Medicine

Here's my July offering for The Sun's Reader's Write section. (Mom, please send me factual edits -- I'm not sure of exact times, lengths, etc...)

I was awakened at 3:02 in the morning by my mother’s voice as it filtered through my sleep in the room we shared when I was a teenager. I wasn’t sure at first it was hers, it was gravely and hoarse and I could barely make out her words. She was on the phone, trying in vain to remain sitting up, pushing into her bed with her severely compromised right arm, falling onto her side with each attempt. She was insisting to someone that she was having a stroke. I was fifteen years old.

Half an hour later, my brother and I were sitting in the hospital emergency waiting room, not saying a word to one another. Mark, who was seventeen, was tapping his fingers on his knee and staring blankly at the TV. I was curled up on a chair, wishing I was back in bed at home, with my mom in the bed next to mine, sleeping soundly.

I couldn’t get out of my head the completely unremarkable bedtime ritual she and I had shared just five hours ago. She snuggled in her bed, me in mine, as we chatted about the upcoming weekend for a few minutes. She turned off the light and said, “Good night, honey, I love you.” I replied, “Love you, too, mom.” And we fell asleep. It was so like any other night, I couldn’t make sense of how we’d ended up here.

A doctor came in to the waiting room eventually to tell us that our mother had had a stroke, that it appeared to have ended and she was being stabilized. He urged us to go home, get some sleep, and come back in the morning. I asked if we could see my mom before leaving.

I found one of her hands through a maze of tubes and my brother found the other. Her face was puffy and her left eye fluttered open, her right eyelid sagged against her effort. She muttered a hello and smiled with half her lips. She told us that everything would be ok, but she was hardly convincing.

But ultimately, she was right. Her cognitive functioning and personality were largely unaltered, so she was able to approach her physical recovery with tenacity and determination. She was home in six weeks, walking with the aid of a walker and soon, a cane. As a single mom with three kids to support, the prescribed two-year recovery timeline wasn’t an option and she was at work again in nine months.

But, in many respects, she is just ok. Even now, eighteen years later, she experiences daily pain, the result of damaged brain cells misfiring. When I still lived at home, and it got bad, usually at night, I would massage her face where it hurt, her head in my lap. It was the best medicine I could offer her, but like any other treatment she got, it didn’t take away the pain. We’re all grateful for her resolve and will to recover, but the drugs she takes to this day serve to keep her blood thin, to prevent another stroke from happening, and to dull the pain enough so she can function. They have not healed her.

When I was twenty-one years old, six years after my mom’s stroke, one night I was squandering precious studying time during finals week flipping through channels on TV. I caught a few words of a news anchor recounting a story about a sixty-something year old man who had come to an emergency room in the midst of a debilitating stroke. I sat up straight and leaned forward. He was unable to walk or talk when he was admitted. This story was exactly the same as my mom’s. The doctors treated him with a new drug, called tPA, a clot dissolving drug, and within hours, he had recovered most of his body function. Within a week he was, more or less, fully recovered. I slumped back into the couch when the story was over and couldn’t stop the tears from coming.

If only she had had her stroke at fifty-six instead of fifty, I thought, she wouldn’t have pain all the time. She wouldn’t have lost a year of her life and income, she wouldn’t worry about having another stroke, I wouldn’t still sometimes wake at 3:02 in the morning in a panic and resist the urge to call her to make sure she’s still alive.

In medicine, as with so many things in life, I realized timing really is everything.