The Blink of an Eye

by Rikke Schmidt Kjærgaard

  By this point, I had no sensation whatsoever in my hands. It was unbearable. I wanted them off, I wanted them on. I couldn’t bear to look at them and I couldn’t stop looking at them.

  Broadly translated: I had to sit and watch my fingers wither and die until they fell off.

  They were ripe. Like milk teeth still hanging in there on a tiny fleshy wire. Ready to fall out, or, in this case, to fall off. I could see the bone and the flesh. Black. Red. White. This also meant my hands were packed with open wounds, perfect conditions for bacterial growth that had to be fought off constantly with antibiotics. Worried I would not be strong enough to fight off any further infection, my surgeon decided that it was too risky to wait any longer. They would have to go a bit earlier than planned.

  They were in the way. My previously untroublesome fingers that had served me so well. My little finger on the right hand was a particular troublemaker: curled up inside the palm, it effectively blocked any movement in my hand. It became painfully obvious. I would be better off without my fingers.

  So much of me was defined in my hands.

  Age four: I plunged them into soft clay and a perfect replica of my hands emerged. This was something we all did in preschool—I did it and, growing up in a different part of the country, so did Peter, and so did our children. Like thousands of parents up and down the country, my mother had put my cast in our living room, a reminder that my hands had once been so small and perfect. Now, I asked my mother if I could have the cast. I needed to have my hands, if only as a hardened memory to hang on my wall. But it was long gone.

  Age eleven: We were playing tag in the school gym, chasing each other, laughing and shrieking with delight. I ran toward the toilets with a girl at my heels, chasing me. I was fast, could dodge even the most determined chaser, but she was getting closer. Shooting out of the gym, I slammed the heavy door. I can still hear the sound of my finger getting caught in that door, my scream as the tip was cut almost straight off. I looked at the piece dangling from my index finger, only attached by a tiny string of skin. My teacher acted swiftly, and I was sent to the emergency room, the bit of my finger in tow. Fortunately, it wasn’t too late for the doctor to stitch it back together, eventually leaving nothing but a tiny scar. I treasured that scar; it was one of my defining features. No one noticed it, but to me it was special. Through the years it served as a reminder of what I had almost lost.

  Age twenty-three: Drawing and painting were a huge part of my life. Before completing my degree in science, I decided to take a sabbatical to explore that side of me. I enrolled in art school and enjoyed every single moment, even considering applying to the Danish Academy of Art. In the end, I chose science and went back to university, but a part of me never left art behind.

  Age thirty: I was seven months pregnant with Daniel, and the four of us had joined in a game of rounders at the school fair. I was fielding. As one of the batters sent a hard ball flying, I reacted instinctively, my body flying through the air, precisely as I had taught it to do during my years of football training. As I prepared for the perfect landing, I realized too late that my center of gravity had changed. Everyone froze as I landed straight on my pregnant belly. But before anyone could react or rush over, I was on my feet, holding the ball over my head. I may have floated through the air like a slow-moving blimp, but my hands did not betray me. The point was ours.

  I have always been a fighter, never willing to give up. Even now, almost four months into my hospital stay, I hadn’t lost my spirit. I liked being in control and little by little I was retaining a bit of it in the gym, in my physio sessions, by breathing, eating, moving and walking. I was getting better. Every week was marked by rapid physical and mental progress. I was moving my body around. It wasn’t elegant and it wasn’t quick, but it worked and I was able to do more and more all the time. I was constantly breaking barriers and fighting to achieve the next goal. But faced with the loss of my fingers, I was drained. I was losing far more than my fingers. I was losing control and I was fearful of what was waiting for me.

  But beyond even that was my terror of letting go. The surgery to remove my fingers required a general anesthetic, and I was petrified that I was going to lose my mind—again. Being in a coma had changed me. I was now sufficiently recovered to know how lucky I had been to wake up the first time. How likely was it that I should have that luck again? What if something went wrong? Would I have to start all over again? Had everything for the past couple of months been in vain, fighting for survival and another chance in life?

  When an iceberg melts, it makes huge ponds of fresh water in the ocean. Layers of different kinds of fluids sometimes create a rare physical phenomenon leading to liquid zones. This is what happens when freshwater ponds suddenly appear in lots of saltwater. A boat can sail into it with everything working perfectly, engine running, propeller churning. But suddenly it will stop and no matter how much power is used, the boat will not move. The surface remains calm. For the crew there is nothing to see and nothing to do. This phenomenon is called dead water.

  This was me. Inner turmoil, all engines roaring at full speed, but on the outside no expression. Composed. Placid. Dead water.

  I couldn’t bear the thought that there was even a minute chance I might wake up after surgery without any memory. Or that I would not come out of surgery, slipping back into a coma. Or worse. And more than anything, I didn’t want to put my family through any more pain. All this raced through my head. I cried, screamed, shouted, raged, cursed, tore the curtains down, threw all the things I could get hold of at the door, smashed the mirrors. All on the inside.

  It was one day around this time that Peter brought me the news about the bombing of the Boston Marathon. I couldn’t take it in. We used to live in Boston, when we were both working at Harvard. We have many happy family memories of weekends exploring the city. We tried not to miss a thing. The marathon was special, the world’s oldest annual marathon and a celebration of what can be achieved when you push the limits. It had taken place every year since 1897 on Patriot’s Day, the third Monday in April. Had we been in Boston on the fifteenth of April 2013, we would most likely have been standing there in the crowd. Knowing my family, we would probably have pushed toward the finish line. Some of us might even have been taking part. We went back to Scandinavia, but we kept Boston in our hearts.

  A beautiful day turned into a bloody mess of panic, pain, lost lives, and lost limbs perpetrated by two twisted minds. I felt the pain and hurt, the agony of the destruction. Three innocent people were killed and more than two hundred and sixty others were injured. A young boy, almost the same age as Daniel, lost his life. All that potential, all those dreams and aspirations, lost in a single arbitrary moment. I cried and I could not stop, tears running down my face. I cried for the victims, for the families, for the city. I cried for all of us, for all the things we lost that day. And I cried for those people who had lost parts of their bodies and out of nowhere had to adjust to a new life.

  I thought of how many lives had just changed. I knew I was lucky. The survivors were lucky. Like many of them, I would soon be an amputee as well. It was all so unfair and none of this should have happened.

  I closed my eyes and wept again.

  The first time I tried to hold a pencil to paper at the rehabilitation center, I cried. Nothing worked. I had no control. My black fingers were in the way, and even a toddler’s scribbled lines looked better than what I was able to produce. I hated it. I hated everything about what had happened and the consequences I faced. I hated not being able to keep my ability to visualize every thought on paper as I was used to.

  But it was so much more than that. It was some of my fondest childhood memories, the precious moments with Daniel and my everyday escape. Daniel’s drawings and Peter’s prints of our family adventures were decorating the walls of my room. One of the photographs showed me in the Angeles National Forest, sitting under a tree next to a stream, drawing. A happy moment. No one could tell me, in losin
g my fingers, if I would ever be able to draw again and I simply didn’t know how I would deal with that loss. I did not know if I could. And I didn’t know what a life without drawing would mean.

  But I had another test to face first.

  “Hi, Rikke!” The neuropsychologist knocked on my door. She was here to pick me up for cognitive tests recommended by the chief physician.

  I was skeptical, had no idea what was expected from me. A lot of thoughts were flying through my head. What would she find? What would the consequences be? What would they write in my medical chart? Could it be something that would affect my chances of holding on to my job? I told myself that I had to shine, that I needed to be utterly convincing. I told myself this, but I wasn’t sure how to do it.

  Sitting in front of this woman, accustomed to being professionally nice, I couldn’t escape the thought that my fingers were letting me down. My own hands were so pathetically useless and while I could speak fairly well now, with my left eye only half open and the serious trouble I had controlling my facial muscles, I could barely see the test sheets put on the table in front of me. But I was not going to let this defeat me and so I gathered myself up to take it on. I had to be alert and ready.

  She was friendly and asked if I was ready. I nodded. At first the tests were straightforward and I did well. “What’s the next number in this row?”

  “Which geometrical shape is missing here?”

  “What is twelve plus eighteen, minus four, times eight, plus thirty-two?”

  “Start with one hundred and keep subtracting the number seven.”

  “What’s the odd one out when looking at these cards?”

  “I’m going to tell you a story; please tell me what you remember and preferably in the right order.”

  On the first of three scheduled tests, she kept going for almost two hours, firing questions at me with no break or time for reflection. This was repeated three days later, but with new questions, and again ten days after that. I was exhausted each time, but in a good way. I knew I had done well. I was confident that there was absolutely nothing wrong with my cognitive skills in terms of intelligence, memory, language, planning, or problem solving. I was playing on home turf. Working through the tests, I had been pleased by her tiny signs of surprise when I got the really hard questions right.

  After she had analyzed the third round of tests, she told me, “You were above average in most of the tests. You did really well. Did you enjoy doing them?”

  I did, so I smiled.

  “But there were minor problems that we have to consider,” she continued.

  I didn’t like the sound of that.

  “Some of your tests covering executive skills, such as the ability to think of new ideas, might not be as good as they used to be. You might find creative thinking difficult as a result of what has happened to you.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Was she serious? Had we been in the same room during the tests? I tried to compose myself and took a deep breath, carefully phrasing the sentence in my head before asking her, “What are your reasons for reaching that conclusion? Which tests support this?”

  I was shocked, and I couldn’t hide my surprise. She was startled by my lack of immediate acceptance of her verdict. After a brief, awkward pause, she explained that the main reason for her concluding that my creative thinking had been damaged was how I performed in the verbal fluency test for words beginning with the letter S. In this test, I’d had to say as many words as possible that began with the letter S, in one minute. I’d managed ten words, not bad for a person suffering brain damage. But it was below the average of a normal person and compared to my other results, it stood out as poor.

  I was very upset. I could not believe anyone would base an important conclusion on such a poor data set. Thinking as a scientist, everything about that was just wrong. She was sitting right opposite me presenting her verdict, daring to take away my creativity. In all of my professional and scientific life, this had been what defined me. But still, this was what went into my medical chart: The trauma to Rikke’s brain has caused a loss of creativity and ability to problem solve.

  I was furious. I felt beaten down, casually brushed aside as the person I used to be, the person I was fighting so hard every day to become again. I couldn’t believe it. The doctors were taking away my fingers, and now she said I was losing my creativity.

  I was determined not to let this happen. I was going to prove her wrong. Of course, she had no idea of the effect on me. To her, taking tests with patients, analyzing the data, and providing results was what she did. To me, however, it was personal. The interpretation of the test results was about who I was and who I could still be. In a curious sense, she did me a favor and helped me to focus my mental powers much more clearly. I was going to leave with my head held high, and I was going to live a creative life. I needed to believe that, if I was ever going to get out of there and pick up my life again.

  And then it was time. I had been transported back to the university hospital and the surgeon told me in great detail how he was going to remove my fingers, while holding up a pair of pliers for demonstration purposes. The pliers took me by surprise. I had envisaged a tiny surgical saw and other precision instruments, him working delicately on each finger one after the other, carefully sewing up what was left with surgical thread. My imagination was somewhat off track. I wanted to know everything and yet part of me wanted to know nothing at all. But my curiosity got the better of me. Would each finger break off easily or would some be stubborn, not wanting to part from my hands? How would he sew up what was left? I became obsessed with the details and wanted to be there as my fingers came off. I wanted to bear witness.

  “Are you ready?” the surgeon asked.

  No, I thought, and forced a smile as I heard my own voice saying, “Yes, of course.”

  All procedures were followed and everything went according to plan. The anesthesiologist put me under as the surgeon suited up. Nine of my fingers had surgery and were partially removed. I slept soundly and never felt a thing.

  When I woke up, I looked down. Two white, bandaged boxing gloves, looking like small white cantaloupes.

  Other than that, there was nothing to see, and I could not help feeling slightly disappointed. I had been thinking about this for so long and had been so worried. I had cried, I had talked endlessly to Peter about it and I had been very, very quiet, keeping most of my thoughts to myself, never letting my guard down and allowing the doctors and nurses to see what I really felt. I didn’t want them to think I was weak or scared. But I had been scared, of course, scared of everything: the procedure, waking up without my fingers, my reaction, and how I was supposed to get on in my life using my new hands.

  Gazing at my gauze spheres, now with signs of blood seeping out, I still didn’t feel anything. They were numb. But that didn’t last long. Soon the pain started and it became real. They were really gone, my beautiful, wonderful fingers, my dexterous friends. Now it was over, irreparably over, and there was no turning back. The magnitude of what I had been through finally sank in. My life would never be the same as it was before I had become ill. Never. I was now physically changed in a way that could not be reversed. The pain from this was different. Something else inside me broke, never to heal.

  After a few days, the surgeon began to unroll the bandages, gently freeing my hands more and more. I thought time would stop. I expected horror, grief, tears and shouting about the unfairness of everything at anyone who came near me. But that didn’t happen. More than anything I was curious to see my new hands, what the stitches looked like, and how much was left.

  This was the first day in my new life. I was eager to discover what my new hands could do. I wanted to try them out. I wanted to get out of the hospital, start over, get on with everything—and go home.

  ten

  Leaving

  I watched the specialist nurse clean my wounds, making sure everything was all right, carefully checking for infections. I watc
hed the doctors examine my hands and all the time I watched the remnants of my fingers. I don’t know what I had imagined, but this was different. At the very least, I thought the wounds would have been delicately closed up with tiny stitches, so small you could barely see them. This was not the case. Flesh, blood, and bone were visible. Strings were sticking out and you could see the knots. How they would ever heal was beyond me.

  I followed every tiny change, watching my fingers as they healed. Every day the scab changed, little by little. The threads became more visible and the wounds more tender and swollen, a sign of healing. And when thin bandages were placed over the tip of each finger, my hands started to look surprisingly normal. The bandages were changed each day and the wounds were improving.

  When you cut fingers off with pliers, your skin and flesh do not contract at the same rate, leaving your skin sitting kind of tube-like around the flesh and bone. These edges were steadily pulling inward as new skin began to form. It was a relief that the dead parts were no longer in the way and as I got used to my tiny hands, I found myself more adept, my movements quicker. As an exercise, I was handed a pillbox with seven compartments, one for each day of the week. My task was to use my new hands to carefully divide my weekly doses of medicines into each compartment, and, day by day, I found myself able to do it.

  It was not all going right. My left eye was still a mess. Doctors had tried to find out what was wrong with it. I had even been back to the university hospital on a day trip for specialists to have a look at it. I could not see anything but a blur when I closed my right eye, and I was told that it might never be any better. My cornea was damaged, making me practically blind, but it still reacted with a painful sensitivity to light. I couldn’t see and yet, ironically, I was blinded by the light and had to protect my eye. The eye patch had become increasingly uncomfortable and reminded me constantly of my illness. I longed to escape that, so instead, I had taken to wearing sunglasses at all hours. By now, I was able to put them on and take them off by myself, and if I had my way, I kept them on.