A good looking kid; coming home from a football game, drunk
and high, and his buddy missed the curve.
My patient rocketed through the windshield, doing what his coach had
told him not to by leading with his head.
The EMTs found him a hundred feet from the burning car. And now here he was, laid out on a kind of
medical sacrificial alter, surrounded by his stunned parents and sobbing
girlfriend. I worked quickly,
fabricating the splints to support his hands and feet; pressing his limbs into
the hard plastic felt like molding Silly Putty into a bundt pan.
I saw him a month later on the rehab unit. His gaze was vacant but at least his eyes
moved as smoothly as dance partners. The
trach was gone, covered by an elegant little bandage secured by micropore tape;
it’s important to keep that precious, tiny hole sealed up while it heals
because maggots just love to roost in there.
I tried to edge by the empty eyed boy slouched in his wheel chair when
suddenly his hand clamped down hard on my wrist, leaving a bruise. “Ow!” I snapped and rolled my forearm down
against his thumb, breaking his grasp.
He stared at me hollowly for a moment, then closed his eyes and fell
almost immediately asleep. The
encounter left me shaken, though. It was
as though I peered into those blue eyes and could almost see stars, galaxies,
infinite space in the dark pupils.
As my patient began to rouse from his vegetative state, he
became a handful of battling demons. Querulous,
angry, frustrated with even the seemingly simple activity of drinking Coke out
of a can; that task earned me the can right in the face and a drenching. Another day he was hauled out of the rehab
room, spitting foam in an incoherent rage and masturbating furiously. Oh, that kid made me mad; I would go out
after work with my friends and just vent for hours at how frustrating this all
was and how I wasn’t getting anywhere with him.
It never occurred to me at the time that it wasn’t about my getting
anywhere. It was his journey and I was
along for the ride, like it or not.
When his words finally returned to him, it started as a
steady stream of remarkably colorful profanity that went on for hours and hours
and hours. It finally stopped when he
fell asleep in his chair, but would resume again the minute his eyelids slipped
open and that icy blue gaze looked out on the world. The speech therapist was almost at the end of
her own rope; we were sitting across the table from him when suddenly his eyes
fixed on me. It was almost as if a light
turned on, a blue laser light shining out of his head: “You.
I remember you.” The speech
therapist came to life in an instant and I eased out of the room, feeling his
eyes on me even as she was talking to him.
He left our unit shortly after that to go to a specialized
neurorehabilitation hospital downstate.
His father rolled him by my office, but I was out at a staff
meeting. When I returned, I found the
filthy and mangled splints on my desk, along with an icy cold bottle of Coke.
Life carries us in strange directions, ripples moving ever
outward from that first impact of rock into water. I left that job, took others, moved across
the country, treated hundreds of patients.
I’m terrible with remembering names; but what is even more terrible is
that I remember all of the people. I
used to joke that I should get overtime since I treated them in my dreams. But, sleeping or waking, I never forgot that
young man. It seemed like everything he
did with me in therapy seemed to strike sparks as big as lightning; he came
from the edge of death to the possibility of a new life. I wondered often what happened to him but
never thought I would see him again; patients come, are treated and are
discharged; most leave, stronger and better, but a few never make it home.
But I seem to have my own personal gravity, as I found out
last year. Standing in Safeway’s
checkout, idly flipping through the latest trash from Hollywood, and suddenly a man’s hand clamps
down on my wrist. Alarmed, I step back
and look up, ready to cold cock this guy, when I see those blue eyes and the
darkness behind them. “It’s you, isn’t
it?” he asks; I nod.
We step out of line and go get a coffee at Starbucks. He’s nervous, but determined. I hear his story, see pictures of his wife
and children, hear about his job in IT at a local aerospace company. He asks about me, and I skim over the last
twenty years in a sentence or two. I am
uncomfortable with his attempts to thank me, but he insists. “I need to say it. You saved my life.” I titter uneasily. “Dude, I’ve never saved anyone, and lost a
few along the way.” He frowns at
that. “Listen. You don’t understand. I remember.
I was falling, dropping faster and faster down this black hole when I
felt you holding my hand—putting those damn braces on. It was like someone had thrown me a rope, and
I started to climb, up, back, out of that place. I can see it just like it happened
yesterday.”
I stare at him. The
boy was in a decerebrate coma when I put the splints on; there was no way he
could remember. He sees my disbelief and
becomes a little angry. “It’s true. I came back.
You don’t have to believe me, but it saved my life.” “My friend,” I say, “you saved your own
life. Your family was praying for you,
your girlfriend was holding your hand.
That is the truth. I’m glad I
could help you as you recovered—maybe that’s where I passed you the rope.” He’s not mollified, but as we exchange
business cards and promise to get together again his mood eases; wishing each
other well, we leave by separate doors.
I don’t think I saved him that day, or any other day; I
think it was those collection of sparks from moment to moment struggles in
rehab that relit the fire of his life.
But, more than that, it was the powerful spirit of the boy that refused
to die, who put up the hand, rolled back the stone and leaped for the rope, emerging into this
bright, strong, brilliant world.
2 comments:
You are one hell of a writer and it is a pleasure to read here. Thank you.
Thank you, Aeo!
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