"dear lover
i can't take the pain no more
dear lover
i pick my heart up from the floor
dear lover
i can't believe it's come to this
dear lover
give me one last painful kiss..."
"Dear Lover", Social Distortion, from the album White Light White Heat White Trash
About a month ago I posted a diary here,
(just another) love story, a diary which described in part the way in which I fell in love with and eventually married the woman who is now my wife: a diary in which I expressed my fears about her upcoming brain surgery.
My worst fears came true.
I had a bad feeling all along.
My lover, she was preternaturally brave, I'd say. She had no doubt; she believed that she'd wind up home, recuperating, withing a week or ten days.
I felt otherwise.
We're talking brain surgery here, after all.
We're talking, removing what the ears/nose/throat surgeon referred to as a "gigantic" tumor from behind her ear.
It just seemed naturally dangerous to me; something imposing and fearsome and something to be scared of.
****
Three weeks ago tonight they did the first operation. An embolization of the brain tumor, cutting off the blood supply to it. We waited for hours in the radiological e.r., waiting for our neurosurgeon to finish the jobs ahead of us. He got behind, some things ran longer than he'd expected, and I remember thinking this didn't inspire confidence, but then, it wasn't up to me, it was Lauren's body and Lauren's choice, I had to respect her wishes, and she thought she'd found the right doctor to remove the big tumor from her head.
****
We waited for hours but we kept it together; for, we WERE together. Through the long wait we laughed and talked and held hands. The nurses seemed to pick up on our vibe, they came by to talk, to rub shoulders, to express their belief that everything would turn out alright. Deep down inside I had a feeling, inescapable, that things wouldn't turn out alright, but I tried to fight it off, thinking the feeling could simply be attributed to pre-surgical nerves.
****
A couple of days after the embolization. We're sitting in a medical ICU ward. Early in the day. Lauren hands me a plastic bottle of skin cream and asks me to massage some of it into her legs, and I follow her command, but as I do so, I can feel tears running out of my eyes and down onto my cheeks. She laughs. It'll be alright, dear, she says, and I look into her beautiful cornflower blue eyes and try to send my bravest smile back at her, but I know I've failed. She sees, or senses, or smells, or whatever, my fear.
****
I calmed myself down and we talked for awhile, but then out of nowhere, she says, I guess they're not gonna let me leave me rings on for the surgeries, and she reaches toward the left hand of her ring finger and she removes her engagement ring and her wedding ring and hands them to me.
I cry when she does this.
I apologize for this, and she apologizes, she apologizes for not being as emotional as I am, one of our differences, one of the differences that we managed and lived with and incoporated into our lives.
I take the rings, the plain gold wedding band, the kind we'd always wanted, and the plain engagement ring, crushed diamonds and emeralds, she'd picked it out herself from some little jewelry shop in Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, England, in 1993. I rub the rings across the fingers of my left hand, I rub them across the wedding ring still lying on the third finger of my left hand; I weep, deeply and bitterly, as I do this. I weep, even as Lauren laughs and assures me everything will turn out alright.
I weep, because somewhere deep inside of me, a spirit whispers to me, things will not in fact turn out alright, a spirit whispers to me, the love you have dreamed of all of your life, the love you finally found with Lauren, the love to end of all loves, it is all in danger.
****
I just fucking knew it.
****
And here we sit now. It's three weeks since the first surgery, and my love, my dream, my Lauren, lies in a hospital bed not far from here, clinging to life.
She has lived these three weeks in a coma, and I have lived them as nothing short, and pardon the self-pity, but I have lived them as nothing short of hell on earth.
The embolization went OK, but after that, we went all downhill.
The surgery to remove the tumor ("benign", ironically enough, as though there is such a thing as a benign brain tumor) went all according to plan for the first fourteen, fifteen, sixteen hours. We got nothing but good updates during those hours.
But somewhere past midnight on the night of October 26th, I got a bad feeling, and not long after, I got bad news; after close to nineteen hours of surgery, the neurosurgeon emerged from the O.R. to deliver the bad news to me and my sister.
****
We sat on plastic chairs across from him, like collegiate applicants sitting across from an admissions counselor, waiting to hear why we weren't good enough...
"near the end of the surgery, as we were removing the last bits of the tumor..."
I could smell bad news coming next,
"...suddenly, significant brain swelling developed..."
oh my fucking god, my fucking god, he's going to tell me right here and now that he killed her...
"...i had to remove a piece of her cerebellum..."
both my sister and me collapsed at that point, I could feel her hand on my shoulder, as we both realized that this man, this surgeon, this butcher, had just told us that he had removed a piece of my beloved wife's brain.
"...i think she'll be OK...if she was a concert pianist i might be more concerned..."
More concerned?
Fuck YOU, I think.
She's not a concert pianist, but she is the love of my life, the woman who turned me from a loser into a winner, the woman who bore three children.
FUCK YOU, I think.
She is, in a sense, a concert pianist. She played me back into health.
****
I could go on for hours about what's happened since.
Four hours after the initial surgery, Lauren still had the ability to respond to commands; they let me in to see her at about six-thirty that morning and she reached for my hand and she stared intently into my eyes; she was trying to tell me something with her eyes, and what that was, I'll never know, but all I can tell you is this:
She looked terrified.
****
Not long after that, her right side went weak, and they took her down for a CT scan, and the scan revealed a blood clot that had slipped down into her brain stem.
I signed some paper giving them permission to attempt a surgical removal of the clot, and they let me go down into the pre-op room and hold her hand and kiss her forehead before they took her away.
****
They came up two hours later and triumphantly announced they'd gotten the whole clot; they came up an hour after that and said a new CT revealed they had missed some and they needed to go back in one more time.
****
That was two and a half weeks ago.
Since then they've debated further surgery for the clot, decided against it, put in a tracheostomy, and then had that go bad after five days; the trake rubbed against and corroded a major artery, a 99-1 shot against they told us. Can't even remember the name of the artery now, but the neurosurgeon told us that, this kind of injury is "almost always" fatal.
****
If she lives, they say, she'll have problems on the right side; she might walk with a walker, she might be confined to a wheelchair. Her speech centers and her frontal lobe, I think it is, the part that controls personality and emotions, has not been injured.
She has a brain stem injury, from the clot, and she may or may not recover from the injury; the brain is a mystery, to some extent, and they don't know if she'll recover, and they don't know to what extent she will recover.
****
We discussed this before all these things went wrong and I'm confident I'm acting on her wishes.
We harbor no illusions about a wheelchair-bound life; we know it would be hard.
But we have three kids, ages eight and three and one, and we feel like this:
if she could someday wake up from this coma to talk to us all and to give these children love they could recognize, everything else would be worth it.
****
That's the miracle we're praying for tonight: love the children could someday recognize.
If you think you can help us get there, anyway, anyhow, we ask you, please, do whatever it is you can do.
Thanks, and Peace.