florida80

Diagnosis confirmed

I could hear Pat calling for help as I slowly slid to the floor. Then the room filled with intense white light. I was surrounded by people who hoisted me onto a stretcher and whisked me into a treatment room, where they inserted an IV and attached me to monitors. I could hear bleeps and beeps and people assuring me I was in good hands.

“What is happening to me?” I asked. My voice sounded like an old phonograph record spinning too slowly. The words seemed heavy and thick. I saw Pat standing in a corner, fear in her eyes.

The next thing I knew, my clothes were being removed. My pants came off. My arms rose above my head and my shirt slipped off.

“Aren’t you a lucky man?” a nurse said to me. “You’ve got five women undressing you.”

I laughed and agreed, but it was dawning on me that my movements were no longer voluntary. The lights dimmed. Pat kissed me on the forehead and departed. I was alone.

I remember nothing else about that night except a vague recollection of being shunted back and forth through a fluorescent glare, never conscious of where I was going. I had been sedated, which was a good thing, or I may have plummeted into the black hole that engulfed me. I curled up, thinking the fetal position offered me the most reliable protection against free fall.

When Pat returned in the morning, she told me the doctors had confirmed the diagnosis—I had suffered a stroke. How severe it had been, no one knew yet. It would be another 36 hours before I was told what I never, ever thought possible: that I might be paralyzed on one side of my body. Soon I would learn that not only could I not move, but when I went to form words, my tongue was heavy, my vocal cords twisted. My words were strangled.

As I lay there, the confusion was overpowering. Everything seemed so vague. So alien. Nothing made sense, no matter how hard I tried to slot a sight or sound into a compartment of my brain.

In the afternoon of the second day, a woman came into my room and said I had been assigned to a bed on the fourth floor. Pat packed up my belongings, and the porter rolled me up to the acute-care ward, past people shuffling along in nightgowns and patients in wheelchairs.

As soon as I had been transferred from the stretcher to the bed, a curtain was whipped around its track and I was partitioned off from the rest of the room. A nurse told me, “If you need assistance, just press the buzzer on the pillow. Someone will come running.”

the confusion was overpowering.Everyth ing seemed so vague. so alien.

I don’t know what kind of magician she figured I was. I couldn’t reach the button, and even if I could, I lacked the strength to press it.

I yearned to close my eyes. I could see that Pat was anxious to get home, but I think she feared she would be abandoning me. Finally, I said, “Go. Please. I need to sleep.”

My sleep was interrupted by people taking my blood pressure, my pulse, my blood. I was made to sit up and swallow several pills. When Pat arrived midmorning the next day, I woke up torn between panic and a huge sense of relief. Panic because the stark reality of what was happening was finally beginning to sink in, and relief because my most reliable connection to the outside world was seated at my elbow. She would protect me. I was certain of that.

Later, I saw a face peek around the curtain. Our daughter, Nicole. I wanted to leap out of bed and embrace her, but all I could do was lie there like a beached whale. It’s unsettling to have your children see you so vulnerable, and for a moment I felt desperate. Almost ashamed.

I had always presumed my daughter saw me as a figure of strength, as someone who would protect her. I had a sense of having let her down. Of disappointing her.

She leaned over and kissed me. “Oh, Dad,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Me, too,” I said, sounding like I was chewing on rubber bands.