by JoAnn Ross
Just as when they’d first met with him, Dr. Burke didn’t beat around the bush. “As you’ve all undoubtedly surmised, Dr. Lindstrom has had a stroke.”
Somehow, hearing the diagnosis out loud from this white-coated man who was supposed to make things better, to make Ida better, hit Savannah as hard as Raine’s original call. She struggled to focus on what the doctor was saying, but seemed only able to pick up the significant words. The frightening words.
“She suffered left brain damage, blah, blah, blah…hemiplegia, blah…weakness in her right side, blah, blah…aphasia, blah…apraxia, blah, blah, blah…some relaxation of the muscles on the right side of her face, blah blah—”
“Wait a minute.” Savannah held up a hand. “Would you mind going back to aphasia? And apraxia?”
“Of course. Apraxia is the inability to use the mouth and tongue muscles to formulate words.”
“And Gram doesn’t have that?”
“No. She’s actually quite talkative for someone who’s just suffered a brain insult.”
He made it sound as if someone had hammered Ida with a sarcastic remark. Savannah glanced over at Raine, who rolled her eyes. Her expression also revealed that she was also thinking how difficult it was to keep Ida Lindstrom quiet when she had a point to make.
“The problem,” he said, “is that her aphasia, which is the inability to express oneself in either spoken or written words, makes it somewhat difficult to diagnose whether she merely has expressive aphasia, or receptive aphasia as well.”
“Which would be her ability to understand language?” Raine inquired.
“Exactly. For example, when she was first brought in, the admitting doctor asked her name, and she answered, ‘Blood.’”
“Maybe she was trying to say something about her blood pressure,” Lilith said hopefully. “Perhaps she was afraid that’s what had caused her stroke and she was telling them to check it.”
“Her vital signs were being monitored at the time,” the doctor said. “I understand that it’s only natural to try to attribute some normalcy to what is, admittedly, an unnatural situation, but when Dr. Lindstrom was asked if she knew where she was, she responded with ‘Brick’ the first time.”
“That’s close,” Savannah pointed out, like her mother, grasping at any straw she could reach. “This building is constructed of brick.”
“The second time her response was, ‘Dog.’ The third time, ‘Piano.’”
Language had always been so important to her grandmother. Her opinionated manner admittedly grated from time to time, but Savannah had always admired the way she’d never hesitated to speak her mind—a mind that now sounded hopelessly jumbled.
“When we tried some yes-or-no questions that she could nod to, she got most of them right,” he said encouragingly. “This suggests she’s able to understand a lot of what she’s hearing.”
“Yes-or-no questions couldn’t be very complex,” Raine pointed out.
“They are, by necessity, fairly simplistic,” he allowed. “But it also indicates a stronger chance that she’ll regain more of her comprehension and speech skills.”
“Could you give us any sort of timetable for when this recovery might take place?” Lilith asked.
“Unfortunately, I can’t. Every stroke is unique.” He appeared to want to leave the room. “Well, if there are no more questions…” He was definitely inching toward the door. “The hospital Social Worker will want to meet with you regarding Dr. Lindstrom’s rehabilitation team—”
“Team?” Savannah asked.
“Your grandmother will be assigned a number of specialists to help her achieve the best possible recovery. A physical therapist will determine the extent of the dysfunction in her weakened right side and help her work her muscles to allow maximum mobility.”
“Will Mother be able to walk?” Lilith asked.
He frowned. “Again, every stroke victim is unique, but your mother’s hemiplegia seems fairly mild. My educated guess is that her prognosis for walking—perhaps with the assistance of a cane—is quite good.”
“That’s very encouraging, Doctor.” Lilith’s faint smile was only a shadow of her usual dazzling one. “But I’m afraid you’ve made one grave error in treating my mother.”
“Oh?” He lifted a brow.
“My mother may have had a stroke. But the one thing she’s never been, and will never be, is a victim.” At that moment, Savannah could actually see Ida in Lilith’s dark blue eyes.
“Point taken, Mrs. Ryan,” he murmured with a nod. “Getting back to the concept of your mother’s team…unless anyone else has a question?” he asked.
“Fine,” he said, outwardly relieved when none of them spoke up. “Along with her physical therapist, Dr. Lindstrom will also be given speech and occupational therapists.”
“My grandmother’s retired, Doctor,” Raine pointed out.
“I’m aware of that.” There was a faint edge to his tone that suggested the Lindstrom women’s continual questions were beginning to annoy him.
Tough, Savannah thought.
“An occupational therapist teaches stroke victims—”
“Patients,” Lilith corrected.
“Patients,” he agreed tightly. “As I was saying, this therapist will help Dr. Lindstrom with daily living skills, dressing, bathing, teaching her to feed herself, get around the house, relearn basic skills such as cooking—”
“We could probably skip that one,” Savannah murmured. She’d meant to keep her comment to herself, but it had come out during a second of silence in the doctor’s presentation and she knew she hadn’t made points when the family all laughed.
The back and forth motion of his jaw suggested that he was grinding his teeth. “Of course, the family is one of the most important members of the team,” he doggedly forged on even as he continued to move backwards. He was now standing in the open doorway.
“I’ll arrange for you to see Dr. Lindstrom. She’s been moved upstairs to ICU. At this time, I would suggest that you keep your visit down to ten minutes. And only the immediate family.”
With that final instruction, he escaped.
“I think we’re in trouble,” Lilith said.
“What was your first clue, Mother?” Raine asked dryly.
“When the doctor brought up the team.”
Savannah caught her mother’s meaning right away. “You’re right. Gram never has been a team player.”
Although it wasn’t very funny, they all shared another laugh because they needed one. And because, Savannah feared, what they were all facing wasn’t going to offer many opportunities for humor.
19
I da looked so small. So frail. It was all Savannah could do not to burst into tears as she stood beside her grandmother’s bed, holding her hand.
“The doctor says you’re going to be fine, Mother,” Lilith soothed. She leaned over the bed railing and stroked damp strands of gray hair from Ida’s forehead. Since her grandmother had worn her hair up in that untidy bun for as long as Savannah could remember, she’d never realized how long it was. If it had been brushed properly, it would have come nearly to her waist. “You just need a little rest.”
Ida’s eyes snapped. “Gorilla.”
“I’m sorry.” Obviously shaken by the terse non sequitur, Lilith bit her lip, avoiding her daughters’ eyes, then squared her shoulders and tried again. “Are you trying to tell us something about Doctor Burke?”
Ida nodded.
“He has a very good reputation, Gram,” Raine said reassuringly. “I did a background check on him when you had your first appointment,” she revealed, surprising Savannah not at all. It was precisely what Raine would do. “His credentials are remarkable and he’s worked at some of the top-flight research hospitals in the world, which, of course, made me wonder what he was doing here in Coldwater Cove.”
“Not that you can’t be a good doctor and a small-town doctor, too,” Savannah said quickly.
Raine visibly cringe
d when she realized what she’d said. “Of course you can. You’re proof of that, Gram.”
Three of the four women in the room smiled brightly at that. Ida did not. Savannah couldn’t tell if that was because she was insulted, or because she couldn’t. The muscles on the right side of her face were lax, which caused that side of her lips to droop slightly.
“Anyway,” Raine said briskly, as if wanting to move on to a safer topic, “it turns out that he’s also an amateur mountain climber. Having conquered all of Colorado’s major peaks, he’s moved on to Washington. He’s already done Baker and Rainier. Next spring he’s doing Olympus. Then I suppose we’ll be losing him, but of course, you’ll be fully recovered by then, so it won’t really matter.”
Ida shook her head.
“Of course you will be, Gram,” Savannah insisted. “We’re all going to help you. And you’re going to have a team of experts, as well, made up of all sorts of trained therapists. Which, of course, you already know about, being a doctor yourself.”
Ida shook her head.
“Maybe she’s forgotten,” Lilith suggested quietly. “Dr. Burke says that you’ll have a speech therapist.” She raised her voice as if an increase in volume could facilitate understanding. “Along with a physical therapist, and—”
“Plane,” Ida interrupted abruptly. She pointed her left hand toward the rain-streaked window.
“Rain,” Savannah guessed.
Ida nodded. “Plane,” she repeated.
“You want to go on a plane?” Raine asked.
Ida’s head bobbed up and down.
“But you hate air travel,” Lilith reminded her.
“Plane!” Ida slammed her hand on the bed. The angry pink hue darkening her ashen complexion would have been reassuring, were it not for a very real concern that she could work herself into a second stroke.
It took some more questioning to figure out that whatever distinguished between head shakes and nods had gone haywire in Ida’s injured brain.
“You’d think that the doctor would have mentioned that a nod means no,” Raine muttered.
They tried again, everyone, including Ida—especially Ida, Savannah thought—becoming more and more frustrated with these early futile attempts at communication.
She jabbed the index finger of her good left hand toward the window again and again. “Plane,” she kept repeating.
Realizing that the word itself was useless, Savannah focused instead on the message.
She went over to the glass and looked out over the town. Then she saw it. The house, overlooking the cove.
“Home!” she said. She spun back toward her grandmother. “You want to go home.”
Ida energetically shook her head back and forth on the pillow. Yes. Tears streamed down her face.
“Of course you’ll be coming home.” Lilith took a tissue from the box beside the bed and began dabbing at the uncontrolled moisture. “As soon as you’re just a little bit better.”
“Dr. Burke says you should be released in ten days.” Raine’s words revealed that she’d absorbed more of what the doctor had been saying than Savannah had. “And then, of course you’ll be coming home, Gram.”
Ida seemed to accept that promise. She sank deeper into the sheets and closed her eyes. Tears continued to fall at a furious pace from beneath her lids, yet her lips—even the injured side—pulled into a lopsided smile.
Hers were not the only damp eyes in the room.
Determined to make the most of the time they were allowed, by mutual unspoken agreement Lilith, Raine, and Savannah remained beside Ida’s bed, surreptitiously watching the monitor overhead. A line continued to move across a green screen in reassuring peaks and valleys.
Eventually a nurse wearing bright pink scrubs appeared in the doorway. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to leave. The speech therapist is here, and she needs to do some tests on Dr. Lindstrom.”
“Dr. Lindstrom is sleeping,” Raine hissed. “Can’t she come back later?”
“She’s here now,” the nurse said in a stern, no-nonsense tone that brooked no argument. “The sooner she can determine your grandmother’s condition, the faster Dr. Lindstrom can begin her recovery.”
Those were, of course, the magic words. They left the room, pausing briefly to speak with the therapist, an attractive brunette in her early to mid thirties. Her hair was cut in a sleek bob she’d tucked behind both ears, and she was dressed in black jeans and black jacket brightened by a scarlet sweater.
“Dr. Lindstrom delivered both my parents,” Kathi Montgomery informed the family. “Me, too. And she saved my social life when she treated my acne when I was fourteen.”
That reference made Savannah recognize her. “You were Kathi Clifton.” She’d been on the debating club, Savannah recalled. She’d also dated Dan O’Halloran.
“That was my maiden name. I’m thinking about going back to it now that I’m getting a divorce, but at this point, I’m just taking one step at a time. Your grandmother’s my first client since I’ve come back to work.”
“Oh?” Savannah worried about that.
Kathi smiled again. “You don’t have to worry. I may have been sidetracked for a while, but I’m very good at my job. I’ll take good care of your grandmother.”
“She looks so weak,” Lilith worried.
“So would you, if you were in her shoes. She’s had a rough few hours. But I was reading the admittance report, and I think she got off real lucky. Strokes are scary, foreign territory to most people.” She assured them that they were not alone in their fears. “But no matter how bad things are in the beginning, they can get a lot better.”
“Back to the way they were before the stroke?” Raine asked.
“Not always.” Savannah admired Kathi Montgomery’s honesty. “In fact, just about everyone will have some residual effects after a stroke. But people have amazing adjustment skills.
“We all want to believe that we can control our lives,” she said. Since she was looking straight at Raine, Savannah added perception to the therapist’s growing list of attributes. “But it’s impossible not to run into surprises. Or detours.
“Right now, even though she’s a doctor, all this is foreign territory to Dr. Lindstrom. Especially with her aphasia making it difficult to communicate. It’s a bit as if she woke up this morning and discovered she was in Tibet.”
Lilith sighed heavily. “Mother has always hated to travel.”
At least feeling they were leaving Ida in good hands, they headed back to the ICU waiting room the family had moved to after Ida had been transferred from ER.
“Well, one thing’s for certain,” Savannah said as they walked past the nursing station.
Lilith glanced over at her. Savannah was relieved when she noticed that a little color had come back to her mother’s cheeks. “What’s that, dear?”
“Whatever her condition in ten days, she is definitely coming home. I don’t care if she has another stroke after this one—a hundred strokes—she’s not going to end up propped up in front of a television at Evergreen.”
About this, they were in total agreement.
After Raine assured Jack that she’d be fine without him, and yes, she’d keep the saltines he’d brought her from the cafeteria close at hand, Jack left the hospital to check on Amy and reassure the little girl that her great-grandmother was going to be coming home soon.
The others stayed. All day, then long into the evening, going in to sit with Ida whenever the nurses allowed. As the hours passed, as the sun rose high above the cove, then set over the mountaintops, it began to sink in that this wasn’t the type of life event that would be resolved any time soon.
Obviously, Savannah’s planned holiday opening of the bed-and-breakfast would have to be put off. Despite having dedicated so many hours to the project, she didn’t suffer so much as a twinge of ambivalence. She thought of what Dan had said about the Chinese word for crisis being the same as the word for opportunity. Her grandmother had always been the
re for her. Now she was being given the opportunity to repay that debt.
In the grand scheme of things, Savannah supposed that her lighthouse, as much as it had come to mean to her, wasn’t really all that important. Neither was Raine’s Harvard law degree, Lilith’s former theatrical career, or even Ida’s medical practice.
Family was what mattered. Mother, grandmother, sisters. Amy, whom Raine adopted upon marrying Jack, and the unborn child they’d made together. Cooper and Jack, who’d married into the family but were no less a part of it, and Gwen, who had been welcomed in. Even, perhaps, baby Lily someday, if she chose.
That left Dan. He was, of course, technically family, since he was Jack’s cousin. Savannah wasn’t even going to begin to try to figure out the logistics, but that would make him her cousin-in-law. Or something like that.
But whenever she returned from the ICU and found him still in the waiting room, hour after hour, offering comfort, support, encouragement, and a tenderness she’d never known from any man, Savannah could no longer hide from the truth.
Despite her vow to hold her heart close, to avoid the risk of having it be wounded again, her feelings for Dan O’Halloran had gone far past cousinly.
Like most of the doctors she’d met over the years, Ida had never expected any of the illnesses she’d treated to ever happen to her. Logically, she knew that a medical degree didn’t come with some invisible shield, but the simple fact was that she quite honestly had been of the belief that things like heart attacks, burst appendixes, cancer, and strokes happened to other people. They wouldn’t happen to her.
Well, so much for that theory, she considered as she looked out the window at her little piece of sky and the small rectangular view that had been her entire world for the past eight days.
She knew she was fortunate that her motor skills weren’t terribly impeded. The physical therapist, a huge black woman who could made Genghis Khan seem warm and fuzzy by comparison, but who Ida knew was sincerely dedicated to getting her back on her feet, had assured her that if she kept up the hard work she’d be out of her wheelchair in a month.