“Oh my God, how can this be? What’s happening?” said Cait, her voice edgy and brittle. She was ill with worry and concern, apprehensively pacing up and down between the sectioned-off alcoves in the waiting room of the Alfred Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit, quivering like a jelly. Her legs felt weak and her stomach was churning as if she was coming down with gastro. She’d been to the toilet at the end of the room twice in the last twelve minutes.
“Oh Rishi, what did they do to you? It’s my fault you’re here. I’m so sorry.” Cait clasped her fingers and rubbed them together, then lifted them to her face, rubbing the nervous tears away with the back of her trembling hands.
The anxiety of simply being in the waiting room, where a thousand suffering souls before her had left the imprint of their concerns behind, had strangely heightened Cait’s senses, blocking out the peripheral garbage that usually cluttered and distracted her mind. She became acutely aware of the subtle nuances of where she was: the sharp bright light of the fluorescent tubes hidden behind opaque diffusers, casting no shadows, emitting a whiteness that seemed to travel through everything; the sterile smell of hospital-grade disinfectant that reminded her of having a pap smear; the small groups of worried people huddling close together on grouped couches, looking more like they were in the waiting room of a funeral parlor than a hospital; the constant buzz of activity in the air, even though she was insulated from the action of what was happening behind those doors.
The doors that Cait could see to the side of the reception desk; the ones where nurses in dark blue scrubs with upside-down watches pinned to their chests were coming and going from. The ones where important-looking people in white coats, with ID tags on lanyards hanging around their necks and carrying clipboards, were constantly walking in and out of.
To Cait, those doors resembled a crack in the world of reality that opened into the other side of life. In a strange, perverted way, they represented death, Lucifer, the devil; swinging doors that led to sadness and hopelessness.
“Mum, this isn’t real. It can’t be,” said Cait. “Rishi was fine on Sunday . . . and now he’s behind those doors with a hole drilled in his head. It’s just not fair. I mean, why him?”
Jools instantly picked up on her daughter’s distress, replying without a second thought, “Cait . . . I realize you’re worried about Rishi. We all are. He’s become a part of the family. You know that.”
“Yes, Mum. But it doesn’t make it any easier.” Jools’s soothing voice was like an incantation, calming Cait as she spoke.
“Cait, just hang in there a little longer. You’re doing really well so far. Now, try and be positive. I know it’s not easy darling, but you’ve got to be strong.”
“Mum, I’m doing my best.”
“I can see that.”
Thanks to G, Jools now knew Cait’s concern for Rishi went much, much deeper than just being worried about her friend. Cait also was convinced that she was pregnant to him.
No wonder her daughter was so upset!
But The Gift had told Jools even more—that Cait had found her first real soul mate in life, and now he was clinging to life by a tenuous thread.
“Oh, it’s so hard, Mum. I can’t get the picture out of my head of Rishi being taken away by the ambulance.”
“Darling, that’s to be expected. But it’s okay to feel like that. At least you can rest knowing that he’s getting the best care possible.” Jools continued with her calming words, showering Cait with as much positive energy as she could summon from within her psychic self. But even she was finding it extremely difficult to talk positively about Rishi, as she too was worried sick about him.
“And it’s great news that your pregnancy test was negative, so at least you can put that one aside.”
Cait looked up at her mother, staring deeply into her liquid brown eyes. But all Jools could see and feel was worry . . . grief . . . concern. It was pouring out of her as if she was hemorrhaging.
“Mum, it was only a home pregnancy test, and it’s wrong! I know it. I’m two weeks overdue for my period. And I felt really sick this morning.”
Cait’s eyes welled with tears.
“And I feel pregnant. You must know what I mean by that! Something’s happening down there. It’s not normal.” Cait was an apostle of negativism.
“Cait, it’s such early days. And stress like you’re going through can totally upset your cycle. I really wouldn’t be getting overly concerned about it at this stage.”
“Mum, I’ve never been through anything like this before. It’s totally stressing me out. I’m a mess.”
Jools recognized that her daughter was approaching a watershed, but this time it was one she had to address herself. All Jools could do was point her in the right direction.
“Please Cait, try not to tie yourself up in knots about this . . .”
As if directed by her own personal lodestone, without any conscious effort Jools listened to The Gift, that by this time was almost screaming at her, and moving away from being a concerned mother, morphed into a spiritual practitioner and healer.
“Look, you’ve really got to clear your head. You can’t let Rishi see you like this.” It was time to change tack and inject some positivity into the air.
“Come on, Cait. You know what to do,” Jools incanted. “We’ve done it a hundred times before . . . close your eyes, find some white space . . . escape to a place of peace and beauty . . . now, take ten deep, slow breaths . . .”
Jools slowed her speech: soft, melodic, hypnotic.
“Do it now, darling. Find that space. Go there in your head.”
Jools gently took her daughter’s hand in hers, lightly drawing her cupped fingers backward and forward across Cait’s soft skin, transferring the power of The Gift—of positive thought—to her daughter, watching Cait’s breathing slow as she attempted to settle the turmoil in her mind, searching for sixty seconds of calm.
“I know it’s easy for me to say, but you’ll find out once and for all tomorrow about your pregnancy when you go to the doctor.” Jools also wanted to continue by saying,”Then if the test was wrong and you’re pregnant, well, we can look at the options,” but that was just way too much right now. It was Rishi who needed to be the focus of attention right at this very moment, not Cait.
Jools let Cait’s hand go and reached into her bag for a tissue.
“Wipe your eyes, darling.”
Jools allowed the intensity of the moment to settle, then continued. “Cait, if it means anything, just always remember, everything in life happens for a reason. And to find why, you have to find the key to the door it’s hidden behind. And that key’s currently locked away inside your head.”
Jools had been on the phone to Divya, Rishi’s mother, earlier this morning so she already had a heads-up on Rishi. Divya and her husband Arnav had been on a trip to Delhi, visiting their aging parents, and as soon as they found out about their son’s bashing they jumped on the first plane back to Australia. They arrived yesterday and came straight from the airport, spending the whole day at the hospital sitting with Rishi. Divya had a nursing background so she understood both the complications and the potential seriousness of Rishi’s head injury and she was only too willing to fill Jools in on what the doctors and nursing staff at the hospital had told her about her son. They had just left the Alfred about an hour ago to go home for a change of clothes before they came back later this afternoon, so Divya was pleased that Cait and Jools would be at Rishi’s side while they were away.
“Yeah, thanks Mum. You’re right. I feel a bit better now . . . but still, this is so much like a dream, it’s freaking me out. I mean, we studied this kind of thing at university, but I never expected it to actually happen to someone that I loved.”
Cait was strong and streetwise and had been around enough to know what was going on, but Rishi’s assault was different. It was just too close to home for comfort. Even though she had studied the criminal mind, this was totally new to her. It exposed a vio
lent side of life that she hadn’t really experienced before, confusing her, playing games with her emotions, and she wasn’t prepared for it.
“And why Rishi, Mum? I mean, he’s a vegetarian. He’s so nonviolent he won’t eat meat because it involves killing animals.”
“Cait, there are some really nasty people out there. You’re smart enough to know that. People who’ve no respect for others . . . no social responsibility. Total sociopaths.”
Jools was now more upbeat, trying to subtly snap her daughter out of her doom-and-gloom mood by introducing a dose of cold, hard reality.
“Remember that case study you had to do at uni about sociopaths and serial killers?”
“Yeah, sort of.”
“Well, now’s the time to use your knowledge, to use the skills you’ve learned. You can make a big difference here, Cait; you can actually help Rishi. Think about it. Remember, you’ve inherited The Gift. Now use it, girl!”
Just as Cait was starting to feel more positive, a young redheaded doctor with a lanky body and a white coat walked through the door and headed directly for them. Everything Jools had just said went in one ear and out the other. Cait suddenly had a terrible sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach again. As he walked over to the bay where Jools and Cait were sitting, Cait noticed that he had an almost expressionless face and a profound weariness about him.
The young doctor stood in front of Cait and Jools, legs slightly apart. Removing his glasses with his left hand, he pinched his nose between his thumb and index finger, then immediately replaced the spectacles as if he felt naked without them.
“Hi. My name’s John Stone and I’m the intensivist doctor on duty. But please, call me Jono. Everyone does. And you must be Julie, and I presume you’re Cait.” He spoke with a tired, monotonous, yet strangely caring voice.
The doctor had the confidence of someone who had done this before, many times. His eyes smiled, but it was one of those sad smiles that conveyed a distant impression of someone who had spent half their life laughing, half crying.
“Please, call me Jools. As you said, everyone else does.”
“Sure Jools, as long as you don’t call me Dr. Stone. Deal?”
Maybe he’s okay, thought Cait, picking up on his vibes. Like, sort of normal in a weird way.
“Rishi’s one of my patients. His mother, Divya, said you’re close family friends and you’d be coming to visit him. I believe that you’ve got some medical training, Julie? Divya asked me to give you a medical update on Rishi.”
“Thanks. Much appreciated. The last time we saw Rishi he was leaving our place in the back of an ambulance.”
“And from what Divya told me, you’re the one who picked up on his brain hemorrhage.”
Jono was rocking nervously from foot to foot. This wasn’t his favorite part of being an intensivist.
“Unfortunately I see this all too frequently,” continued Jono. “He’s so lucky he made it here in time or he could have had major complications. Not that he’s out of the woods yet, but if his bleed had gone on any longer, well . . . let’s just say you potentially saved his life.”
“Thank my daughter, not me. She’s the one who picked up on it. I just took over from there.”
As Jono spoke to them, Cait felt it strange that in such a traumatic moment as this, an instance in time when she was hurting so terribly on the inside, worried sick about her close friend—her new lover—how the little things around her suddenly assumed such great importance: the second hand on the clock on the wall moving forward at seemingly half pace; the stain on the carpet in front of the chair opposite her where someone had obviously spilled their coffee; the tiny tear in the arm of the couch she was sitting on; the dog-eared copy of the two-month-old Women’s Weekly sitting at an odd angle on the coffee table.
It was all so depressing. Even the vibe in the room was flat, as if someone had poisoned the air with dark thoughts.
And then suddenly as if out of nowhere, another dimension in the room took shape for Cait and smacked her in the face, demanding her attention, forcing her to sit bolt upright as surely as if she had received an electric shock. She could feel it. Sense it. Almost see it, smell it.
For the first time, Cait was experiencing the full power of The Gift as it rushed through her consciousness with the speed of a runaway truck. Jools was watching it all happen and knew instinctively what her daughter was going through, but she also knew this was a journey that Cait had to experience herself. It was her rite of passage; a journey that all the females in her maternal bloodline had taken for hundreds of generations past before they fully blossomed into full womanhood.
It’s just a pity that the awakening’s happening in such traumatic circumstances, thought Jools. The universe works in strange ways.
“Well as you no doubt have been told, when Rishi was attacked, he was knocked to the ground and according to witnesses, fell heavily and hit his head on the sidewalk,” explained Jono.
“When he first presented, his case history indicates he was initially diagnosed with concussion. He was given an MRI to check for any bleeding into the brain, but all was clear and he was released five hours later.”
Informing friends and family about a patient’s prognosis was a part of the job that Jono hated doing, especially when he was the bearer of bad news, but he carried on regardless.
“Well unfortunately as sometimes happens in cases like this,” Jono stopped momentarily to catch his thoughts and center himself, “Rishi suffered from a latent bleed into the area between the bones of the skull and the brain known as the dura. He has what’s medically known as a subdural hematoma.”
As Jono was doing his best to walk that fine line between compassion and fact, all Cait heard was woe. It was as if an ominous dark mist suddenly descended around her, enveloping her in its cold, dark shadow, hanging above her like the Sword of Damocles, fogging her vision and stealing part of her soul.
The power of The Gift that she had just experienced now meant nothing. Instead, the immediacy of the moment took over. With tears welling in her eyes, Cait asked urgently, almost pleading, “He’s not going to die, is he? Please tell me Rishi’s going to be all right.”
“Well Cait, all I can say at this stage is that Rishi’s responding well to treatment. We’ve had to place him in an induced coma and ventilate him to give his body every chance of recovering without also having to cope with normal body functions, even breathing. But the good news is that at this stage, all his vital signs are within normal parameters. And it looks like we’ve hopefully stopped the hemorrhage.”
Almost in unison, Cait and Jools breathed a sigh of relief.
“However, as much as I would like to be able to tell you otherwise, his condition is still serious and potentially life-threatening. It’s now critical for his recovery that we prevent any further bleeding and also any build-up of what is known as intracranial pressure inside his skull.”
“That doesn’t sound good. Divya told me that he had to have a craniotomy,” said Jools, her emotions vacillating between hope and despair.
“Yes. This was carried out Sunday evening after he failed to respond to treatment.”
“Did he just have a tube inserted to measure his ICP or did you have to remove a piece of bone to get to the source of the bleed?
Jools obviously has more medical knowledge than the average person, thought Jono. She needs a proper answer.
In a way, Jono was relieved that he didn’t have to dumb things down too much. It made his job easier when he could say what naturally came to him, as Rishi’s condition was serious. In fact, worse than that, he wasn’t far away from being placed on the critical list, so it simply wasn’t fair on Jools and Cait to build their hopes up, only to have them come crashing down like a house of cards if another hemorrhage occurred and Rishi ended up a vegetable, or even worse, died.
“When the ambulance admitted Rishi to emergency he had a GCS of nine, but within half an hour of his arrival he started driftin
g in and out of consciousness and became quite disoriented. He was immediately given a CT scan and a hemorrhage was found, which was slowly expanding along the inside of his skull and starting to press inward.”
Jono realized this wasn’t sounding good, but he continued regardless. “These sorts of chronic bleeds can be hard to pick out sometimes. The blood and any cerebrospinal fluid that may have leaked out initially can take on the same shading as the brain tissue, obscuring an early finding, which is probably why it wasn’t evident when he had his first MRI.”
As Jono continued with his explanation of Rishi’s condition, Cait just listened, gobsmacked. She was too concerned to say anything, but this was a hidden bonus as it gave her time to let the shock of it all settle in. She watched Jono intently, picking up on his body language: he kept placing his left hand in and out of the side pocket of his white coat, and as he was talking he was either gesturing with his right hand, palm upward in an almost pleading gesture, or using it to stroke his chin as if he was checking whether he needed a shave or not.
Cait started to feel more comfortable, not about the news of Rishi’s condition, but more with Jono and Rishi’s place of care. Reading between the lines, it was evident that Jono was as uncomfortable being the bearer of bad news as she was hearing it, but even so, he delivered his assessment with confidence and compassion. He appeared to be genuinely concerned not only about Rishi’s welfare, but also about the effect the news was having on Cait and her mother.
Cait decided then and there that she trusted him.
“So the attending staff at emergency were left with no other alternative but to call a neurosurgeon and he decided to operate immediately. It was that serious. He could have died.”
At the mention of the word”died,” Cait’s heart skipped a beat, but Jono’s explanation was so thorough she was able to take it in stride.
“The neurosurgeon removed a section of bone directly over the loci of the hemorrhage so that the source of the bleed could be located and stopped. This is fairly standard emergency procedure for this type of complication.”
The Cait Lennox Box Set Page 15