Rae’s friend Cecilia visited her Wednesday morning, before the rest of us troops arrived. All her life, my Mom’s energy has been highest first thing in the morning, just after sunrise. (Unless I’m camping, this is when I’m still asleep.) Cecilia was excited, and still was a day later, to see Rae’s eyes were open, and this was without the usual prompting from anyone. This is a small, huge, encouraging step.
She’s not only hanging in there but improving, too. But because I’m tired of all this, and impatient, and didn’t expect this sort of Spanish Inquisition (no one expects The Spanish Inquisition), I’m simultaneously thinking like some doctors: not wanting to give you all “false hope.” We—and by “we” I mean Rae—also have a long way to go yet, just to get back to where we started over two weeks, before the surgeries to remove her brain tumor. And then again—isn’t this confusing?—unlike the doctors I think, “Fuck it; what the hell do I have to lose? I might as well enjoy having hope and keep practicing being positive.”
From noon on, after her higher-energy mornings, she’s still mostly sleeping, she can only speak a few raspy, whispered words. Even a non-stop yakker like Rae will lose her voice if it’s not used in 16 days. And since she’s not awake she’s still being fed through a damned tube. Oh damned tube, I thank you for keeping my Mom alive. I wish I could find more humor—i.e., comic relief–in the tube and its attached bag ‘o liquid maltodextrin being the most effective diet plan of Rae’s life.
My brother Andy and sister-in-law Karen and our great neurologist Dr. McCarthy, all at the hospital Wednesday unanimously agree she’s improved, doing her best since her second surgery which removed clotted blood from her brain. Now she has more energy, her CT scans are clear, she’s having an easier time breathing and able to cough through the congestion still lingering in her lungs. When we rouse her to fuller—note, never full—consciousness, she aces the neuro exams, responding to “commands” like “show 2 fingers” and other “tests” we use to prove her brain is still functioning and even coming back on line.
Yet I can’t help wanting a BIG, DRAMATIC improvement like in the movies. You know the one. The heroine, comatose for 23 years opens her eyes and groggily says, “Oh…where am I?…Jack, Andy…is that you?…How long have I been out?…”
Oh if it only it were so. Well it ain’t.
Rae has proved she’s tough though, and not done with her life yet. A two weeks-plus hospitalization is tough on the body, yet she’s waking up, not slipping away, and to me this proves she wants to be in the game. If only she’d wake up more—“where am I?…”—she’d be so much more connected to us, and you, and then REALLY feel our pull to revive. It’s your choice to fight or not, but if you’re gonna do this, Ma, then let’s get it on.
And still I know she’ll do this in her own way, in her own time, and she could die today or tomorrow. I am learning from this: each time I step outside the hospital after visiting I feel the warmth of the sun on my face more fully. I smell the freshness of the open air compared with a building interior. I see more clearly trees swaying in the wind. I am more appreciative, in those first moments outside a building filled with people struggling to get up and out to where I walk effortlessly, for being alive and part of being alive on this Earth.
With love for it all,
Jack
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