Stir (13 page)

While I will never turn down a Toll House cookie, a new chocolate chip cookie came into my life a few years back that instantly became my go-to. The cookie's defining feature is that it's made exclusively with whole wheat flour. That sounds annoyingly virtuous for a chocolate chip cookie, but the whole wheat's not there to be healthy. It's there because it tastes good. When I first discovered these cookies, I baked them for everyone I knew. My friends all had a guess about what was different in these cookies, but very few called out the whole wheat flour. They asked instead if I'd put ground walnuts in there, or oats, or an earthy spice of some kind. One person insisted I'd browned the butter. Nope. It was just the whole wheat talking.

These cookies bake up fat, with a crisp, crustlike exterior. On the inside, they're soft, even borderline flakey. The genius behind them is Kim Boyce, who published the recipe in her cookbook,
Good to the Grain
. Her specialty is taking whole grains, figuring out their particular powers of flavor and texture, and harnessing them in the service of baked goods that are astoundingly delicious. (If you ever visit her Bakeshop in Portland, Oregon, please have one of everything for me.)

The only thing better than a Kim Boyce chocolate chip cookie is a Kim Boyce chocolate chip cookie made from dough that's been aged for a day or two. I like to prepare the dough, scoop it into individual cookies, and store them in the fridge on a baking sheet wrapped in plastic. Then, when the mood strikes, I bake them off, a cookie or two at a time.

3 cups (340 grams) whole wheat flour

1½ teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon fine sea salt

1 cup (2 sticks; 226 grams) unsalted butter, softened to cool room temperature and cut into ½-inch pieces

1 cup (200 grams) dark brown sugar

1 cup (200 grams) granulated sugar

2 large eggs

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

8 ounces (227 grams) bittersweet or semisweet chocolate (I use something in the 62–72 percent range), roughly chopped into ¼- and ½-inch pieces

Sea salt flakes, like Maldon

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and fine sea salt in a large bowl. Put the butter and sugars in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, and mix on low speed until just blended. Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a spatula. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Mix in the vanilla.

Add the flour mixture to the bowl, and blend on the lowest speed until the flour is just barely incorporated. Add the chopped chocolate, and mix with a rubber spatula. If there are any small pockets of flour lurking in the dough, rub them in with the spatula or your hands. (Better to leave off using the mixer at this point so that you don't overwork the dough.)

Scoop the dough, 3 level tablespoons per cookie, onto the prepared baking sheet. I use a 1½-tablespoon cookie scoop and pile one level scoop on top of another. You can crowd the mounds of dough shoulder to shoulder on the single sheet so that they won't take up too much room in the fridge. (You'll move the cookies to a separate sheet when you're ready to bake them.) Wrap the dough in plastic and chill for 24 to 48 hours.

When you're ready to bake, heat the oven to 350 degrees and line another baking sheet with parchment paper. Place 6 to 8 mounds of prescooped dough onto the prepared pan, leaving about 3 inches between each cookie. Press a few sea salt flakes into the top of each mound.

Bake for 16 to 20 minutes, rotating the sheet halfway through, until nicely brown but still soft. Slide the parchment paper with the cookies onto a rack and cool completely. Repeat with the remaining dough, making sure to begin with a room temperature baking sheet.

Makes about 20 cookies.

T
hat Sunday, in the last hours of my dad and Anna's visit, a full-fledged fever came on and stayed. We called Dr. Tranmer, who said it sounded like I'd picked up a bug, and to feel better soon. I got into bed.

My head throbbed and the coming-and-going swelling thing I thought I'd noticed became the coming-and-going swelling thing I noticed for sure. Eli saw it now, too, but perhaps this was just what recovery looked like a few weeks out from brain surgery?

The next morning I felt no worse, and maybe even a little better. My fever returned to a low-grade something or other that was questionably a fever at all. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, was beginning that night. Friends of ours knocked on our door to deliver a holiday meal.

Then things got bad fast. My fever spiked to 104 and wouldn't come down, and the swelling was no longer going. Instead, it was spreading; it was in my forehead and temple now, too. Eli folded me into the car with an ice pack for my head and we drove to the ER.

They brought me back right away, which didn't make me nervous but should have, and paged a neurosurgery resident. That got my attention.

“Why?” I asked Eli. “Why?” I was scared. “I'm afraid they're going to cut into my head again.”

“That's not going to happen,” he said. I knew it was improbable. I'd said my fear out loud in part not because I believed it could happen, but to make sure it didn't. Magical thinking: To say it was to ward it off.

The next hours and days get swimmy in my mind. I know that there was an MRI, and that soon after, I was admitted. My fever stayed high. My head continued to swell. None of the doctors knew for sure what was happening to me, but from what I understood it was one of two things: a cerebral spinal fluid leak or an infection. There was also a third option: both. A neurosurgery resident told me that they would operate, then a few hours later said that they wouldn't and disappeared.

Next came a trip to a neuro-ophthalmologist in the building next door. Someone carted me over in a wheelchair in my johnny with a blanket around my shoulders and one across my lap. I hadn't been allowed to eat or drink since I'd been admitted—was surgery a possibility still?—so I was hooked up to an IV. It rattled along beside me. The office was in the hospital, but regular people went there, fully clothed ones who'd walked or driven there alone. I sat in the waiting room right along with them while they read their magazines and tried not to look. I was too sick to care if they did.

“Oh no,” the doctor said when he saw me. By now my face was contorted from the swelling. My left eye bulged and my temple was a giant pillow of a thing, yanking my cheek up with it; my skin stretched unnaturally across my forehead, a hard, protruding ridge. I was flushed and sweating from fever, and my Frankenstein scar peeked out from beneath my matted hair. I'm not sure what this doctor was looking for, but he must not have found it, because he sent me back to my room and I never saw him again.

I was doing that thing now that I'd practiced in Burlington when the pain had been at its worst. I pictured it not inside me, but right alongside, and shut myself down to increase the space between us. Sometime in the night, I had to use the bathroom. I pressed the red call button, as I'd been instructed, and an unsmiling nurse came to help me along. When I was through, I realized my gown was wet.

“It must have dropped into the toilet,” I told her.

“It will dry,” she said.

I got back into bed.

Morning again. A test. I lay on a table and someone strapped my ankles down. Slowly, the table tilted back, farther, farther, until I was hanging upside down. The pain and the pressure were too much and a roar, half scream, half sob, came barreling out of me. The doctors lowered me down and into the waiting scanner so they could snap their shot right away. “Almost there, almost there, almost there . . . Done,” I heard one of them say. I strained to lift my head up from the table and green vomit shot out of my mouth. Then I lay there, sobbing and heaving, until someone wheeled me away.

An infection? A leak? They still didn't know. But yes, they would operate. They'd slice back in along my old incision, peel my forehead down once more, suck some fat from my belly to plug up the hole if there was one, and deal with the infection if that was what they found.

I didn't care
.
I just wanted them to fix it.

 • • • 

Waking up from surgery is rapture. Nurses and doctors will tell you that you won't remember it. Some people must not, but I always do. I love the first breath, how it feels spiked with extra oxygen sneaked into the atmosphere when no one was looking, like rum in the punch bowl at a high school dance. Along with it comes the awareness that I'm alive and not dead, then the druggy realization that I have arms and legs and a body and there is no pain. I feel cured. A pleasant heaviness pins me to the gurney, and at the same time I'm so light, I think I might float away. Through the haze of anesthesia, the fluorescent bulbs are beautiful, the way they glow and light up the hospital corridor. I feel warm and safe, and I am only glad.

As far as I was concerned, the worst thing had happened—another surgery—and I had made it through. It, whatever “it” was, was over. Someone wheeled me from the recovery bay to my room and I waited for Eli to be allowed in so he could confirm what I already knew: that all was well and we were done and I'd be going home soon.

But something was off. I could tell when Eli walked in. He sat down on the bed and put his hand on my leg. Why did he look so sad?

“Jess . . .” he started. It was a voice I'd only ever heard once, five years earlier, when he'd called me from the other side of the world to tell me my grandmother had died. Was that what was going on? Was I dying? They must have found something when they went in. I studied his stricken face and waited for him to go on.

“You have an infection,” he explained. “It got into your skull and a piece of it, the piece they sawed into when they fixed your aneurysm, was so diseased that they had to take it out and throw it away.”

“Okay,” I said, bracing myself for the part where he'd tell me I was dead.

“They scraped out as much of the infection as they could, and sewed you back up, but you have a deep indentation above your left eye where the forehead bone used to be. You'll be like this for a year, and then you'll have to have another surgery so they can fill in the hole. They're going to give you a helmet . . .” His voice trailed off.

“Okay,” I said again, still waiting for the terrible news.

“They've started some strong antibiotics for the infection and you'll be on them for a while. At home, too. Through an IV.”

Clearly I was missing something. “I don't understand. Will I be okay?”

“Yes.”
Wait, what?
I didn't know if I wanted to kiss him or punch him.

“I'm so sorry, Jess—”

“Eli!” I was actually laughing. A helmet? Some drugs? Big deal! I asked for a mirror, too relieved to feel nervous. How bad could it be? And then I saw it. Part of my skull was missing, all right. My head looked like a partially deflated beach ball that someone had bashed in with his fist. The top of my left eyebrow disappeared into the hollow. There was no forehead above my unseeing eye.

“Okay . . .” I said. “Okay. Okay. But this is temporary, right? This is temporary.” Eli nodded. I made him tell me a few more times that I'd be fine, just to be sure, then sent him to get my parents and sank back into the last delicious moments of my postanesthesia euphoria.

 • • • 

This time the surgeons had gone just sort of right up
to
the brain, without going inside, and there hadn't been a hemorrhage, so things were only a little bit dreadful—okay, medium dreadful—and only for a couple of days. But sometime in there, as soon as the anesthesia had fully lifted, I noticed something: I couldn't smell.

The antibacterial Cal Stat that everyone rubbed on their hands before they approached my bed, the trays of hospital food that went uneaten before someone carted them off, the sickly sweet scent that hung over the cans of vanilla Ensure, my mother's perfume, Eli's unshaven skin: nothing.

My surgeon surmised that with all of his scraping around in there, my olfactory nerves had been damaged. He said it casually, as though explaining what happens when you skin your knee.

“Will it come back?” I wanted to know.

“Probably not,” he said lightly, and then, “But you don't really need your sense of smell anyway.” I know he wasn't trying to be cruel. From a medical perspective, he must have meant, it doesn't matter whether or not you can smell. I was horrified.

Strangely enough, my father had lost his own sense of smell about ten years earlier in a Razor scooter accident. (Wear helmets, friends.) He discovered the deficit one morning not long after, when he splashed puddle after puddle of aftershave onto his face, finally determining that it must somehow have expired and lost its scent. When he walked downstairs and into the kitchen, my brother nearly keeled over.

There are some funny stories about toast left to burn, and the dog puke in the basement that once went unnoticed for days while Amy and the kids were away. He missed things, though. We'd forget sometimes and moan over the aroma of the brownies baking in the oven, then see my dad stick out his lip in an exaggerated pout. I remember a time one summer when my brother and sister ran in from the backyard. They were maybe seven and eight then, and he'd said to me, “You know what I miss? The smell of their sweaty little heads.”

I thought of that now, of all the scents I'd miss, and all the scents I'd never know, and for the first time since my fall, I felt a tiny black hole stretch open inside of me. For the first time, the thought occurred to me that maybe everything was
not
going to be okay. An eye. My sense of smell. What was next?

But the fever was coming down, and soon it disappeared. The antibiotic was working. Someone came in to fit me with my helmet, which turned out to be a hockey helmet. An actual hockey helmet. White plastic, with a thick elastic chin strap secured on either side to a black rubber loop by each ear. It came down over the part of my face that was missing and, by hiding the defect, made me look sort of normal. As normal as a woman in a hospital gown and a hockey helmet can look, anyway. I had some soreness in my neck that my doctor told me was expected after an infection like that. My glands and lymph nodes were in overdrive, he said, but that would clear up soon. I could go home the following day.

Before I was discharged, an occupational therapist came to evaluate me. It's clear to me now that she was young—newly and thus faithfully wed to the protocols she'd learned in her training. She carried a clipboard with a list of questions.

“Do you live in a house or in an apartment?”

“An apartment.”

“How did you get inside before you got sick?”

“Excuse me?” It was the “before you got sick” that threw me. The implication that I'd have to do it another way now.

“Are there stairs?”

“Yes, a few up to the front door.”

“Is there an elevator inside?”

“Yes.”

She scribbled some notes onto her pad.

“Did you toilet yourself before you got sick?” I couldn't believe she was serious.

“Yes.”

“How did you bathe before you got sick?” The healthy, unterrified version of myself would have realized that all of this “before you got sick” business was just standard language. The therapist had probably been taught to ask the same things in exactly the same way of each of her patients, many of whom—unlike me—had limited mobility before whatever had landed them in the hospital, or had suffered debilitating physical or cognitive deficits. But hadn't she read my file? And if she had, and she still thought these questions applied, was I worse off than I knew? Panic crept up along the back of my neck.

“I got into the shower. I washed my hair.” My throat was so tight that it hurt to talk. Why was I speaking in the past tense?

“Can you show me how?” she asked. I lifted both of my hands to my head and wiggled my fingers around. She scribbled another something down. Silent tears had begun to squeeze out from the corners of my eyes. I wiped at them with the back of my hand.

“Just another few questions. What did you like to do before you got sick?”

“I liked to cook?” I squeaked.

“Well,” she said, “maybe we can get some peanut butter up here and you can spread it on some bread. Would you like that?”

“No!” I gasped. I was really crying now. “No, I would not like that!” Would that be the extent of my cooking now? “After,” as opposed to “before”?

The therapist was assessing my ability to take care of myself, but that was the least of what I wanted to be able to do. I wanted to take care of
other
people. Host dinners at my table the way I'd always done. Chop the garlic, stir the soup, slice the cake. The cake I'd baked.

I went home. My mother was with us now. She had washed the sheets and made up the bed, and I tried to sleep, but the pain in my neck was building. I ran my doctor's reassurance on a loop through my brain and breathed, and Eli hooked me up to the IV as he'd been shown. I watched the medicine drip into my body and drifted off.

 • • • 

The pain choked me awake, stabbing into my neck on both sides. It was dark now, near midnight, and I could tell that I had a fever. Eli stuck the thermometer under my tongue and we watched the numbers climb. I was back in the hospital that night.

This part was worse than anything that had happened so far. It feels crazy to say, after the hemorrhage and the surgeries, but it was. I couldn't take the whiplash, the you're-okay-you're-not-okay. Residents disagreed loudly over my bed about what was going on. Doctors said different things. The infection was raging, or it was on its way out, or the medicine was working, or it was time to try another, or my blood counts were off and I'd be put in isolation, but no, wait, my blood was fine and now they'd do an MRI. Someone wheeled me off downstairs and left me in the hallway, but no one came to get me, until a person finally stopped, and I heard him ask around to find out where I had to be. And still the fever, and the pain, so a nurse gave me a button and said push it for the morphine, and I did, but no relief, until finally, “We think you might be having a reaction. You're going off the vancomycin, and we're starting something new.”