Fallen: A Trauma, a Marriage, and the Transformative Power of Music by Kara Stanley
Authors: Kara Stanley
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realistically be. Like me, Emily is a writer, a researcher by nature, and for both of us there is safety to be found in the gathering and sorting of information. But an earlier attempt to Google some of the unfamiliar terms—
subdural hematoma, transtentorial herniation, decerebrate posture
—was quickly aborted. It is better, we agree, not to know.
MY BROTHER, HIS wife, Carol, and his twin three-year-old boys, Aidan and Lucas, arrive from Singapore.
“Oh, Sis,” Rob says, holding me tight. “I’m so sorry.”
They rent a hotel room downtown and join the growing contingent of folks who have commandeered a large corner of Sassafras, waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting.
THERE IS A small pond beside our house; Paloma loves to splash in its muddy banks. At this time of year the mighty noise of the frogs fills the cathedral of the blue-black sky at night. As I walk down the ICU hallway, the thought of the frogs comes to me like a long-forgotten dream. The crickets are also noisy this time of year, and the birds too. Soon the cicadas will add their castanet-clacking to the summer’s song. But here, summer has disappeared; only the hum of fluorescent lights and the changing of the nurses’ shifts mark the passage of time. Time is static right up until the very moment when it races by in a kaleidoscope of nurses and doctors, in orthotic shoes and colored scrubs, pushing a stretcher, a mad, clattering migration to an operating room, winged with purposefulness. In their wake they leave a weighted hush, a palpable increase in gravity, a promise of winters that lie ahead.
As days pass, we are joined in the hallways by other families, who have come to wait out their own catastrophes. I see them leaning against walls, huddled in chairs, hanging on to one another. Although I am careful to avoid direct eye contact, with a brief glance I can predict exactly what stage they are at: they are in shock; they are in grief; they are, like us now, waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting.
STAYING GROUNDED IN Simon’s glass room becomes, in the wake of the spinal surgery, much more challenging. I don’t need the nurses’ updates—shivers and hiccups continue, the ICP is still rising, Simon is still not tolerating food, the fever is too high, glucose is too low—to know the situation has become more precarious. I can feel it. I can feel Simon, more distant and scrambled; I can feel him in the room almost entirely separate from his swollen body. It is as if the battle he wages has left the confines of his body and is being fought somewhere in the sterile air above and around him. Dr. Griesdale’s clinical notes echo, in far less dramatic terms, exactly what I am feeling:
07/26/08
14:15 ICU STAFF
Will keep current management over next 24–48hrs then consider lightening sedation but this is the critical period right now.
WHEN I LEAVE Simon’s room, I am overwhelmed with anger, a very specific, direct, and irrational anger. I am not angry, as might be expected, at myself, for not earning a decent enough wage that Simon could just focus on his music. I am not angry at the culture of construction workers or even at the larger culture, for how we teach men in the crudest terms possible that caring for the safety of their bodies is somehow unmanly. (Hard hat? Harness? Pussy!) I am not angry that I didn’t receive a phone call that might have got me to Simon faster, in his last few lucid moments. I am not even angry at the doctor who used the callously descriptive word soup to describe my lover’s—my best friend’s—brain. I am angry at the neurosurgeon with the paisley cravat, Dockers shoes, and youthful face who told me at the end of the first long night that there was room to hope. It is one of the kindest gestures a medical person has extended to me since Simon has arrived, and so the sense of its betrayal cuts deepest. I am furious.
The fabric of the day wears thin until I am clothed only in moth-eaten time. The unspooling of
subdural hematoma, transtentorial herniation, decerebrate posture
—was quickly aborted. It is better, we agree, not to know.
MY BROTHER, HIS wife, Carol, and his twin three-year-old boys, Aidan and Lucas, arrive from Singapore.
“Oh, Sis,” Rob says, holding me tight. “I’m so sorry.”
They rent a hotel room downtown and join the growing contingent of folks who have commandeered a large corner of Sassafras, waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting.
THERE IS A small pond beside our house; Paloma loves to splash in its muddy banks. At this time of year the mighty noise of the frogs fills the cathedral of the blue-black sky at night. As I walk down the ICU hallway, the thought of the frogs comes to me like a long-forgotten dream. The crickets are also noisy this time of year, and the birds too. Soon the cicadas will add their castanet-clacking to the summer’s song. But here, summer has disappeared; only the hum of fluorescent lights and the changing of the nurses’ shifts mark the passage of time. Time is static right up until the very moment when it races by in a kaleidoscope of nurses and doctors, in orthotic shoes and colored scrubs, pushing a stretcher, a mad, clattering migration to an operating room, winged with purposefulness. In their wake they leave a weighted hush, a palpable increase in gravity, a promise of winters that lie ahead.
As days pass, we are joined in the hallways by other families, who have come to wait out their own catastrophes. I see them leaning against walls, huddled in chairs, hanging on to one another. Although I am careful to avoid direct eye contact, with a brief glance I can predict exactly what stage they are at: they are in shock; they are in grief; they are, like us now, waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting.
STAYING GROUNDED IN Simon’s glass room becomes, in the wake of the spinal surgery, much more challenging. I don’t need the nurses’ updates—shivers and hiccups continue, the ICP is still rising, Simon is still not tolerating food, the fever is too high, glucose is too low—to know the situation has become more precarious. I can feel it. I can feel Simon, more distant and scrambled; I can feel him in the room almost entirely separate from his swollen body. It is as if the battle he wages has left the confines of his body and is being fought somewhere in the sterile air above and around him. Dr. Griesdale’s clinical notes echo, in far less dramatic terms, exactly what I am feeling:
07/26/08
14:15 ICU STAFF
Will keep current management over next 24–48hrs then consider lightening sedation but this is the critical period right now.
WHEN I LEAVE Simon’s room, I am overwhelmed with anger, a very specific, direct, and irrational anger. I am not angry, as might be expected, at myself, for not earning a decent enough wage that Simon could just focus on his music. I am not angry at the culture of construction workers or even at the larger culture, for how we teach men in the crudest terms possible that caring for the safety of their bodies is somehow unmanly. (Hard hat? Harness? Pussy!) I am not angry that I didn’t receive a phone call that might have got me to Simon faster, in his last few lucid moments. I am not even angry at the doctor who used the callously descriptive word soup to describe my lover’s—my best friend’s—brain. I am angry at the neurosurgeon with the paisley cravat, Dockers shoes, and youthful face who told me at the end of the first long night that there was room to hope. It is one of the kindest gestures a medical person has extended to me since Simon has arrived, and so the sense of its betrayal cuts deepest. I am furious.
The fabric of the day wears thin until I am clothed only in moth-eaten time. The unspooling of