Fallen: A Trauma, a Marriage, and the Transformative Power of Music (17 page)

None of us know how to respond. Heartsick, I realize we are all going to have to experience the loss of his legs many times over before it truly sinks in.

“A stretcher is best for today,” I say.

“Okay,” Simon agrees, without complaint.

“Maybe we’ll check out crutches at a later date,” I say.

“Okay,” he says. Again with no complaint or resistance. It is unlike Simon to be quietly compliant. I wonder if it is the head injury that makes him so mild and even-tempered. Or is it some combination of shock and self-preservation? An internal safeguarding mechanism? One that insists on tranquility and moderation and that allows him to grasp the extent of his injuries in manageable increments.

MARC UPDATES THE
log book with the news of Simon’s transfer out of Step-Down, writing that during the move “Si was full of humor and vitality.” I love this entry because that is what I see most in Simon too—his humor and vitality—though I don’t think it is readily apparent to the world at large.

Often Simon can stay awake for no longer than ten or fifteen minutes at a time. The only part of his body with voluntary movement is his right hand. He is now breathing on his own, but the trach is left open in case that suddenly changes. The suctioning of his lungs stimulates a cough, but it is weak and he cannot swallow. His head lies on the pillow inclined to the right, and only with enormous effort can he roll it toward his body’s midline. He is unable to move his eyes to the left, past that midline point. At its best, his voice is clear but flat and robotic, and it takes a titanic effort to move enough air to create an audible sound with the trach still in. Most often, Si’s previously booming voice whistles and croaks out a thin, gravelly noise. The left side of his face droops, and there are large and mushy pressure wounds on the back of his head and his right foot. Because he is still fighting recurring bouts of pneumonia and various internal infections, his fever rises in the late afternoon and then he becomes even more sleepy and disoriented. Still, there isn’t a more apt phrase than “full of humor and vitality” to describe his disposition.

SIMON’S NEW ROOM
on the spine ward is large and single occupancy, and for the first time he is allowed plants and flower arrangements. Lorna buys a potted jasmine to sit on the windowsill, its sweet fragrance an antidote to the antiseptic smells of the hospital. Beyond its white petals and waxy green leaves, the view from the window overlooks the emergency helicopter landing pad.

“Isn’t it cool to see the helicopters?” a student nurse asks Simon. He is young and pleasant, eager for feedback from both Simon and me, but the tone of his voice—verging on cutesy and condescending—grates. A red-hot filament of fury sparks and I grip the guardrail on Simon’s bed, counting to three before I speak.

“Maybe not so cool when you’re rushed here in one,” I say, pleased to see the look of apologetic horror cross his face.

“Whatever,” Simon mouths, shrugging his right shoulder.

I am the one, not Simon, traumatized by the comings and goings of the helicopter, each arrival or departure intimating a potential catastrophic injury. Each time the helicopter lands, I think some devastated family from Kamloops or Kelowna or Prince George is about to embark on a journey similar to ours. It is overwhelming, all this potential hurt, and I wonder how the doctors, nurses, and rehab staff face it every day. Simon, however, finds the helicopters mildly interesting; more disturbing to him is the high-pitched beeping of the
IV
fluid line whenever the tubing kinks, which is often. The
IV
inserts into Simon’s right hand, which, as the only mobile part of his body, is often in ceaseless motion, even while he sleeps—as if that one limb serves as a repository for all the vast amounts of energy of his pre-accident body. The insistent squawk of the alarm is loud enough to drag him, disoriented and dozy, from a deep sleep during the night. When he wakes, I explain to him where he is as I unkink and restart the fluid line. I repeatedly suggest that his right arm should try to relax along with the rest of his body.

“Impossible,” he replies one night. “It is busy playing a John Hiatt song. That arm has its own presence.”

During the long nights when Simon is disoriented or drifting off to sleep, I repeat the message I have been delivering since his time in the
ICU
. That his injuries are serious but that he is stable. That he is safe. That he is strong. That we will be patient and let the swelling subside. That he should trust his body and love his body because his body is amazing. That his body knows exactly what to do. I believe what I say, but even more I believe in believing this: I want Simon to feel positive and empowered on a bone-deep, cellular level. This approach, I believe, will give him the best possible chance for recovery.

“Thank you,” he says one night. “I’m going to set up Redroofs Road for you, Kara, so it will go with the flow of your bones.”

And another night: “I know, babe, I know. I need a mystery gift for you, or whoever is dealing with the potatoes.”

And each night I scribble down all his beautiful nonsense, each message a lyrical and musical map that gives me insight into the way that Simon is rebuilding his brain.

He is actively rebuilding, a process he clearly articulates when a speech therapist questions him about his ability to think, to find and to speak a specific word. Did he find it difficult? Was the word he thought the one he eventually spoke, or was it a different one?

“It’s like I have an idea,” Simon replies in his slow, robo-trach voice, “but I can’t just spit it out. I can’t just go A to B. I need to take the long walk around the park to find all the words I need.”

“Well,” the speech therapist says, “if you are doing that on your own, then you don’t need me.”

MARC AND LORNA
and I maintain our established routine: I spend the nights at the hospital; they spend the days while I nap in the hotel room and start to reorient myself to the real world of paying bills, balancing budgets, and planning for our still very uncertain future. Grade 11 starts for Eli in a few short weeks. Simon is getting stronger, meaning that, sometime within the next year, we will return to the coast. Our Hobbit house on Redroofs Road won’t accommodate a wheelchair, so we will need a new place to live.

Simon begins the hard work of learning how to swallow and to reawaken his left hand. We start to take inventory of his injuries, addressing some of the previously overlooked non-life-threatening issues. His ear canals need to be cleaned of the dried blood that has accumulated, and his hearing, especially in the right ear, needs to be tested, but for this to happen he first needs to build up his tolerance for sitting in an electric wheelchair from the ten minutes he can now manage to at least the hour it will take to go to the Ear, Nose and Throat Clinic at the Diamond Centre, adjacent to the hospital. He has no sense of smell. This could be due to nerve damage, or perhaps damage to the olfactory receptors in the cerebral cortex. The doctors refer to Simon’s left-side neglect as a stroke, explaining that it is most likely caused by something called Kernohan’s notch phenomenon. At the time of the accident, the bleeding in the left side of Simon’s temporal lobe shifted his brain so far down and to the right that a portion of the right side of the brain stem called the cerebral peduncle was pressed against the hard structures of the skull, creating a notch, an area of damaged tissue. The right cerebral peduncle contains motor fibers that cross over to the left side, and damage to these motor fibers results in hemiplegia, or left-side paralysis. These fibers are so densely packed in the brain stem that even a slight amount of damage can cause catastrophic results. Brain stem injuries are more difficult to recover from, though it is not impossible for neurons to reroute. Over time, six months to a year, Simon might recover some hand movement. Or he might not.

“It’s hard to say exactly,” the doctor summarizes, a phrase we hear often.

Each day, in the morning and late afternoon, Marc, Lorna, Simon, and I regroup for a debriefing on how the day has gone. After so many days of waiting, waiting, waiting, it is a relief to finally have something to do.

Such relief during these days! And still so much fear. Such joy and such sorrow. Never in my life have such extremes of emotions so naturally coexisted. Like unruly children, they trip over each other’s heels, finish one another’s sentences. Simon is alive, yes, but malnourished, dehydrated, paralyzed, too weak to move. Alive, yes, but with a mushy, weeping wound on the back of his head, a skull cracked open like Humpty Dumpty, and no ability to control his bowels or bladder. Alive, yes, but what kind of life lies ahead?

The thought of our future life is impossibly daunting. The future, like hope only a short while ago, is too precious a commodity. Right now, moment by moment, I am capable only of facing the most imminent challenges of the day. It is too big, too overwhelming, to think about the future.

ONE DAY WHILE
my brother is visiting, Simon asks him how long we are staying in Powell River (the town where my mother lived) while simultaneously acknowledging that he is looking at the Vancouver skyline. Simon is awake, seemingly lucid, and yet disoriented. He acknowledges the inconsistency in his logic when it is pointed out, saying, “It’s weird. I had it in my mind we were in Powell River.” This episode causes a jolt of panic for Lorna, but I am not too concerned; I believe that somehow his present confusion relates to the confusion he experienced at the time of his accident. He doesn’t remember the accident or the helicopter, but one of his earliest written questions was “Why am I alone riding up Coast.” He had been losing consciousness as Emergency workers loaded him into the Air Evac, and I believe that somehow he thought he was being taken to Powell River, north of Halfmoon Bay. I had spent much of the previous year in Powell River, at the hospital with my mother for her chemotherapy treatments. Simon, even as he was losing consciousness, was planning to meet me there.

Most of the time Simon is rooted in the world we were living in before the accident—a world that now feels lost to me. Did the Precious Littles play the Islands Folk Festival? Did someone fill in on guitar? How did the gig go? How are we going to get to Chilliwack in two weeks for Eli’s annual soccer tournament? Where will we stay? Could I call Dave on his behalf? He arranged to buy a piano from Dave for my birthday—sorry to spoil the surprise!—and I need to call Dave and tell him we still want it but won’t be able to pick it up right away. When Ray, the owner of StraitSound recording studio, comes to visit, Simon emerges from his dozy state and immediately apologizes for not showing up for the recording work they had booked for that week.

“I’m not going to be able to make it, man,” Simon croaks through his trach hole. “Do you have someone else you can call?”

“That’s okay, Si,” Ray says. He brushes errant tears from the corner of his eyes. “I’m taking a little time off work right now.”

Simon smiles. “Me too,” he says.

WITH THE HELP
of Karen, Simon’s pragmatic and personable occupational therapist, we set up Simon’s room to help him orient toward his left side, moving the visitor’s chair, my sleeping cot, and the boom box to his left. I encourage Simon to hold a washcloth in his left hand, and with my hand over his hand, help him make small cleaning swipes over his chest and face. When he is relaxing, we all spend hours massaging that left hand, manipulating the wrist and fingers, and I place rolled-up washcloths underneath his palm while he sleeps to encourage his clenched and curled fingers to release and straighten. Small, beautiful movements gradually begin to return to his hand, arm, and shoulder.

“
SUCH A GENTLE
and yet such a strong man,” Nurse Zola says to me one day as we walk down the hall toward Simon’s room together.

“Yes,” I say, and start crying, as I often do. Outside Simon’s room, tears can come quickly and unannounced, shocking in their intensity and force. I have never cried easily, but now it seems I cannot stop. I am snotty and slosh full of tears, tears that are a confused expression of the currents of sad-happy, relief-regret, hope-despair that constantly churn my insides. Most often I don’t even know why I am crying, but I do know now. Zola has described the essence of Simon. What, of all his many excellent attributes, I love the most: the ease with which he embodies seemingly contradictory traits. He is gentle and strong. Fierce and playful. That this, even in his compromised state, is what shines through to a relative stranger fills me with a kind of devastating happiness, an emotion too immense to put into words. I can only fall into it and allow it to momentarily swallow me. I huddle against the wall outside Simon’s room and bawl like a baby, choking and huffing for air while Zola gives him a shave, finally ridding him of his hideously overgrown beard. When the storm passes, I go back to the room. Simon smiles from the bed with newly shaved head and face—a wide-open grin. Without the beard, the amount of weight he has lost is more evident, as is the large area of his head where, underneath the skin, the skull bone is absent. Still, without the beard he easily looks ten years younger.

“You’re rocking the sexy monk look,” I say.

Zola winks and says, “I’ll leave you two alone.”

Zola has worked with spinal cord patients in many countries and is a font of information. She and Simon establish an immediate rapport. Simon actively works at cultivating good relationships with all the nursing staff. Zola is a favorite, as is Corrine, a Jamaican national, who, the day when Usain Bolt obliterates the men’s 100-meter track record, spends a little extra time in Simon’s room celebrating.

“He was barely trying,” Simon crows from his bed.

“That man is living proof,” Corrine sings, “that Jesus loves Jamaicans!”

Often, though, when new nurses arrive at the beginning of their shift, they address me, asking questions about how
he
is doing. I rarely have to redirect them to ask Simon himself, however, as Simon, if he is awake, will interject: