his breaks in therapy. As we crossed Lake Shore Drive, we passed a police car. Dave turned to me and said: “I feel like screaming at this cop. Can I yell at him?”
“No! You can’t scream at him,” I whispered sternly, and hurried Dave across the street and away from the police car.
As he was recovering, glimmers of Dave’s personality were beginning to emerge, but a lot of the time he basically seemed like an intoxicated or juvenile caricature of his former self. It was pretty common for him to burst into outrageous and offensive epithets directed at strangers.
“Hey, move aside, slowpokes!” Now, as we walked the crowded footpath along Lake Michigan, just a few blocks from RIC, Dave shouted at a swimsuit-clad woman and her muscular companion. The woman looked at us, shocked. The guy beside her looked like he was ready to put his fists up. “Sorry!” I grimaced and quickly steered Dave away from the couple, wondering if perhaps we needed to end our outing before Dave got himself a black eye.
When Dave would yell these things at passersby, he did not mean to be combative or rude. In fact, he did not even know that he had done anything wrong—the drive center of his brain, the part that regulated impulse control, had been seriously damaged in the stroke, so he was completely uninhibited and often displayed questionable (to put it generously) judgment. He thought of these random outbursts as nothing more than hilarious jokes; the recipients of these “jokes” obviously saw things quite differently, and so taking Dave out in public was becoming increasingly challenging.
I pulled one of Dave’s therapists aside to discuss this troubling new trend later that day, after he had tried to yell at the police officer. “I love to get outside with Dave when he has breaks in his therapy. It’s good stimulation and good exercise to walk along the lake, and I think it’s got to be good for his mood, but it’s mortifying when he yells, even curses, at complete strangers. Today he almost yelled at a cop.”
His speech therapist, Renee, nodded as she listened, and then offered me her thoughtful reply. “OK, so, immediately after the stroke, we struggled to get Dave to answer questions, much less initiate any communication on his own. Now he is initiating communication, but obviously not in the way we would like. This is pretty normal as his initiation comes back online. We will work on getting him to scale it back and focus on initiating and communicating in a way that is socially appropriate.” Whatever I did, Renee warned me, we were not to laugh. I sent an email that night to his guy friends: “Do NOT laugh at Dave’s verbal outbursts. We should not be encouraging this.”
Other times Dave’s demeanor was like that of a sweet, helpless child. This was most evident in the way he spoke. When not cursing like a sailor at random passersby, Dave was using a baby voice in pretty much every conversation. It was a voice I knew well—it’s the voice he uses to speak affectionately to me and to our dog and to his mother. That was fine, but it was not particularly appropriate that Dave was cooing and crooning to his doctors and colleagues and therapists.
We had some fun as we tried to remind Dave to turn off that baby voice. “Dave, use your grown-up voice,” Renee would urge him.
“Hello! How are you?” Dave would respond, speaking in a booming baritone, a playfully deep voice that sounded remarkably similar to Will Ferrell’s imitation of Robert Goulet.
“That’s your Newscaster Dave voice,” Renee responded, smiling. “It’s better. But now try to just sound like normal, grown-up Dave, not Baby Dave or Newscaster Dave.”
“Hello,” Dave would respond, his voice somewhere in the middle of his baby talk and his Robert Goulet.
In spite of my initial concern over depression, Dave was in remarkably good spirits, and he was improving. There were moments of celebrating, and there were plenty of moments when we genuinely laughed. Our room, with Dave as the merry center of a steady stream of friends and visitors, often had the feel of a lively cocktail party, minus the alcohol. One of his physical medicine doctors at RIC told us that visiting
Dave was the highlight of her day because he was friendly, optimistic, and funny. But mostly because his improvements were so clear and noticeable.
My evening letter to Dave one night said:
Dear Dave,
You see, in many ways (most ways), these have been the worst weeks of my life. And they’ve been even worse for you. But, in some inexplicable way, they have been the most meaningful weeks of our life together. You and I are living out our marital vows every single day. That whole “for better or for worse, in sickness and in health” thing is playing out for us, hour by hour, day by day.
In so many ways, we have never been more connected. You see, you are a medical resident, and for as long as we have been married, we’ve never had enough time together. The demands of your work schedule always took you out of the home more than we wanted, always required sacrifices to be made. Now we spend twelve hours together a day, every single day. We talk about everything. We eat every meal together. We are so close that I know when the last time was that you peed. We are so close that when I look down at my phone for thirty seconds and look back at you, you are staring at me and ask me, “How are you?” You are sweet and affectionate. You seek out my hand when we walk. You want my company. I guess we are finally getting the time together that we wanted. I’m just so sorry that it had to be under these circumstances.
We are in this together, more than we have ever been in anything together. We are a team, and, together, we are fighting every single day. You are not alone in this. You and I are fighting together—we are fighting for our future. We are fighting for our life together. We are fighting to regain the beautiful memories of the past. We are fighting to restore the freedom that we always took for granted in the present. And we are fighting to make the dreams of our future possible. We are fighting for our little girl. We are fighting for this unborn daughter and the future babies we’ve always wanted to have. We will do this. Together.
Beauty in the Broken Places Page 14