Will & I

by Clay Byars

  Eleanor started crying at the airport before her flight home, but it didn’t make me sad. We made plans for a return visit that summer. I kept thinking, could I really be this lucky? I walked around in a daze, dividing my time between fretting over surgery and wondering about her. But as time wore on, our phone calls dwindled. She was spending more time with her boyfriend, and it was probably awkward for her to squeeze me in. And then as the surgery began to seem more and more inevitable, I became preoccupied with it, and thought about her less.

  * * *

  My mother was completely against the surgery from the beginning. She accepted that it was my choice but said with finality, “This thing is just too new, Clay. You have nothing to go on. I mean, who is this guy anyway?” This guy was one of the most respected surgeons in the country.

  I tried to remain calm, and looked to my father for support. “Mom, he’s done plenty of these operations. If it comes to that. It may not. I’m not worried at all.” I was terrified.

  Strangely, however, Will and I never discussed whether I should go through with the surgery. His fear for what might happen to me instinctively made him want to side with our mother, I could tell. But he knew what I had to do, what he would have been reluctant about but done himself.

  This guy, Dr. Jeffrey Cohen, the neurosurgeon, was a short, later-middle-aged man with beady eyes, a bulbous nose, and prominent incisors. He had black hair with a widow’s peak that he kept combed back. The edges were peppered with gray. It kind of disturbed me that he acted as if I were irrelevant as he examined me—all he wanted was my injury—but he had a crowd of interns making his rounds with him, and he immediately put me at ease by his confidence in everything he said and did.

  “You see the lack of response from the biceps and deltoids, and the minimal response from the triceps and hand?” He held up my arm and had me try to move various muscles. “This is indicative of C-6 damage, and judging by the movement the patient exhibits, the damage is likely near the root.”

  Whenever a doctor spoke objectively about things concerning me that I knew about as sensations, but didn’t have the terminology for, I felt that much more removed from my body, which was both eerie and a relief.

  A young Asian woman wearing thick, oversized glasses and a lab coat looked up from the notepad she’d been writing in. “So surgery is the proper course of action here?” she said.

  My pulse quickened. I glanced at my father, who looked as anxious as I was. The interns eagerly waited Dr. Cohen’s response, and to learn if they should be envious or disdainful of their peer.

  He didn’t answer her. He looked at his own notepad instead. “Seven o’clock Monday,” he said and began walking off. My chest sank—there it was, the dreaded articulation.

  “Okay,” my father said, “let’s do it.”

  As the interns began to file out into the hall behind the doctor, a shy girl in back came up to show us where I needed to go for tests and to get everything in order. One of the many forms I had to fill out asked for my consent to death being a possible outcome of the surgery. This made me pause. I knew it was just a formality, and I should have known it was coming, but seeing it in writing was a reality I wasn’t prepared for.

  I had another nerve-conduction test that afternoon, Friday, which turned out exactly as the doctor had said. I was then given the weekend to convince myself there was nothing to worry about. The daze I felt now lacked the airy uncertainty it had possessed before. It was more sluggish dread. I thought about death-row inmates, how their legs sometimes refuse to work at the end.

  In New Orleans, where the surgery was to take place, we stayed in a family friend’s condo. He was a lawyer in Birmingham, but his firm did a lot of business in New Orleans. The condo, on Conti Street, was in a relatively docile area of the French Quarter. My father made reservations for the three of us at Commander’s Palace, where we sometimes used to eat after visiting friends on the Mississippi coast. I had snapper soup and oysters Bienville. Midway through the dinner, I noticed my mother staring at a man wearing ungainly shorts and a jacket, which the restaurant had apparently provided. I could tell she was worried about my surgery. Her look was not condescending, just curious. She turned to me and smiled. “Just think, you’ll be all done by this time Monday. Will wants us to call him the minute it’s ovah.”

  I knew a fraction of what Will was feeling. He was born with what we always said was a hole in his heart. The “hole” was actually a valve that hadn’t properly developed. When we were in the second grade, he had to have a heart catheterization to make sure it was opening properly. Standing under the jungle gym on the elementary school playground, realizing his operation was about to start, I’d felt painfully helpless. And that was just an exploratory procedure.

  After we were born, the doctors took blood out of me and gave it to him. He gave some of it back just before I left for New Orleans. I donated then as well. Having our blood on hand was purely precautionary, in case I needed it during the surgery. We each had to donate more than a pint.

  I tried to sleep away the last day to speed things up. I was ready. I drifted off for about fifteen minutes once or twice but spent most of the time looking around the dimly lit room, getting mad because I couldn’t fall asleep. I got up and showered at three o’clock on Monday morning. Then I sat shivering in front of the TV, watching the last of the late show reruns followed by a local variety show. When the early morning news came on, I knew the end was near. I was delirious with fatigue by the time we arrived at the hospital.

  An attendant met us at the sign-in desk and took us to a holding room where I had to strip, “even underclothes,” and put on a hospital gown, and he put a bracelet on my wrist. My father asked the guy when they were going to shave my head—meant as a joke—but the guy just said he didn’t think they would be shaving my head at all. As I waited for them to wheel me down to the operating room, I became a boxer about to enter the ring. I transformed into my martial, beyond-justification state of mind. I felt like beating my chest.

  The last thing I remember is looking at all these aqua-green scrubs scurrying around the operating room. I knew this was serious because the doctors had on the square hats they don’t wear in public. One of them leaned over me and snapped fingers. I tilted my head back to see if the IV bag had begun to drip. I closed my eyes to hurry it along. I thought about a journal entry I’d written before leaving Birmingham, meant to psych myself up for the operation, but now it seemed to dissolve into utter nonsense.

  Well, my day of reckoning is here, and as many ways as I try to justify my right to life and put my next days in an optimistic perspective, the reality of physical pain and the passage of time will still be upon me. Frankly, I’m scared; actually terrified, but this fright is somewhat eased by the power of choice. It is my choice to have surgery, and whatever the outcome I have to be content and accepting. So, now faith and hope are heavy upon me; what else do I have?… what else does anyone have for that matter? Maybe Alaska.

  5

  I survived the surgery, but after my parents had given me a couple of days to wake up all the way, they let me know that Dr. Cohen had lowered my chances of total recovery to 60 percent, based on what he’d seen in my shoulder. Not wanting to alarm me, they neglected to mention that he had accidentally nicked an artery during the procedure. But he’d clamped it shut before any serious bleeding occurred. At the post-op follow-up visit, I checked out fine. I was good to go, they said. I should have been disappointed about the 60 percent prognosis, but I felt a kind of ecstasy instead. It was like when I’d gotten out of the hospital the first time, that animalistic rapture at being alive. Whether or not my arm was ever the same, I wasn’t dead.

  On Thursday morning I woke up at home with the sun slanting through my bedroom window in separate rays. I caught an occasional whiff of antiseptically soaked gauze mixed with the smell of my clean sheets, but if I didn’t move I could almost imagine it had all been a dream. Except I didn’t want it to be a dream,
because then Eleanor’s visit would have to be one, too. I wanted to call her right then, to wake her up. I reminded myself I was no longer racing the clock.

  The phone rang, and I threw back the covers to try to answer it before my mother could, assuming it was someone calling to check on me. When I stood up, I became dizzy and spots splotched my eyes. I sat back down on the bed. I heard my mother talking and could tell by her businesslike tone that it wasn’t for or about me. A moment later she appeared in my room and asked me how I felt. Fine. She told me she had to run out but would hurry back.

  My unshakably bright mood persisted as I walked to get some writing paper from the den. I needed to send a lot of thank-you notes. As I searched through the drawers, a wave of intense dizziness washed over and threw me off balance. Whatever it was felt like an inhuman force, so unfamiliar it was somehow mechanical. It wasn’t even within the range of anything I’d felt before. I put both hands on the desk to brace myself, but when I leaned back in the chair the dizziness left. I sat there until my heartbeat slowed somewhat. I then remembered one of the interns in New Orleans saying how important it was to eat regular meals following surgery.

  I headed for the kitchen. My grandmother O’mama stood in the doorway to the garage, shaking her keys. Once inside, she immediately opened her arms. She had on a church suit, and her pocketbook dangled from her wrist.

  “Our worries are finished,” she announced. “You have made it.”

  I laughed. “I’m all here,” I said.

  “Yes, Clayboy,” she said and petted me. “You certainly are.”

  O’mama was on her way to a friend’s funeral but she wanted to come see me first. Her friend was living in a nursing home, where she herself wouldn’t think of living, but had gone on a cruise with her daughter’s family and had a stroke. “Right there on the deck of the ship,” O’mama said, trying not to sound amused.

  “I’ll come back and sit with you when it’s ovah,” she said. “I mean, if that’s all right.”

  “Well, I was going to a movie with Emily Major [Amanda’s mother] this afternoon. What time will you be done?”

  “Go on,” she immediately said. She then reiterated, like a woman used to, and almost pleased by, having to defer her plans, “No, go on. I don’t know how long the service will be, so go on and maybe I’ll come back this evening. We’ll have more time then anyway.” She smiled wide. “Oh!” she said, and clapped her hands like a baby. “This is good. I’m so happy! Things are back to normal. I can finally get some sleep.”

  I was walking up the stairs to the bathroom when another wave of dizziness hit. This episode lasted longer than the first, and left my heart racing long after it had subsided. I wasn’t able to even guess at the source. I wondered if possibly Dr. Cohen had left some surgical device inside me by mistake.

  As if in a fire drill, I bounded back down to the den to call my father. He wasn’t in. I didn’t think I had time to explain to his secretary what was happening. I didn’t know what was happening. With the receiver in my hand I reached out and hung up with the other. I reluctantly dialed 911. I didn’t want to invite bad news by doing so—I was still hoping the thumping in my head would turn out to be a false alarm—but as I was talking to the operator, another alien wave came, and I panicked. “I don’t know what’s happening,” I shouted. “Please hurry!”

  When this last wave had subsided and while I was waiting on another, Amanda’s mother and sister drove up. Before Emily’d shut her car off, I ran through the garage and opened her door. “I’m not going to be able to go to the movie, I just called 911! I don’t know what’s happening to me!” I tried not to acknowledge my frantic sense of breathlessness while I was gripped in terror.

  I told them about the dizzy spells as they hurried inside behind me. Amanda’s mother pulled out one of the kitchen chairs for me to sit in. “Okay,” she said. “Have you eaten anything today?”

  “No,” I cried, “and they said that was important.”

  “Okay,” she said again. “You need to do that right away. Grace, bring me some bread!”

  Amanda’s sister fumbled a slice out of the package and gave it to me. I took a bite. As I chewed and was about to swallow, I felt my throat constricting. “Pttt! Pttt!”

  Just then I saw the fire engine pull up, its sirens wailing to a stop. Amanda’s mother was standing behind my chair, holding on to my shoulders when all of a sudden my entire body began to convulse. It was the same kind of feeling as your teeth chattering when you’re cold—you know it’s happening but you’re helpless to stop it. Nevertheless, I stayed clenched. Then I pissed in my pants.

  Now slumped in my seat, I saw the uniformed paramedics hurriedly clanking through the garage, one with what looked like a tackle box. When they laid me down on a stretcher I caught a whiff of some guy’s pungent, musky cologne. It was a scent no one I knew wore. This moved everything up a notch.

  My body had become useless at this point. I could feel everything but couldn’t move. My heart was pounding. While one of the paramedics fumbled around with a stethoscope, another looked at him and hunched his shoulders. My eyes—they were all that I could now consciously control—glanced up and saw a woman standing in the threshold with her hands clutching the door frame. With the sunshine behind her it was hard to tell it was Mom at first. She looked down at me. “It’s all right, baby. Everything’s gonna be just fine.” (Later she told me she had been on her way home and had followed the fire truck all the way from the station. She said her heart skipped a beat every time it took a turn toward our house. By the time it turned into our driveway, she said her heart was pounding as hard as I told her mine was.)

  I slurred, “I don know wha’s happenin’.” My voice had begun to shut down as well.

  Finally, just as suddenly as the dizziness had come on, my heart stopped pounding and what felt like a morphine-induced calmness set in. But nothing had been given to me, and I wasn’t hooked up to an IV. I thought, “Okay, this is it. Hold on.”

  6

  Although I was conscious during this ride to the hospital, it didn’t seem to be as dire as I thought. The lights may have been flashing—I don’t remember—but I couldn’t hear any sirens. No paramedics hovered over. Only two were in the back of the ambulance with me. While one of them struggled to wrap the elastic band of an oxygen mask around my deadweight head, the other asked me which hospital I wanted to go to. There were three in relatively close proximity to the house. I couldn’t answer him, though. I didn’t even try to open my mouth. If you’ve ever been in an elevator or a staircase when the power goes off, there’s a draining sound before the emergency lights come on. The sensation was something like that. My voice and body were gone—not just shut down but seemingly far away. The guy looked at his partner. They didn’t know what the problem was. All they could do was keep me stabilized until we got to the closest ER. It’s strange: I couldn’t move my head, but I knew precisely where we were on the route when we crowned one of the hills above downtown and began the descent. I could feel Birmingham, but I couldn’t feel my body. I didn’t know a condition like that existed, for anyone, much less me. It was like having one dream inside another, waking from the first but being unable to move or call out and awaken altogether.

  I feared I was losing life, I suppose, so I let life recede to a dreamlike distance. It was protection. It guarded me from losing sanity. I kept expecting to snap out of it at any second. I wanted to return home and come at this whole day from a different angle.

  A moment came when they were lifting the gurney and taking me inside. I saw my father’s face, to my right. He’d decided his job was to reassure me. He forced his mouth to smile—almost a grin, What have you done this time?—but his eyes were horrified.

  A team of doctors was discussing my case above me. CT scan, MRI, blood tests. Later in my life, I would become used to people talking about me in the third person while I was present, but at that moment, the sensation still felt new, and I kept experiencing an i
mpulse to respond after everything they said. My brain would send out the thought, but my face would not cooperate. Each time there was a feeling of failure. And impatience. Why was this still happening?

  All the lifting and positioning of my body for the tests was done to a mannequin. Gradually I let go of any illusions about control. My frustration over not being able to move or communicate turned to apathy. When the doctors’ voices starting turning to noise, I didn’t fight it. A numbness took over. Though somehow I was still afraid.

  One of the few coherent thoughts I recall having during those first hours was a memory of visiting my brother at college a week earlier. It was a just-in-case visit, before the surgery, though of course we didn’t say that. We watched the movie Glengarry Glen Ross. I can’t remember a single scene—that’s how nervous I was. I wouldn’t let myself break down my fear into anything specific, so a broad sense of impending doom overshadowed everything. And now the worst was coming to pass, and that’s what we’d done with our last hours together, watch a horribly depressing movie that I couldn’t even remember.

  The MRI results came back. The mystery over what had happened had finally been solved. I’d suffered a massive brain-stem stroke. It turned out that during the New Orleans surgery seven days prior, when the vertebral artery running through my shoulder had been “nicked” and then partially closed, it had thrown off a blood clot to the base of my brain. My father, who’d reached the hospital before the ambulance, had been urging the doctors to check the vertebral artery, but they concentrated initially on my carotid as the most likely culprit—it’s the artery that leads most directly to the brain, and I had, right after the wreck, undergone a risky but necessary surgery on it, to close the fistula. Their assumption wasn’t unreasonable, but we ended up losing valuable time by their refusal to listen to my father.