I’ve never been a mother, but after a careless driver in a pickup truck runs a red light and hits my fifty-four-year-old husband on his bicycle, I think I feel something like one. In the ICU, Dave is as helpless and mysterious as a newborn. He’s reliant on machines for breath and sustenance and on nurses to catheterize and clean him. And as I watch these professionals pad about Dave’s prone body, I feel like I’m behind glass watching my preemie struggle in a neonatal unit. The admitting surgeon has told me that he doesn’t think my husband will die of his countless broken bones and his partially collapsed lung, but he can’t say what Dave’s brain injury will mean for his future. Dave may be unable to perform the most basic activities. He may be nonverbal. He may be a perpetual child. The waiting is terrible.
For the next two weeks, Dave requires a ventilator to breathe and is largely kept unconscious with medication. When he’s finally free of the machine, I chatter at his bedside but get no response. Only when his mother arrives, does Dave say, “Hi Mom,” then nothing more.
All day I wonder if my husband of twenty-six years recognizes me. Finally, long after his mother has left, I can’t take it anymore. “Do you know who I am?” I ask.
Dave looks at me through the slit of his left eyelid. “You’re Pookie.”
“Yes!” I laugh with relief. “You call me that, but most people call me Leslie, and I’m your wife.”
At home, I tell myself that I was silly for thinking that Dave might not remember me, but the next morning when I quiz him on photos of family members, he’s unable to regularly identify his siblings’ spouses or children. When I show him a picture of the tortoiseshell cat that practically lived on his lap for seventeen years, the cat whose trill we used to mimic for our secret greeting, he only says that she is a cat or an “at.” The accident has given Dave a speech impediment. He has trouble pronouncing Cs and Ks and Js, and his voice is reedy and childlike. Behind a bright mommy smile, I hide my impulse to cry.
Yet I soon realize that Dave’s inability to recognize his favorite pet is the least problematic aspect of his traumatic amnesia. The worst of it is that he can’t remember he’s wounded. This becomes particularly apparent once he is moved from the ICU to the step-up ward. There, Dave’s less sedated and monitored mostly on camera. Within minutes of my arrival to his new room, he tries to get out of bed. I hold him back and emulate the medical staff, who continually orient him by repeating the details of his accident. “You’re in the hospital. You were run over by a truck. You’re healing.”
Dave nods, but a moment later he tries to pull the feeding tube out of his nose. “Don’t do that,” I tell him. “It will hurt if you pull too hard.” As he takes his hand down from his nose, his eyes are attracted to the sensor that glows ET-like on the pad of his left pointer finger. He tries to peel it off. “Leave that alone,” I say. Soon his hand is messing around under his sheets. He’s attempting to remove his condom catheter. “Stop it!” My voice is loud in the quiet room.
The TV is on but muted, and I can’t find the remote. I stare at the screen stupefied. I haven’t slept properly since the accident. I watch the people on the reality show cutting down trees and bouncing along on snowmobiles, chopping and careening their way toward brain damage. When an injured recluse is hauled out of the wilderness on a human-drawn sledge, I look at Dave to see if he’s disturbed, but he’s not even watching the show. He’s looking at me with the expression of a sly toddler. He’s inched one leg over the edge of the bed as if he’s about to make a break for it. “Don’t do that,” I say. “You’re in the hospital. You’re wounded. It will hurt you if you get out of bed.”
His face says that he’s only just hearing this news. It dawns on me that in his current state, Dave is like a toddler. In each new moment, the world is fresh for him. In response, I become like a mother, keeping my eyes on him, alert to every danger.
At noon, Dave nods off, but almost as soon as his good eye flutters closed, a respiratory therapist wheels a noisy cart into the room. Although the surgeons took the extreme measure of plating Dave’s broken ribs, they’re still worried about his breathing, so the RT straps him into a shake vest. It inflates around Dave’s chest and violently vibrates his entire body. I worry about shaken baby syndrome, but Dave looks as thrilled by the experience as by a roller coaster ride. After the RT has left, Dave’s brow furrows. He says, “I need to…”
“Shit or piss?” I ask. The blunt words sound odd in the sanitized setting of the hospital, but since we’ve had no children, Dave and I have never used euphemisms. I refuse to infantilize our vocabulary now. Yet Dave remains tongue tied. I hold up the urine-filled line of his catheter bag. “If you need to pee, just do it.” When he doesn’t answer, I call in some nurses, who manage to slide a bed pan under him just in time.
Days go by, but Dave’s memory doesn’t return, and he continues to try to get out of bed. The hospital assigns a rotating group of nurses’ aides to watch him around the clock. The presence of these women—they are all women—feels odd to me. Dave and I are used to being alone with one another, and now, the most private bits of our lives, certainly the most private bits of my husband’s body, are on full view. Disinhibited by the brain injury, Dave often hikes up his hospital gown, exposing his genitals. There’s no sexual intent behind his flashing, and none of the CNAs seem disturbed by this display. Nonetheless, I’m relieved when the phase eventually passes.
Days later, however, Dave develops another worrying habit. When I’m home during the evenings, he begins to telephone me and ask, “Where are you? Why aren’t you here?” Though he seems to accept it when I tell him that I will see him in a few hours, he sounds so plaintive and weak, so like a sick child, that I sob as soon as we hang up. Yet, in just a few days these calls abruptly stop. It’s as if he’s relearned object permanence overnight.
There are other signs that Dave is recovering. He’s not the reader of news and literary fiction that he used to be, nor is he the computer scientist, but he can read and tell time, although he forgets what he read and what time it is within seconds. He can do simple math with coins so long as he is told over and over again what nickels and dimes are worth. And, at last, when one sweet CNA asks him what happened to him, he’s able to explain, “I’m told that I was smooshed by a truck.” Smooshed! I certainly never used that word, but I’m so elated to hear that my husband knows what has happened to him that I rejoice in the babytalk.
After three weeks, the staff at the trauma hospital begin to talk of releasing Dave to a rehab facility. When I learn that there is a prestigious brain and spinal injury hospital eighty miles from our home, I set aside my lifelong dread of driving and lobby for Dave to be admitted there. Even when Dave’s primary surgeon warns me that the rehab hospital’s selection process favors younger patients, I’m not discouraged. Though I understand that young brains are more plastic and quicker to heal, I attempt to prove that Dave is worthy of an exception. I commandeer the white board in Dave’s room to list family members who are willing to help in his recovery. I write down his alma maters and the university work he does designing software models of land use. When I am interviewed by the rehab hospital staff, I tell them that I will be happy to leave our home to go live in the facility’s family housing five days a week. I swear that I will regularly attend Dave’s appointments, and on the rare days when I cannot be there, I promise that Dave’s family will take over. When I learn that Dave will be admitted to the illustrious hospital, I feel as proud as a mother when her child gets accepted into a highly competitive school.
On the morning Dave’s feeding tube is removed, he is transferred to the brain injury hospital. I arrange for friends to look after our house and our cat. I pack one bag for me and another for Dave, and I wave good-bye to my garden. Years ago, I’d thought my neighbor hadn’t loved her garden when she’d excused its demise by gesturing at her dog and her newborn child and said, “I just couldn’t look after one more living thing,” but now I understand. Sometimes, love must be triaged.
As I drive, white-knuckled, along the highway perilous with construction and traffic to the big city, hope surges through me. I imagine the leaps and bounds Dave will make thanks to the hospital’s intense rehabilitation schedule. He will attend occupational, speech, and physical therapy sessions five days a week as well as regular appointments with a medical doctor and a neuropsychologist.
But on my first night in the apartment next door to the hospital, my phone rings me awake. Dave has forgotten that he is wounded and tried to get out of bed. Heart pounding, I race from my room to find him in his bed wearing a neck brace. He hasn’t had a brace like that since the day of his accident. I’m in despair. Progress feels like an illusion.
It’s early in the morning, but nevertheless, the impact of Dave’s tumble needs to be assessed by an immediate MRI. Since he can’t remember to stay still inside the scanner, he’s sedated for the procedure. The images show that his fall did him no damage, and the neck brace is removed. Yet when he is returned to his room, still groggy from the drugs, he’s put in a new bed. It’s the height of a crib and covered by a boxy mesh tent in jaunty white and green. It bears an uncomfortable resemblance to a child’s playpen. I’m told that I must zip and lock Dave into the bed whenever I help him into it. So, our first full day at the new hospital ends with me kissing my husband goodnight then locking him into the tent.
When I get back to my apartment, I pull a beer out of the fridge. The bottle in my hand reminds me of the time Dave and I encountered a friend at a liquor store. He and his wife had just adopted a baby, and he looked exhausted. Still, he held up the bottle of booze he’d bought and said, “Daddy needs a bottle.” Mommy needs a bottle I think as I chug the beer down.
As the week progresses, Dave is given a wheelchair, and I am given a crash course in caring for my six-foot-two charge. Toileting, bathing, and feeding Dave are all complicated operations. At night, he wears a condom catheter, but during the day, he wears adult diapers and uses the toilet. I am taught to transfer him from his bed to the chair to the toilet and back again. I position the wheelchair and lock it in place. I undo the seat belts on the chair. One is like a belt on an airplane. The other requires a key. I then wedge a polished board under one of his butt cheeks and use my hands to guide him in his slide across the board from bed to chair to toilet from toilet to chair to bed.
I am taught to help Dave wash his hands, clean his face, and brush his teeth. Both of his occipital lobes were damaged in the crash, and he has suffered some damage to his right cranial nerves. It is essential that his limited eyesight be preserved, so I wash his eyelashes with baby shampoo to discourage infections. I use a different cloth for each eye.
Eventually, I learn to give him a shower. I put surgical gloves over my tennis shoes to keep them dry and position him on the shower bench so that he can hold onto a grab bar and briefly stand on his one good leg while I wash and dry his behind, mopping up all the water on the floor of the shower before I help him dress.
The accident damaged Dave’s hippocampus, giving him the speech impediment and making it difficult for him to safely chew and swallow normal food. At the trauma hospital, when Dave was being weaned off the feeding tube, I was taught to mix his water and juice with thickener, and his meals were neon-colored, gelatinous masses. At the rehab hospital, the speech therapists watch Dave eat foods of various textures. They teach him to clean food from the pockets in his mouth with his tongue and to cough. They promise him that he will be able to eat anything he wants soon. But my always thin and now emaciated husband seems uninterested in this news. Perhaps it is because he’s lost the concept of time. Dave can’t correctly give the day, the month, or the year. Like a young child, he exists only in the present. In any case, it may be for the best that he doesn’t take the word soon too seriously, for I soon discover that the speech therapists are using the term in the loose way that parents do. They’re sure it will happen, but when is unclear. […]
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Leslie Patterson’s essays and short stories explore medicine and art. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre and Bellevue Literary Review. A retired public librarian and technical writer, Patterson lives with her husband and two cats in Fort Collins, Colorado.