Stir by Jessica Fechtor

would happen next. Eli was back from New York now. He stood by my bed, while Dr. Tranmer assumed his usual position, slouched in one chair with his leg propped up on another. He folded a sheet of paper to stiffen it for writing, laid it against his thigh, and drew us the blood vessel and its attendant aneurysm as he’d done before the surgery. Again, he penned the straight wall of the vessel, then the aneurysm ballooning outward from it in the shape of a kidney bean. Only now, he added another line across the base of the aneurysm, separating it from the vessel. This was the clip. He ran the pen back and forth a couple of times so that the clip stood out in bold. Until he pointed it out, we didn’t notice that he hadn’t drawn it flush against the vessel. There was a sliver of the aneurysm still beneath it.
    A residual aneurysm is common after clipping a bean-shaped aneurysm, he explained. Most likely, the clip would stay firmly in place and the minor deformity of the vessel would spend the rest of its days unchanged until I died an old woman. (Peacefully, in my sleep, arm in arm with Eli, of course.)
    There was unfortunately also the chance that pressure would build beneath the clip and a new aneurysm would form out of the bit that remained. It would need to be monitored. That meant an angiogram every six months for a year, then yearly for five years, then every five years after that.
    Okay. But how was I supposed to understand all of this in terms of my actual life? That was what I wanted to know. Was it safe to run? How far? How fast? Was pregnancy an option for me? When? These questions were impossible to answer, but Dr. Tranmer spoke kindly and did his best. Pregnancy would probably be safe one day, though it was too soon to say so for sure. Pushing would not. I looked at Eli and tried to read his face. It had taken us years to know with certainty that we wanted to be parents. The feeling of sureness was still new. Maybe I could make myself not want it anymore. I groped around for the old familiar doubt, but I couldn’t find it.
    â€œNo marathons,” Dr. Tranmer went on. “The occasional short run should be fine.” But how occasional was occasional? How short was short? Three miles? Five? What do words like “probably” and “should be” even mean when the potential reality that lies beyond them is death?
    Dr. Tranmer was in one-step-at-a-time mode, the only mode appropriate after brain surgery, when the body is just beginning to heal and the first follow-up scan is still six months away. I, on the other hand, wanted an operating manual, and a lifetime warranty to boot. What
exactly
do I need to do to make sure I’ll be okay?
    My official prognosis, it seemed, was that I was going to be either absolutely fine or not, based either entirely or not at all on whether I crossed certain red lines, sketchily drawn—that may or may not be red lines at all. This is the prognosis of every human, of course, from the healthy and strong to the gravely ill, every single moment of our lives. We forget that. (And thank goodness.) One inconvenience of having just been nearly dead was that I could no longer help but remember.
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    I moved out of the ICU and onto a regular floor that night. Eli was sitting at the foot of my bed when an e-mail came in on his phone.
    â€œJosh and Melissa are splitting up.” He said it before he’d had a chance to process the news himself, and from his offhand tone I was sure I’d misheard.
    â€œWhat?”
    These friends of ours had been together for ten years, married for six. We’d met them for drinks before leaving New York a few weeks earlier. They had just bought a place in the city. In another year, they told us, they were hoping to have a child.
    â€œNo,” I sobbed. “No, no, no . . .” Everything was broken. This was too much. I kicked at the sheets and pounded the mattress