Fallen: A Trauma, a Marriage, and the Transformative Power of Music (10 page)

Only a few months ago I suffered back spasms so bad that it became impossible to sit or sleep or move around, and I spent my days in a clutch of shooting pain.
X
-rays showed that I had a compressed disc at
T12/L1
, caused by undiagnosed fractures in those vertebrae.

“They are very old fractures,” the doctor told me. “Can you think when you might have hurt it?”

I knew the exact moment. I had been thrown from an Appaloosa horse named Chocolate Chip mid-gallop across a field during a game of cops and robbers when I was eleven. After the fall I couldn’t move.
My back is broken,
I had thought.
My mother is going to kill me.
The shock wore off seconds later and I got up, remounted, and continued our game, but whatever damage happened during that fall was finally catching up to me. The spasms were worse during the night, and on more than one occasion I was forced to wake Simon so that he could lift me out of bed, and I would hobble to the kitchen and lean against our fridge, reading, until the pain had eased. The spasms finally stopped, but the stiffness in those muscles still hasn’t entirely gone away. It frightens me, this recent memory, saturated as it is with the absoluteness of my need for Simon. And now it is him with the crushed and dislocated discs, the severed, shattered nerves. I can’t lift him out of bed. How will I ever be strong enough now that he needs me?

This sense of how much I need Simon strikes often and without mercy: I am strangled by a kind of mental barbed wire. I confess to Emily my crippling need, how over the years of raising Eli, my life narrowed so in focus. I haven’t spent time cultivating friendships outside of our family. There was my writing work, there was Eli, and there was Simon: that was all I needed. Somehow I imagine life for Emily and Sarah in downtown Toronto is different; I imagine them surrounded by a vast network of supportive friends, but she assures me that, given the demands of work and kids, she too has reached a similar place of isolated and singular focus.

But despite my intense feelings of dependence on Simon and our relationship for meaning and connectivity, direct daily evidence of our community network—loving, resourceful, and generous—surrounds us. In such a short time, a very large group of people has mobilized. A network of rides brings Eli in and out of the hospital; salve is bought to apply to the anxiety hot spot the dog, Paloma, has developed; at our house the compost bin is emptied, the garbage taken out, and the lawn mowed. Patricia, Sully’s partner, and Joe Stanton and his girlfriend, Sue, despite needing to ready themselves for the big weekend gig at the Islands Folk Festival, are making plans for a fundraiser. Dave has contacted WorkSafe
BC
, purchased a cell phone, and secured a hotel room for me. Every day, Simon’s uncle Jer and aunt Barb take great pains to prepare a delicious evening meal for Marc and Lorna to return to after a long day at the hospital. In Toronto, where first-time home buyers Emily and Sarah were just about to move, a large group of people has arrived to clean, pack, and transport boxes. Emily connects via email to Simon’s extended family and her own community of friends, many of whom have never met Simon, and receives, every day, long-distance messages of support and promises of prayer.

“You know we’re here for the long haul,” Guido says as he draws my left arm in a small, gentle circle in the shoulder socket. “There’s a lot of people here right now, helping in the immediate crisis, but you know me and Sari and Nadia, we’re here for the long haul.”

I breathe into the sore spots of my back. It is possible, I think, that I can be stronger.

“I know it,” I say. “Thank you.”

SULLY AND MARC
sit at a table and watch a video Sully has brought of the gig he and Simon played with their band Gut Bucket Thunder a few weeks ago. It was at a local elementary school, a charity event, featuring a catered dinner and a silent auction, and Guido joined the band as a special guest. I monitored Guido’s stationary video camera throughout the night, adjusting the focus, pulling in for close-ups then panning out, readjusting the angle when the camera was knocked by the occasional elbow or hand of an enthusiastic dancer. I can’t see the computer screen, but I can hear Simon’s resonant voice singing the refrain of Jolie Holland’s “Old Fashioned Morphine.”

As much as I love Simon’s visceral rendition of this song, hearing his voice through the thin computer speakers is unbearable. I want, so badly, to hear his voice, his real voice. I want to lean into the notch of his left shoulder, the one where my head fits perfectly, and feel the warmth and strength of his body. I want him—here—now—so desperately; it is unbearable to think that this Gut Bucket Thunder gig, so randomly captured on video, might be the final record of Simon in action. I leave Sassafras to go find Lorna and Emily, who have been visiting the hospital chapel.

Of all of us, Emily is the only one strong enough to continue to sing during this time. Her high, pure voice fills the chapel with an a cappella version of an old Martha Carson spiritual. “
You can’t stand up,
” she sings, “
all by yourself. You can’t stand up alone. You need the touch of a mighty hand. You can’t stand up alone.
”

EMILY, LORNA, AND
I settle at a table on the outdoor patio at Sassafras, a safe distance from the video, which is still being played. As Lorna ends a call to her sister in Ontario, an urgent announcement comes over the hospital PA system for the Greyson family to return to
ICU
immediately, and the three of us reach for one another’s hands, struck with the sudden, unwanted knowledge of what this type of emergency call most likely means to that unknown family. Heart failure, seizure, a sudden turn for the worse—that is what an emergency call to return to the
ICU
means. Are they gathering now, this unknown family, at the bedside of someone they love while a doctor turns off a ventilator machine and they say their final good-byes? This is the moment, the emergency call, that we have collectively been anticipating, dreading, defending against all afternoon while Simon is in surgery.

But when the call comes for us, it is not urgent and the news is good: Simon has been returned to the
ICU
in stable condition. At the moment, no doctor is available to talk to us, but the surgery proceeded without complication and we are now able to visit Simon.

We make our pilgrimage back to his room in groups of two. Nothing has changed in the glass room, but there is general agreement that Simon looks more comfortable now, that he seems more settled in his body. We tell one another that the occasional shuddering movement in his shoulders is a good thing; it must be. He is fighting his way through the drugs and the pain and unconsciousness back to us. He is struggling to wake up. How could that not be a good thing?

This positive outlook is short-lived. When I return to the hospital for the overnight hours, Simon’s shoulder shudders have transformed into rigors, a type of intense shivering that is the body’s response to fever. A cooling catheter is inserted into his femoral artery at the top of his right leg, and it circulates a cold saline solution through his body to keep his temperature down. I learn that Simon has not been able to tolerate the nutritional supplement that is pumped into his stomach through a tube in his nose; his digestive system has completely shut down and will accept nothing. Nothing in, nothing out. And along with his bone-shaking shivers, he also has the hiccups, both of which contribute to a spiking
ICP
. It is over 20 mmHg, then over 25, then over 30. The external ventricular drain is open almost constantly, and the cerebrospinal fluid is distinctly colored with blood. Although the nurses continue to give him increasingly high dosages of a paralytic drug for the shivers and hiccups, every time I attempt to hold his hand or soothe his shoulder, he starts to shake. I feel that I am endangering him simply by touching his skin.

JULY 26, DAY 5

IT IS DR.
King, the serious young doctor who spoke to me on the first night, who arrives at Sassafras to update the family on the spinal surgery. He explains that the surgery went well and that the spinal cord, despite being severely damaged, was not, as they had originally thought, completely severed. Nearly, but not completely.

“Although we can’t assess him because of the coma state, we are assuming he is an
ASIA A
,” he says. “Meaning,” he continues in response to our baffled looks, “there is no sensation and no mobility below the level of injury. Which is from the waist down. But the injury to the spinal cord does not affect his ability to breathe on his own or to move his arms.”

Even though that is essentially the same prognosis he gave me on the first night, I write in my journal to Simon that this is “the first real good news we have received.” Good because the situation is not worse than we anticipated, and good because it introduces a margin of error into the doctor’s predictions. This is the small margin—of error, of hope—that I want to reside in. Not knowing, Emily and I agree, is the most positive place we can realistically be. Like me, Emily is a writer, a researcher by nature, and for both of us there is safety to be found in the gathering and sorting of information. But an earlier attempt to Google some of the unfamiliar terms—
subdural hematoma, transtentorial herniation, decerebrate posture
—was quickly aborted. It is better, we agree, not to know.

MY BROTHER, HIS
wife, Carol, and his twin three-year-old boys, Aidan and Lucas, arrive from Singapore.

“Oh, Sis,” Rob says, holding me tight. “I’m so sorry.”

They rent a hotel room downtown and join the growing contingent of folks who have commandeered a large corner of Sassafras, waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting.

THERE IS A
small pond beside our house; Paloma loves to splash in its muddy banks. At this time of year the mighty noise of the frogs fills the cathedral of the blue-black sky at night. As I walk down the
ICU
hallway, the thought of the frogs comes to me like a long-forgotten dream. The crickets are also noisy this time of year, and the birds too. Soon the cicadas will add their castanet-clacking to the summer’s song. But here, summer has disappeared; only the hum of fluorescent lights and the changing of the nurses’ shifts mark the passage of time. Time is static right up until the very moment when it races by in a kaleidoscope of nurses and doctors, in orthotic shoes and colored scrubs, pushing a stretcher, a mad, clattering migration to an operating room, winged with purposefulness. In their wake they leave a weighted hush, a palpable increase in gravity, a promise of winters that lie ahead.

As days pass, we are joined in the hallways by other families, who have come to wait out their own catastrophes. I see them leaning against walls, huddled in chairs, hanging on to one another. Although I am careful to avoid direct eye contact, with a brief glance I can predict exactly what stage they are at: they are in shock; they are in grief; they are, like us now, waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting.

STAYING GROUNDED IN
Simon’s glass room becomes, in the wake of the spinal surgery, much more challenging. I don’t need the nurses’ updates—shivers and hiccups continue, the
ICP
is still rising, Simon is still not tolerating food, the fever is too high, glucose is too low—to know the situation has become more precarious. I can feel it. I can feel Simon, more distant and scrambled; I can feel him in the room almost entirely separate from his swollen body. It is as if the battle he wages has left the confines of his body and is being fought somewhere in the sterile air above and around him. Dr. Griesdale’s clinical notes echo, in far less dramatic terms, exactly what I am feeling:

07/26/08
14:15 ICU STAFF

Will keep current management over next 24–48hrs then consider lightening sedation but this is the critical period right now.

WHEN I LEAVE
Simon’s room, I am overwhelmed with anger, a very specific, direct, and irrational anger. I am not angry, as might be expected, at myself, for not earning a decent enough wage that Simon could just focus on his music. I am not angry at the culture of construction workers or even at the larger culture, for how we teach men in the crudest terms possible that caring for the safety of their bodies is somehow unmanly. (Hard hat? Harness? Pussy!) I am not angry that I didn’t receive a phone call that might have got me to Simon faster, in his last few lucid moments. I am not even angry at the doctor who used the callously descriptive word soup to describe my lover’s—my best friend’s—brain. I am angry at the neurosurgeon with the paisley cravat, Dockers shoes, and youthful face who told me at the end of the first long night that there was room to hope. It is one of the kindest gestures a medical person has extended to me since Simon has arrived, and so the sense of its betrayal cuts deepest. I am furious.

The fabric of the day wears thin until I am clothed only in moth-eaten time. The unspooling of possible near-future events is terrible to contemplate, but what is worse are the past memories that descend with a clarity and closeness that is devastating:

Simon, returning home from work one evening when Eli is about seven. He is sad. On the road home, he saw a mama duck get clipped by a car, her ducklings scattering as she hobbled across the road. He jumped out of the car and tried to flag down an oncoming vehicle, a green Sundance full of teenagers, but they ignored him and hit the duck. Si said he could hear, could feel, the heavy death sound as she hit the asphalt. He searched for the ducklings that had dispersed into the bushes but couldn’t find a single one.

Simon, at sixteen, calling to tell me he has tried pot and my prissy response that he shouldn’t bother to meet me before the school dance, seeing as our lives are moving in such obviously different directions. Then the sense of relief three hours later when he arrives at the high school—the world has suddenly turned so boring without him—that I run across the gym and jump into his arms, a dance move we have perfected during long lunch hours at his house.