Me Again (2 page)

Chapter 2

“T
HERE’S STILL NO ANSWER,” Julie said. “We’ve been trying all afternoon, and all we get is the damned machine.”

I had calmed down a little, and was getting acquainted with the hospital staff. Julie was the lady in white who was always talking about Jesus. Karen wore green, and enjoyed waving her fingers in front of my face. And the big guy in blue with the clipboard was Dr. Spence, who seemed to be in charge. He had ordered his staff to try to get in touch with my parents, to notify them of my awakening. But they weren’t answering their phone.

“Give it another hour,” Dr. Spence said. “Then if you still can’t get through, leave a message. But no details – just tell them to call us immediately.”

Julie winced. “Can I at least tell them it’s not bad news? They might think he died or something.”

Dr. Spence considered this, then nodded. While I was getting very tired of being spoken of in the third person, I suppose it was to the hospital’s credit that they thought an answering machine was too informal and undependable a medium by which to transmit such portentous news.

After several more unsuccessful attempts at reaching my parents, Julie finally left a rather generic message for them to call “as soon as possible,” going so far as to mention that she had some “really good news.”

While they waited for my parents to respond, Dr. Spence and company continued to work on communicating with me. I had a lot of questions, but found them impossible to express via grunting. Still, my caregivers managed to fill in some of the blanks for me – you know, little things like where I was, what had happened to me. And why I couldn’t talk, move, or remember much of anything.

From them I learned that the stroke I’d suffered was “sudden and catastrophic” (love those medical terms), which meant one minute I was sitting in a restaurant in Chicago complaining of a headache, and the next I was gone.

My family had done their best, shipping my inert form to various medical institutions, consulting some renowned specialists. But the prognosis was uniformly discouraging, and as my coma extended into weeks and months, expectations for my recovery had dwindled.

Finally my parents had put me here in the stroke unit of a hospital in St. Louis, which was within driving range of their home in Springfield, Illinois. This was, my caregivers informed me, a facility that specialized in the long-term care of non-responsive patients. Sort of a cold storage for the stubbornly unconscious.

* * * * *

Three nights after Julie left a message for them, my parents called the hospital. Yes, I’m using a number here; when I do, I’m merely parroting numbers and statistics that were described to me, but I’m a reporter unable to substantiate his facts. I assume these quantities make sense, and offer them simply to provide context.

Back to my parents – they were thrilled by the news and immediately made arrangements to travel down to St. Louis. It turned out they had been off on a vacation, and had neglected to provide their itinerary to the hospital. Lest I paint too negative a picture of my parents’ sense of responsibility, I later learned that for the first year or so of my coma, they would call the hospital if they so much as left their house to go out to dinner, always leaving word of where they would be, how to reach them, and when they would be back – just on the off chance that I might suddenly wake up. Over the years they became less diligent, and although they did eventually purchase an answering machine (a big leap for this low-tech couple, who to this day eschew the use of cellular phones), invariably they would return from their outings to find no word of any miraculous recoveries on my part.

While we waited to hear from my parents, my interrogation/education by the stroke unit staff had continued, and I was regaining enough of my faculties to now be thoroughly freaked out. When I woke up, I had been something not quite human – a grunting, blinking blob. Now as I was becoming more self-aware, I was beginning to realize who and what I was, and that a huge chunk of it – of me – was missing.

Would I recover? Would I be able to move my atrophied limbs? Would I be able to speak again? Nobody knew what to tell me, or even how to talk to me, not knowing how much I was comprehending. Everyone treated me as something alien and, I think, more than a little frightening.

My parents arrived on Saturday morning. It went badly.

Prior to their arrival, the nurses told me repeatedly how excited my parents would be to see me, with an enthusiasm that seemed a bit forced. But I had a problem. Hell, I had a lot of problems, but here was a new one. Based, I guess, on me having remembered my own name, everybody assumed I remembered my own family. I did not.

Let me clarify: I understood what parents were, but couldn’t remember my own, try as I might. Unable to alert anybody, I resigned myself to my fate, and tried to approach this awkward little matter as scientifically as I could. My plan was to wait and see if their appearance triggered any memories.

On that much-heralded day, a pleasant looking couple was ushered into my room. Expectant gazes populated the faces of all who crowded into the room for this momentous occasion. My parents – I felt safe in assuming them to be my parents, based on their age and lack of medical attire – shared this expectant look, with an added top note of fear. They leaned over my bed while Dr. Spence made introductions. I stared up at them, trying to find something familiar, opening my metaphorical ears to the possibility of any bells going off. No dice.

The woman – my mother – smiled down at me, but I could see that she was fighting back tears. Her gaze grew more intense, as if she were trying to see
into
me, to drill past the communication barrier she was facing. She hadn’t even spoken, yet she radiated so much warmth. And so much pain. Even though I couldn’t remember her, the look on her face made me want to somehow ease her mind. I resolved to try.

“Jonathan,” she said. “My Jonny.”

I responded with what I hoped was a warm, engaging grunt.

She began to cry.

“Look, Ellen – he’s smiling at you,” the man said. This would be my father.

The stroke had done some funny things to my facial muscles, leaving me with one corner of my mouth upturned in a perpetual smirk. I didn’t think I was smiling, but it was hard to tell. My face still felt heavy and numb, a sensation not unlike the handiwork of a dentist who didn’t believe in scrimping on the Novocain.

“Can you understand me, Jonathan?” my mother asked. I grunted. Although she had obviously been thrown by my first grunt, apparently she had been briefed on my rather limited vocabulary, and was now gamely attempting to communicate.

“Are you in any pain?”

I remained silent. Although highly uncomfortable, and seriously weirded out, I couldn’t profess to being in any pain.

“We’re going to take care of you, Jonathan.” She leaned forward and patted my hand. “Everything is going to be all right.”

Even without being able to remember this woman, I could recognize a lie when I heard one.

She went on. “As soon as they tell us you’re able to travel, we’re going to have you brought back home. Springfield has an excellent stroke facility, what with the university’s medical school being right there in town.”

Unable to recall a damn thing about Springfield, I continued playing the strong silent type.

“We’ll make sure it’s a nice place. Because, well, you’re probably going to need to stay in rehab for a while – have they told you that?”

I grunted. They had
not
told me that, but it was clear to me that I was a long way from being ready to be reintroduced into polite society.

“They’ve got to do a lot of tests,” she continued. Tests. I didn’t like the sound of that.

“And they’re going to help you get stronger, Jonathan. Like you were before.”

Like you were before
. I couldn’t remember much about that, but I was pretty sure nothing was going to be quite like it was before.

My father hadn’t spoken in a while. I was later to learn that this was consistent with the dynamic of their marriage. He apparently felt that she did enough talking for the both of them.

Flustered by the awkward silence, my mother added, “And of course, when they say you’re ready, you can come home to us. We’ll have a room set up for you.” She hesitated. “It’s not
your
old room – we, uh, gave that to Teddy, and he changed things around a lot.”

It must have been apparent that I had no idea who Teddy was. She frowned. “You do remember Teddy, don’t you? Your brother?”

Shit. Nobody had said anything about a brother. I suddenly found myself having a hard time maintaining my cool while it was becoming more and more apparent to me what a piece of Swiss cheese my brain had become. And that was actually the thought I had – I’m not being clever – I thought to myself “Shit, my brain has turned to Swiss cheese.”

And then I thought about the fact that I could remember what Swiss cheese was, but had forgotten an entire brother. What the hell kind of priorities were running what was left of my mental filing cabinet?

But it got worse. Sensing my confusion, my mother asked The Killer Question.

“You do remember
us
, don’t you?”

I couldn’t bear the pain I saw on her face. So I did the only thing I could do.

I grunted.

The palpable relief that washed over that sweet woman’s face made the sin forgivable.

* * * * *

My parents drove back to Illinois the next day, where they began making arrangements for me to be sent to an inpatient rehabilitation center in Springfield, their hometown. Well, it was my hometown, too, but I didn’t remember it. I was informed that I had grown up there, but had moved upstate to Chicago after I finished college.

I was in little position to argue with this decision, so when my doctors were satisfied with my roadworthiness, I bade a wordless farewell to my St. Louis caregivers, and was soon installed into my new quarters at the rehab facility in Springfield.

After a lengthy and grunt-filled intake interview, my new keepers went to work on rebuilding me. This would be a complex task, starting with my body. Six years in bed does not do wonders for the physique: I wasn’t paralyzed, yet I couldn’t move. My muscles were atrophied, my body withered.

I was told that in the type of facility where I’d spent the last six years, the staff would perform perfunctory attempts at physical therapy, to minimize these effects and try to keep their patients from shriveling up entirely. I can only imagine what those therapy sessions were like: I picture some deranged aerobics instructor, clad in spandex and sporting the requisite sweat-absorbing headband, manipulating my unresisting limbs in a sort of full-sized puppet show, all the while chanting, “Work that body! Feel the burn! No pain, no gain!” At least my imagination wasn’t damaged by the stroke. On second thought, maybe it was.

My recovery would be made much more difficult by the fact that not just my body needed rehabilitation. My brain was also on the injured list, and the true extent of the damage took a long time to reveal itself.

The brain is tricky – the actual physical lump of stuff in your skull gives precious little outward indication of its state of health, quite unlike the way the rest of your body manifests any injuries it sustains. And the information contained within the brain is not arranged in any way that mere humans have yet figured out. I remembered some things, and had forgotten others, with no discernible rhyme or reason.

In some instances this damage could be repaired – I just had to relearn various skills, ideas, or concepts. A nuisance, to be sure, but I could be taught. I did well with shapes, colors, and names of common objects, although I still have a tendency to say “kangaroo” when I mean “giraffe.” Fortunately the relative scarcity of either kangaroos or giraffes in central Illinois prevents me from committing this faux pas with any frequency.

But in other areas, it gradually became clear that even the potential for learning certain concepts had been permanently eliminated. For example, I cannot count. Period. Repeated attempts to jump-start my mathematical neurons have met with nothing but failure and frustration any time I attempt to move beyond the number three. I read a story about a primitive tribe somewhere that has only a few words to express numeric quantities:
one
,
two
, and
many
. I would fit right in with that tribe, were it not for their affinity for rather drastic body piercing.

Let’s see – what else? Although I eventually regained many of my basic motor skills, I cannot for the life of me tie a knot – the architecture of the process eludes me. This limits my choice of footwear somewhat, although they’re doing some stylish things these days with Velcro straps.

While dealing with aphasia was a major challenge, it turned out that I got off easy compared to many other stroke victims. First of all, there were far more severe forms of aphasia than what I had suffered, which could include the lack of the ability to understand language at all, the ability to understand individual words but not syntax, and a myriad of other equally unpleasant combinations. What’s worse, many who were stricken with aphasia never recovered. So in the long run, I got lucky: I could understand spoken language from the get-go; I just needed to work on being able to join the conversation.