Brainstorm

by Robert Wintner

  “Hey, Carol.”

  “Hey! You! I knew you’d call!”

  “No you didn’t. How could you know?”

  “Well, I didn’t know it would be you. But I stayed home from class tonight. First time in two years for a Wednesday night. I just couldn’t go. What?”

  “Hey, I hate to call you out of the blue with bad tidings. But I’m in a real jam. I need some guidance.” So I debrief to a laywoman across an ocean. I’m careful with objectivity, profiling the aggressiveness here, the unequivocal certainty of surgery with no options as well as Rachel’s chief fear, for her hair. When I finish, we wait. I hear her breathing and imagine her strange twitch, in which electricity in frightful voltage arcs the planes of being and knowing—not exactly like the scene in The Bride of Frankenstein where the kinky haired wife comes to life at the top of the tower during a thunderstorm with hellish lightning bolts searing the night sky. Carol’s communion with the cosmos has much better effects and is more realistic.

  Outside, the lament demands equal time. Carol too hears the muffled dirge, not as a distraction but as integral to the bigger picture, as part and parcel of the life force, in this vortex of transition and the chorus of humanity along for the ride.

  In a minute Carol says, “Do the surgery. The hair will grow back.”

  “That simple?”

  “I think so.”

  “But I . . . I need to get some information. Who do you know who deals with head stuff? Brain stuff.”

  “Hmm . . .”

  “How about Upledger?”

  “Ooh! Yeah! They’d know! I need to call my girlfriends to get some numbers.”

  “I’m in a crush here.”

  “Twenty minutes. Okay!”

  I walk back to the melee and meet Rachel on the way. She is rolling her wheeled monitor back from the bathroom. “They’re pumping this stuff into me by the quarter. I had to pee.”

  Nurse Betty doesn’t get physical but gives us the look of death, but by now we’re used to it. So she says with threatening undertone, “You. Must not. Do that.”

  I tell Rachel I have some calls in to some alternative sources. We may have some outside guidance in a half-hour or so. In the meantime, we can continue to collect data here, ignore the noise and the scenery and the hard close. We’ll plan to spend the night. By morning we should have a clear course. She wiggles on the gurney and says she’s cold. She needs a blover. She doesn’t respond to my situation report because she’s weary or depressed or suffering cranial pressure, or all of the above.

  I don’t know much about Upledger, except that The Upledger Institute is commercially successful in its recruitment and training campaign. More importantly, the four or six people I know in Hawaii who have the ability to heal others with non-invasive means have all taken multiple training sessions in cranial-sacral therapy with Upledger. Seldom is heard a discouraging word; moreover, they hold the Upledger techniques in high regard. It’s all I can think of right now.

  In twenty minutes I call back. Carol gives me three names from Washington, Colorado and California, Upledger practitioners considered to be the very best. If they can’t provide the necessary information, here is the direct number to The Upledger Institute.

  The first number has been disconnected. A little girl answers the second number. She says she doesn’t know when her mama will be home from her job. Mama is a waitress.

  The third number is in Colorado. A soft-voiced man answers. He seems intelligent but can’t hear for the wailing children and TV noise in the background—his background. He finally has the sense to take it in the next room. He listens and says he’s not really trained in Upledger but in some other cockamamie discipline. He thinks we should probably go ahead and consider the surgery. Meanwhile, he’ll do what he can from there.

  From Colorado?

  Up in the mountains?

  I don’t press him but thank him and check the clock; only nine hours to opening time at The Upledger Institute in Florida. I go back and tell Rachel we’re on the right track, headed to the source; it won’t be long now. She can’t speak; whether for sadness or the other, I can’t tell.

  Her sister Sue arrives. A teenage boy in blue scrubs tells me that Sue is waiting out front but can’t come back until I leave. I’ll have to leave if Sue stays, because only one visitor at a time is allowed in the trauma ward. I ask him to please tell Sue to come back. I’ll leave when she arrives. He rolls his eyes, like I’ve compromised regulations once more, and he leaves.

  In a few seconds another young man enters in the white tunic indicating the higher, noncommittal echelon. His nametag says Phil. Phil reaches to put his fingers in Rachel’s hands but she shoos him away and tells him to get a calendar and turn on CNN. Phil smiles good-naturedly and asks that Rachel please remember three words, ball, ring and wristwatch. Then he says we have excellent news. He pauses, apparently to allow our excitement to register. We wait, and finally he informs us that the infusion CAT scan revealed that the bleeding appears to be contained for now. Better yet, the staff has reason to believe there is no tumor. We share marginal relief, hearing that we have been spared two dire potentials that, until that moment, we’d been kept unaware of. We look glum, perhaps sharing as well the realization that we only broke even on two bits of good news. But best of all, he says, we’re on the schedule for an angiogram at nine a.m. He has two consent forms ready for signature, which is required, “because we do have some mortality in angiogram.”

  “What? No morbidity?”

  “Oh, that, too.”

  “Thank you, Phil. We’ll deal with this later.”

  “Nine a.m.,” he chirps on his way out. We share a moment of acceptance and progress. I touch Rachel softly as a means of assurance; things are looking up. I inhale to tell her that Sue has arrived. But then Phil dashes the curtain aside and swoops back in. “What were those three words?”

  Rachel thinks.

  “I have an idea,” I say. “How about if you and Rachel both write them down, and we’ll see who gets it right?”

  “You know we’re only doing our job here,” Phil says.

  “We don’t mean to complain, Phil. But your job here seems to be an ongoing monitor of confusion in the patient. The irony is that the process has confused both the patient and me. Maybe I’m the control here, demonstrating that a non-hemorrhaged observer shares the confusion. I only want to keep this honest, Phil. I think whatever confusion is here is generated by this place and this process, which seems confusingly secretive and repetitive. Do you remember the words?”

  Phil smiles briefly and exits. Rachel calls out, “Ball, uh . . . ring. And uh . . . uh . . . wristwatch!” But Phil is gone, perhaps to log evidence of confusion, paranoia and resistance on our chart.

  Besides no privacy and constant, unannounced intrusion of visitors bearing good news and/or mortality disclosure, we are constrained from conversation beyond words or phrases barked from the foredeck to the cockpit in heavy weather. Like the noise of a gale or storm or hurricane, the lament is difficult to imagine. A new woman from the blue team swings the curtain aside. She spreads her legs, plants her feet, crosses her arms and tells us we still have a visitor waiting out front.

  I go out and debrief for Sue: we think we have no tumor and they want an angiogram and surgery in the morning. Sue says in a heartbeat, “Well, that’s terrific!” Sue does not share her sister’s sense of the natural world. Sue’s children take antibiotics like M&Ms, because they cure what ails you. If this were a scene of sisters reversed, Sue would be in pre-op already, thanking her lucky stars that a brilliant young doctor would soon cleave her head. I don’t mind, for we each must allow the other to choose her beliefs. Terrific, however, this is not.

  I remind her that the watchwords of the hour are calmness and assurance. Sue must know these things already, I think, but I warn her that she must not under any circumstance press forward on the side of the doctors. It will only compound resistance. We want nothing—Nothing!—thro
ugh the night but neutrality. I will go in with her, and then I must leave, for the poor dogs have been in the car ten hours now. I will drop them off at the office in town after walking and watering them and bedding them down. Then I will return. She should stay with Rachel no matter who says what until I return. We must maintain our vigilant guard against heroism.

  “Heroism?”

  “That’s when they cut you up for your own good.”

  “But she needs the surgery!”

  “Sue. Please. We need a holding pattern until sunrise. Please.”

  Sue gives me a few sheets of paper, a printout on subarachnoid hemorrhage she pulled off the Internet. I stash these pages in my pocket, and we go in together.

  I remind Rachel that the bleeding is contained for now, and she has no tumor. She laughs short. I tell her I will take the dogs and be back to spend the night. I write my cell phone and office numbers in six-inch letters on her folder that is already a half-inch thick. She says fine, but if she calls and I’m not around she’ll take a cab. She gets up to use the bathroom again. The blue team responds like the secret service to a loony with a gun.

  Knowing Rachel as congenial to a fault, I assess this scene, as the blue team cannot. She is simply distressed and has to pee, but to them she’s a wacko who won’t cooperate and who has a shrill complaint. “Get away from me!” All they want to do is help, and all she does is resist, or so it seems.

  I take my leave in a blush of expedience. I need out. I see my opening and make my move, leaving my mate behind. I tell myself I must stay strong, that engaging the mind is the best cure for motion sickness, that I should tend to details in order to improve the big picture. But the truth here too is harsh; the air outside is oxygenated and ion-charged instead of stifling, overbearing and death scented. Yet the scene is also boisterous, noxious and disturbing, with the medivac helicopter landing just across the drive.

  This is not the old familiar helicopter of Hawaii tourism and Magnum, P.I. That was the Bell Ranger 500 helicopter, scorned by those people who live under the fly zones, because they sound like giant mosquitoes. This is the full-bore Apache attack unit dreaded by the Afghans, Albanians and anyone else who dares to fuck with these colors don’t run. A sixty-foot rotor span over flashing reds and blues and focused beacons scanning for escapees make this beast outshine a lighthouse at Christmas, out-rumble Godzilla. The downdraft gusts to ninety knots. Cinders whip sideways, irritating my eyes and stinging my face. The yelling and arm waving looks like an attempt to orchestrate the monstrous rotors and the Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! Whomp!

  We have endured for most of a day and a night the mutterings of crazy, insane, idiotic, irrational, some people, and on and on. Yet in the piercing cinders and hot gusts I am affirmed by the ambulance screaming in unison with the screaming chopper, as I watch a victim who couldn’t say no or forgot to politely decline. The patient is hustled from one thrill ride to another, chopper to gurney to ambulance. The patient is as wired and plugged as Rachel, its hands gripping the gurney sides, its knuckles white. The ambulance gets scratch in a gratuitous display of drag strip urgency or the finest medical services insurance money can buy. Or military might, or something or other. Or maybe it’s only youthful exuberance, the kids trying to find out what this bucket can do. The ambulance doesn’t make third gear, because it’s only fifty yards to the door, which is obviously too far to walk or ride on a gurney, and it bills out for seven hundred more dollars.

  I turn my back on this DMZ and walk quickly in long strides, stretching it out, planning my schedule on the way. A nonstop hour later the car has repeatedly reminded me of its needs. The dogs are walked, peed, watered and bedded down in my office. I need a beer or some wine, but I can’t. I feel bad and out of control, as if life is rolling its eyes up into my head.

  I know from heavy weather at sea that the sickness is best fended off by activity. I fetch the printout Sue gave me and skim the fundamentals, what the hospital staff seems unwilling to convey for fear it could be misconstrued and followed by litigation, or misrepresented and followed by litigation, or misdirected, wrongly applied or inaccurately repeated, followed by litigation. I had folded these pages into quarters but then wonder why I did that, when thirds would have fit so much better in my inside pocket. So I unfold the quarters and refold in thirds, making progress all the time.

  Molly and Dino are settled now, but they’ll need to eat and pee near sunrise and given a chance to take a dump outdoors. I go downstairs for a chat with Sebastian, the night-shift doorman. Doormen or doorwomen or even doorpersons seem unnecessary, except as egregious proof of security, though it’s only a concept to benefit those who need reassurance. I like opening my own doors, and the door staff would be hard pressed to interfere with a serious intruder, but the door staff is generally alert. Sebastian is a kid from Cameroon; no speaka too gooda de English, but he’s a smart kid with good manners. He listens and nods. He cannot be walking dogs while he is working. But he is off in the morning at seven and can walk them then, if that will do.

  It will be perfect, I tell him, so we go up together for introductions; so Molly won’t maim him for breaking and entering. The dogs take to Sebastian, and I review breakfast, which is dog food in a bag, in case they don’t have that sort of thing in Cameroon. Sebastian grants me a tolerant smile, so I show him how to fill their water dish and outline the basics of a short walk just across the street so they can pee. And maybe take a dump.

  “A what?”

  “A dump. A shit. You know . . .” I hunch my back, grunt and blow raspberries. Molly loves this. Eyebrows and concern overarch Sebastian’s patient smile. I slip him twenty bucks, the universal muscle relaxant. We say goodnight, shake hands, he leaves, and I gather my things.

  But my skin jumps when the phone rings. Nurse Betty is on the line to tell me the angiogram will be in the morning, and consent forms must be signed. In the meantime, Rachel has been moved out of the ER and officially admitted to the hospital. She’s in Nine West, Intensive Care. All her clothing, her purse and wallet were removed to the vault for safekeeping. I can process forms for reclaiming them tomorrow.

  “Can you get me a cot, please? I’m staying with her.”

  “No. You can’t. Not in Intensive Care. It’s highly infectious. Besides we don’t allow family to stay in rooms. Not in this hospital.”

  “Highly infectious?”

  “We have no beds in the Neurology ICU. She’s in the Pediatric/Burn ICU.”

  “Great.”

  “She’s doing fine and getting very good care.”

  “No surgery in the middle of the night?”

  “We hope not. I have both your phone numbers. I’ll make sure her night nurse gets them.” She gives me the direct number to Nine West and says, “I have to tell you again, she has all the classic symptoms of memory loss and speech loss.”

  “Betty. I don’t doubt your assessment or your intention. But you have no base of comparison. She’s always been that way. Her hero in life is Lucy . . . . That’s I Love Lucy.”

  “I know who Lucy is.”

  “Good. Did you think Lucy had an aneurism? Nobody said Lucy had an aneurysm.” I pause for comprehension but get only exasperation. Nurse Betty sighs into the phone. “Did you ever notice young Dr. Michael speaks with a heavy lip?” She laughs. “What’s that? Has he had a CAT scan?”

  “I’ll let you go now. Try to get some sleep.”

  “Where’s Sue?”

  “You mean the sister? She went home. Good night.”

  I sit and stare. Molly and Dino are up again; our routine does not account for so much going and coming and strange people at all hours and phone calls. And they want to know what’s up with the tension, so thick you could choke on it.

  Highly infectious?

  And where’s the alpha bitch?

  Thank God for dogs. They know but can’t fill in the details, so I tell them. They cry and nudge. We commiserate, and I gain marginal comfort. I lie down in my clothing a
nd feel drowned and dredged. Numbness is stunning and overwhelming, like what comes between impact and pain. I get up, drink a beer and consider puking. I lie down and watch the spinning room; you don’t have to be drunk to have it spin on you.

  I sit up and lie down and get up to call Sebastian and tell him we’re covered. “Covered?”

  “I’m staying. I’ll walk the dogs.”

  “And maybe take a dump. Okay.”

  “Thank you, anyway.”

  “Okay.”

  I lie back once more and begin the sorting process, the nervously energetic drive of humans unable to achieve adequate calmness, in the belief that thinking a thing through over and over will ease the mental muscles into perfect, happy sense. The imagery of a dark spirit and wrestling match between it and me crosses my mind but is banished, or in modern terms repressed, for its arcane, foolish, fearful nature. Which of course is the perfect entrée for the shadowy one, who comes on in formidable mass, not anthropomorphic, not with limbs and a cape like Darth Vader or clashing plaids like the Joker. This spirit is again aligned with what I’ve learned, seen and felt. To imagine that the ether is not populated is naïve. Then again, I can hardly call my nemesis an individual; it’s so amorphous, unwieldy, rank and pervasive. I want to grasp and beat him and send him on his way, which of course is another simplistic motivation born of our yen for convenience.

  I can’t, yet I can engage him:

  I don’t know who you are, why you came or where from, but I dare you to come forward now.

  I watch the clock pass two and ease on down to four. I don’t care.

  I control my breathing with long, deep draughts, and I conjure those images that seemed fundamental to the healing crisis of our past. I’ve sensed a mystical connection since childhood between the little fishes and myself. Call me introverted, antisocial, misanthropic, a gill-breather at heart. I’m most comfortable among cold-blooded creatures of garish color and innocent intent, whose daily lives revolve around predation, procreation and protection of territory.