The Beginning of Everything

by Andrea J. Buchanan

  Finally the paramedics arrived, rushing in, wanting to know what happened, but of course I didn’t totally know, I had been in the bathroom, staring at myself in the mirror, and Emi couldn’t tell them: In her six-year-old version of events she had seen him explode in lightning bolts and then fade into nothingness before he died. But he wasn’t dead. He was moaning, making sounds, starting to open his eyes, saying “Mommy” as they lifted him onto the gurney.

  “I don’t want to ride in the ambulance, I want to stay here in case Nate dies, I don’t want to see him die again,” Emi told me, but we had to ride in the ambulance, even though it was scary, even though it seemed like Nate might die again as he vomited and passed out.

  Once we got to the ER, Nate was conscious, but crying, screaming, trying to talk but unable to talk, unable to focus. Agitated. Emi wanted to know that he was okay, but was terrified to see him in the room with so many cords hooked up to him. Wet hands. Cord. A nurse, a doctor, a social worker, so many people asked me to recount what had happened. I began to explain, and Emi jumped in to tell them, “Mommy can tell you her version of the story, and then I’ll tell you what really happened.” The suspicion that fell upon me in that moment was a thing I could feel, the sound of mental accusations being leveled, the weight of reports being filed. But I noticed everyone relax as I hugged Emi tight and told her of course she could tell her version of what happened, she might have seen different things than the things I saw, and that the grown-ups needed to hear both versions, the grown-up Mommy one and the big-sister one. She sat with coloring books and graham crackers and juice while I choked out the version of events as I understood them, still hyperventilating through tears of shock and guilt.

  What I told them: That as far as I could tell, from what I had been able to make sense of, he had left the bathroom with his hands still slightly damp from washing, and had reached under the couch to get his car. In doing so, he had touched an extension cord where one of the plugs was not fully flush with the socket. He suffered an electrical shock and passed out and went into seizures.

  What I did not tell them: The plug upon which he seized was the plug that powered my laptop. My computer. My work. The instrument I used to write about them, my children. The thing that simultaneously enabled me to be proximal to them while also taking me away from them, enabling me to be in the room with them, perhaps even writing something about them, some anecdote or story, while utterly being absent from them outside of a Hmmm? or a Sure, that sounds like fun in response to who even knows what was being said.

  What I told them: I hadn’t seen it happen, I was still in the bathroom. I’d just heard it happen, and then ran as soon as I could.

  What I did not tell them: I was in the bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror as I put on makeup.

  Once they were done, they went to Emi, and I could hear her begin to tell her story of how Nate floated up to the ceiling as he died.

  Within hours, he improved. He was able to talk to us again, and while the doctors did their doctoring, I tried to distract him with questions about things we’d done that morning, and he remembered them, so I was hopeful. He perked up a bit more and then wanted to take a nap. I was terrified to see him sleep, but the doctors said it should be fine. I stayed with him at the hospital for as long as I could, then Gil took over and I went home to be with Emi, who was still shaken, like me, who didn’t want to sit near the couch where he had faded away, who was upset that she had ripped her Belle costume dress and demanded that I sew it right then with my shaking hands on the couch where I thought Nate had died, who was worried that maybe she might have made Nate die a little because she wished he was dead sometimes. She couldn’t get the pictures out of her head, she told me, so she started to draw them. Page after page of Nate looking dead, or floating, his eyes rolled back in his head, little panic lines to indicate him shaking from a seizure.

  The next morning, at the hospital, it was as if Nate was supercharged. When he saw me, he lit up and gave me a big hug and kiss, and when I said, “Oh, Nate, you’re so sweet!” he replied, “Oh, Mommy! That’s just love!”

  “I was so worried about you,” I told him, and he said, “But Mommy, I was so worried about you, too! And you know what? I just love you, all the time. I’m just always going to love you!”

  He was fine, but I was not. Because I’d thought all of that was gone. When he was lying there on the couch seizing and turning blue, I thought all of that—all of that personality, the sweet brilliance of a kid who could happily and freely reassure me that he was just always going to love me—I’d thought that was gone forever. And even once I knew it wasn’t, I was still somehow perpetually stuck in that awful moment when I was on the phone with 911 and he was dying and I was so sure that my own death was the only way I would be able to survive it.

  He was fine, but Emi and I were not. I tried to cope by staying in motion, so as to keep at bay the impulse of my mind to replay those endless scenes of my running around the corner, finding him slumped against the wall, his face turning lifeless and gray. In every small moment of rest, I would relive it, and so I tried to remain restless, doing what I could to keep the flood at bay. Emi coped by allowing the flood. “Let’s talk about how Nate died,” she would say, while coloring or getting ready for bed, and this was the last thing I wanted to talk about, the thing I was endlessly trying to prevent my mind from chattering at me about. And yet I knew this was her way of processing, to create a narrative to understand the trauma, and thus tame it. I suggested, “How about we think of it like a book, a very long book that we can’t read all at once because it’s just too long to read at bedtime, and we read a chapter at a time together and then put it away?” And she agreed. And so each night, we’d lie there in the dark, and she’d narrate the story of how Nate died but didn’t die, and I would will my body to be calm next to her, embracing her, even as my heart hammered in my chest and every nerve ending I had seemed to scream He’s dead, he’s dead, you have killed him.

  The first weekend after the accident, Emi requested a “Mommy-Emi” weekend, so that we could spend time together, just us. I wasn’t sure whether this was a good idea, for us to be alone—after all, we had experienced Nate’s accident alone, just the two of us. And yet her impulse to create a different, more positive bonding experience for us was a good one. Gil took Nate to his parents, and Emi made a list of all the things she thought we should do: bubble baths, s’mores, going to the shoe store to look for fancy shoes, going to a “grown-up” yoga class, playing dress-up, doing art projects, playing beauty parlor, watching movies and eating popcorn, sleeping in my bed together. I marveled at her natural impulse toward healing, this restorative, remarkable combination of ordinary and extraordinary things.

  It was a good weekend for both of us. At the yoga class, which she managed to keep up with, and which I managed to survive without a panic attack during the quiet moments, she accepted the compliments of the teacher with grace, and when a fellow class-goer we knew asked her “How is your little brother?”—unaware of what had happened, or what a loaded question that might be—Emi responded, “He’s fine, thanks,” with a smile. But these things, too, were fragile: On the way home from the shoe-shopping portion of our weekend together, she tripped and fell, ripping her tights and skinning her knee, and I sat with her on the sidewalk, crying along with her as she sobbed and shook in my arms, the grief of everything finally pouring out.

  The further we moved away from the event, the more things shifted in my memory, in much the same way Emi’s narrative changed and shifted as she retold it to me and to others. Lying in bed together in the dark those nights as she read a chapter at a time from the Big Book of Nate Almost Dying, it wasn’t that she was lying or confabulating; it really felt to her as though she saw sparks shoot out of Nate’s body, it really felt to her as though she saw a lightning bolt descend from the ceiling and cause him to fade away, even though of course he never dissolved into thin air; even though, like me, she never saw th
e actual incident, only the second or so afterward. I couldn’t argue with the validity of her interpretations. I couldn’t say that any of it wasn’t true. What about me and my own memory? What is more important or true, the memory of clumsily stabbing at the phone, trying and failing to dial 911? The memory of realizing he was gray and not breathing? Is it true that his heart stopped for a moment, that after he stopped seizing and stopped breathing he really truly was dead? Or is that only how it felt to me? I’d had an eyeliner pencil in my hand when I ran out of the bathroom to find him. I must have still held it when I’d picked him up off the floor and put him on the couch. Days later I found it lodged between the couch cushions, an indictment of my narcissism, my own self-involvement. And yet when I encountered it, I almost couldn’t recognize it for what it was—was this one of Emi’s pencils? How did this get here? Who put it there? It seemed so out of place. I’d completely forgotten that I’d been holding it when the accident happened. But there it was, reminding me that not everything I remembered was true, and that maybe some things I remembered weren’t.

  It took maybe a year to be able to stop living in the parallel world of what might have been, to stop being suspended in that limbo where it was eternally Monday and I was on the phone with 911 and Nate was dying. Every day I had proof that he was fine, that the only actual consequence of the accident was my own inability to shake the shadow of the event itself. I couldn’t write; I stopped writing about my children; even just using that laptop made me sick to my stomach, despite the fact that I knew I was not literally killing them by typing out an anecdote. It took time, and then a serious deadline, to get me out of that guilty funk. Deadline. Eventually I bought a new laptop, a new extension cord, and got back to work.

  Would I have actually killed myself if Nate had died? I had been berating myself for my selfishness—for writing about my children; for using a tool to write about my children that had, due to the poor placement of its power cord, nearly killed one of them; for the narcissism of looking at myself in the mirror putting makeup on; for the narcissism of writing down stories to make my life more interesting—and yet how incredibly selfish was the thought of killing myself? To make it even worse, to scale the absolute heights of selfishness, I’d had that thought literally as my other child was in front of me, terrified, more in need of me in that moment than ever. And yet that was my thinking. How could I even consider it, even in a moment of desperation? If he was dead, and then I killed myself, she would have two people to mourn, her six-year-old mind would not be coping with pictures and restorative weekend plans, she would be traumatized for life. And yet that is the thought I felt more certain about than any other thought that day, the memory that haunts me more than almost any other part of that series of events that replayed itself in my mind like the sickest movie: That I would die, too, and that I would deserve it.

  But no one died. Not Nate, and not me. Instead I watched them both heal. I marveled at their natural tendencies toward health, at their natural impulses toward recovery. “Trauma doesn’t have to be traumatic,” my therapist told me, and I watched that statement unfold as a true life experience. Nate had no memory of the accident, no lingering effects from it, and although he was aware of the attention and anxiety of the adults around him, he moved on from it even better than could have been expected. And Emi prescribed herself art therapy, suggested healing activities and rituals, stunned me with her innate sense of resiliency and emotional integrity. They could do this at six and three.

  Even my foggy brain is capable of thinking: How could I even think of asking them to do this at fifteen and twelve? I already see them struggling to cope, Nate’s natural buoyant happiness giving way to anxiety, Emi freezing, unable to turn her stress into art just yet.

  Mirror-me at the medicine cabinet tallying up my medications, plotting my way out, is for a moment indistinguishable from the mirror-me of almost a decade ago, putting on eyeliner and dreading the endless task of filling up the hours until bedtime, calculating the odds of whether at least one kid will take a nap so she can work on an article, or write a quick draft, or just have a fucking break, one moment to herself before she has to cut up more fruit and make who knows what for dinner and sew a Belle costume and settle another fight and read two sets of stories and wait in the dark for the tiny voices of children to quiet down into the breath of children on the edge of sleep until she can finally go work on something or sleep herself. Mirror-me at the medicine cabinet sees the mirror-me before the accident, completely oblivious to what will happen next, no idea that the eyeliner in her hand is an accusation, no idea that her dread of the quotidian is a thing she will regret, will pray for in the adrenaline-sick moments ahead of her, will swear to never again take for granted, although of course she will, we all do, eventually, as we forget and become impatient with everything all over again. Mirror-me at the medicine cabinet and mirror-me before the accident merge into one me for a moment and the small buried part of my brain that is still me says No, this is not a viable plan, no matter how much proof you have that they will be okay, that they have it in them, both of them, to thrive and to survive trauma. No, they will not find you, they will not dial *11 and 811 and 711 before finally dialing 911 and screaming for someone to hurry, they will not promise themselves that if you are really dead, they will kill themselves, they will not be trapped in that moment forever, wishing they, too, were dead.

  And of course my brain agrees with this.

  This is what my brain does now: It agrees with itself. And so I find myself thinking Of course. These medicines are not a plan. I will not take them all at once. I will throw them out at some point. Good idea! Good thinking!

  I go back to bed. My friend has texted again.

  “Didn’t mean to minimize,” it says.

  “No problem!” I respond. “Going to sleep now.”

  “You’ll probably feel better after a nap.”

  I won’t. But I recognize that’s just his brain trying to be agreeable too. I push all the pillows aside to be as flat as possible, to make the pain as small as possible, put on a podcast, and float in the fog of Britain and the run-up to World War I. I hear the interviewer talking to a group of historians about the deaths of so many young people, and eventually I fall asleep.

  PART FOUR

  Insight

  The prototypical manifestation of spontaneous intracranial hypotension is an orthostatic headache. Such a headache generally occurs or worsens within 15 minutes of assuming the upright position . . . but in some patients this lag period may be as long as several hours. Improvement of the headache after lying down is less variable and occurs within 15 to 30 minutes. The headache may be diffuse or localized to the frontal, temporal, or—most commonly—the occipital or suboccipital regions. The headache may be throbbing or nonthrobbing and is rarely unilateral. Some patients use descriptive terms for their headaches, such as the feeling of “an ice cube in an empty glass” or a “pulling sensation from my head down to my neck,” offering a clue to the diagnosis. Additional clues may be the patient’s recumbent position in the physician’s office or a pillow they carry along to allow them to lie down comfortably . . . . The severity of the headache varies widely; many mild cases probably remain undiagnosed, whereas other patients are incapacitated and unable to engage in any useful activity while upright.

  —Wouter I. Schievink, “Spontaneous Spinal Cerebrospinal Fluid Leaks and Intracranial Hypotension,” JAMA, 2006

  18

  September 2015

  I have exhausted the resources available to me at the hospital, with its one doctor familiar with CSF leaks and its many specialists who are not, and so I make an appointment to be seen at a different hospital, one with a headache center and neurologists who specialize in headaches of all kinds. I’m still toying with the idea of trying to reach out to the doctor of last resort, the specialist I’ve read about online, but my case seems too pedestrian, despite the way it’s taken over my life. It just doesn’t seem serious enough
to merit a cross-country trip, my scans not dramatic enough, my symptoms not definitive enough. Although I don’t know what the threshold is, I’m sure I haven’t cleared it. And so this is the next step I feel I can take: to be seen by the headache center.

  Before I can be evaluated by the headache center, I must go through a screening process. First I am required to take the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test, which costs $300, will not be covered by insurance, and takes about an hour to ninety minutes to complete. Then I must meet with one of the headache center’s therapists, even though I already have a therapist. But I’ve run out of other options, so fine: I will take the expensive test, I will talk to the random therapist.

  The center itself, which is less a center than a nondescript area on the second floor of the neurology building, presents as a fluorescent-lit waiting room with no place to lie down, which is how I evaluate everything at this point: Is it dark? Is there a place for me to be flat? It’s taken me more than a half-hour of being upright to get here, and so I am woozy with pain and brain fog, but I nod my head as the desk person informs me that insurance probably won’t reimburse me for the cost of the personality test and I sign a thing and take a sheaf of forms to a chair in the corner that seems like the least obnoxious place to lie on the floor if I have to.

  The personality inventory test I have to take, the MMPI, is “the most widely used and widely researched objective measure of psychopathology in history,” according to what I read about it later, and was first developed in the 1930s. It was initially used to diagnose hypochondriasis, depression, hysteria, psychopathic deviate, paranoia, psychasthenia (an outdated term for what is now considered obsessive-compulsive disorder), schizophrenia, and hypomania. Later, social introversion and masculinity-femininity (measuring how rigidly a person conforms to stereotypical gender roles) were added, creating ten basic diagnostic categories. Beginning in the 1980s, the test underwent a major overhaul, and by 2003, the MMPI-2 was introduced, with clinical scales intended to measure the perhaps more modern states of demoralization, somatic complaints, low positive emotions, cynicism, antisocial behavior, ideas of persecution, dysfunctional negative emotions, aberrant experiences, and hypomanic activation.