Threads

A virus is one of the most microscopic bits of existence; not really alive, but life like, small, threatening, powerful.  This is what the doctors think brought my husband's life almost to a standstill then into a mind bending tailspin.  A mosquito's proboscis, infected with some minute fragment of an unknown virus, digging into the deltoid muscle.  Then a strange rash as the virus marched up protopathic and epicritic pathways, invading hypothalumus, hippocampus, amygdala, cortex, overthrowing the seat of reason and setting his mind on fire.  A headache, malaise, fever, delirium, coma, ?death? .  The slow, deliberate clawing back on shore, somehow coming back to daylight.

I feel like a demented Penelope,  trying to spin the threads of Bill's memory back into some recognizable record of life as he drifts from memory to hallucination to awareness only to be swept away again into some dark closet full of terror.  He is pinned in a corner of his hospital room, raging at his inability to manipulate his wheelchair.  Reorient, reposition, remind; the breathing slows, the wide eyes narrow and the voice becomes calm.  Victories come in small steps.  He knows now why he is in the hospital; he demonstrates to the speech therapist complex calculus and how to compute the declination of the orbit of a spy satellite. The physical therapist is trying to get a road bike at cost.  My husband tells me of the nightmare of being drowned in blood as he remembers pulmonary hemorrhage and the rescue of intubation and I listen calmly, while screaming inside. He bitches about the hospital food (which is hideous) and refuses to eat. 

The neurologist assures me that there will be a complete recovery, and I believe him, but this virus burned through my husband's brain and extinguished almost all of the lights.  Now, thoughts blink like fireflies and find connections, slowly, tenaciously, with persistence, pulling the threads together.  It is an odyssey that I never in my wildest dreams expected to be on, but here we are, trying to figure it out and stumble through.  One foot in front of the other.  One word at a time.