No Weapon Formed (Boaz Brown) (20 page)

I followed the nurse beyond
the white swinging double doors, to Stelson’s bedside. He was upright, wearing
a light blue hospital gown. The miniscule upturn of his lips nearly crushed my
decidedly confident demeanor.

Words would have betrayed me.
I pecked his forehead with my lips and concentrated on breathing normally.

“Mrs. Brown, your husband has
asked that you be present as we discuss the findings. I think that’s best,
especially considering this whole episode may be foggy for him.”

“I understand.”

Dr. Coyle sat down on his
stool and turned on both his laptop and a monitor at the foot of Stelson’s
hospital bed.

The days of doctors slapping
X-rays and scanned results against luminescent panels must have passed without
me knowing.
All this technology—he’d better have an answer.

“I need to forewarn you.
These findings are…concerning,” he prefaced.

Stelson slipped his hand into
mine and squeezed once. I reciprocated, taking it further by lacing our fingers
together. Whatever the doctor said, we’d have to face it together. Period.

“The scan revealed old
lesions.”

“Lesions?” I gasped.

“Yes, but they were old. Whatever
you’ve got, you’ve had for a while or you’re experiencing a relapse.”

“I’ve never been this sick.”

“I have a few questions for
you, Mr. Brown.” Dr. Coyle swiveled the laptop toward himself and pressed a few
buttons. “In addition to the headaches, have you experienced numbness in your
hands or feet?”

I was relieved to hear him
ask questions that sounded foreign.

Until Stelson answered,
“Yes.”

What?!

The doctor continued,
“Dizziness, off-balance?”

“Yes.”

I choked Stelson’s hand. He
wriggled out of my grasp and rested the hand on top of the white linens.

“Fatigue?”

“Yes.”

“Difficulty breathing?”

“No.”

Thank God for one no! Dr. Coyle
was going to have to put me on a stretcher in a minute. Why was my husband
hiding all these symptoms from me?

“Blurred vision?”

“Yes.”

The doctor took off his
glasses and got busy clicking and scrolling away.

Stelson avoided my glare,
keeping his eyes on the doctor alone.

“Well, there’s good news and
bad news. The good news is, now that we know you have lesions on your brain, we
can narrow this down to a specific category. The bad news is, the types of
syndromes and diseases we’re likely dealing with can bring life-changing,
life-long challenges.”

Immediately, something inside
me rejected this report. Not because I didn’t want to believe it, but because the
Witness inside said the doctor wasn’t accurate. The same Witness, the Holy
Spirit, had spoken when Stelson’s headaches started. I knew then that we
weren’t dealing with migraines, just as I knew when the doctor was speaking
that Stelson’s problem, while serious, was not in line with the doctor’s
suggestion.

“What kinds of diseases?”
Stelson asked.

I didn’t want to hear the
answer and from the way Dr. Coyle rolled his head to the left, he didn’t want
to say too much. “There are quite a few.”

“Name one,” Stelson pushed.

“Well…there’s MS, cerebral
infarction, systemic lupus, epilepsy…it’s too early to tell. We’re going to
keep you here overnight as a precaution. I recommend you work closely with your
regular doctor to chase this down.”

“Will do,” Stelson agreed.

Dr. Coyle reattached his
glasses to his face and patted Stelson on the shoulder. “Are you having any
discomfort now?”

“No.”

“Great. I’ll check in with
you again tomorrow morning.”

“Thank you.”

Dr. Coyle left the room.

I threw my hands in the air.
They landed on my hips. I took a deep breath and tried my best to address
Stelson without raising his blood pressure. “What was that?”

He rocked his head left and
right on the pillow. “The truth.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you
had all these other symptoms?”

“If this guy’s a doctor and
he can’t help me, why would I tell you?”

“Because I’m your wife.
Because we’re here for each other.”

“Are we?” he questioned. “The
sicker I get, the more we fight. Telling you would only make you worry more,
which makes you more irritable.”

I’m the irritable one?
Thank God I caught the accusation before
it escaped my mouth. Lord knows we didn’t need another argument.

We did the only thing I knew
to do: pray.

I texted Peaches and asked
her and Quinn to visit with Stelson. We all prayed again, then I walked with
Peaches and Quinn to the elevator. Monty pressed the ‘down’ button and the door
chimed almost immediately. “I’ll go pull the car around so Quinn won’t have to
hop around so much.”

“Thanks for coming, Monty,” I
said.

“You got it. See you later,
Shondra. I’ll text you in a few. Y’all can meet me at the emergency entrance,
Peaches.”

Monty boarded the elevator.

“Momma says don’t worry about
the kids,” Peaches said. “Focus on Stelson.”

I reached in my purse,
searching for my wallet. “Here, let me give you something in case we end up
staying longer and Zoe runs out of milk.”

“Girl, please. We got this.
Plus, you know Momma’s already whipped up mashed potatoes. Zoe will not go
hungry.”

“Please thank her for me
tonight,” I begged.

“Do you need anything before
we go?” Peaches offered.

“No. You being here was more
than enough. I’m a basket case right now. I feel like I’m just going through
the motions,” I confessed to them as much as myself. “Stelson has been so…not
himself lately. And I’ve been fussing at him, thinking he needed to will
himself to snap out of it. I didn’t know he was battling something so
insidious. I can’t imagine how much pain he was in.
Lesions
on his
brain. That’s like…
lesions
.”

“He was definitely in a lot
of pain,” Quinn seconded.

Confused, I asked, “What? How
did you know?”

Quinn glanced at Peaches. She
nodded. Obviously, they knew something I didn’t.

“Tonight, while you two were
gone, Stelson asked me if I had any leftover pain medication from my surgery.
Said he’d even pay me for them.”

God, he’s serious!

“I was going to call you
later and tell you, but then
this
happened,” Peaches said.

“Quinn, I’m so sorry—”

“No need to apologize,
Shondra. Stelson’s my brother in Christ, but he has flesh. No telling what any
of us might do under the wrong circumstances.”

As an educator, I always had
the greatest respect for doctors, partly because they stayed in school so long.
And yet, there we were, surrounded by all this computerization and a doctor
who’d studied and practiced long enough to handle critical patients in a major
hospital, and we walked out of there Christmas day basically with a note
telling us to go see
another
doctor.

This is ridiculous
.

With Stelson pretty much
resting in bed the rest of the day, Daddy and Jonathan came to our house so
Seth could have some kind of semblance of a Christmas surrounded by family and
friends.

I noticed something about my
father while he was in our living room: He wasn’t nearly as bold and abrasive
when he wasn’t in his own house. He spoke to Stelson cordially and minded his
manners. Held his tongue quite well, actually. Perhaps this was something he’d
learned to do back in the ‘60s, when he’d perfected his public persona for
mixed company.

Whatever the reason, I was
thankful. He and Jonathan assembled Seth’s Big Wheel and took him outside to
test it despite the cool temperatures.

Momma Miller must have
coddled Zoe nonstop because she was clingier than usual, not wanting to be
contained by her swing or the playpen. I searched my closet full of baby gifts
and produced a harness that I hadn’t ever used. I strapped her in it, slung her
on my back, and she was full of peace and joy facing the world from five feet
off the ground.

This new perspective, as well
as me singing softly to her, kept her entertained while I finished our
Christmas dinner.

Stelson sat up in bed and
laughed when he saw Zoe’s newfound orientation. “Must be nice.”

“I guess so.”

I set his lemonade and plate
of food on the nightstand. Turkey, dressing, sweet potatoes and green beans,
though not nearly as much as he would normally eat. “Need anything else?”

“You,” he said tenderly,
caressing my arm.

I froze. My heart had grown
numb from its survival-mode default position on top of the callouses formed by
weeks of abrasive comments.

He asked, “Can you come and
sit with me for a while if you have time later?”

“Why?”

“Because I’m sorry. About
everything. I know you deserve better, but I didn’t have it to give. I still
don’t. And I’m afraid maybe I won’t ever be able to love you and the kids with
all of me again.”

“Don’t say that, Stelson.” I
left the room so he wouldn’t see me crying.

If this wasn’t temporary, I
wasn’t sure I could survive. A sick husband? Two kids? Hustling back to work so
I could support all four of us in between what would probably be countless
doctor visits? What if he had another seizure? What if he went to jail for
buying pain meds on the streets?

If we were elderly, if we
were both retired with no kids at home so we could focus on one another that would
be different. No one imagines spending a good chunk of their lives as a
caregiver for a spouse. At our age, we were supposed to be vibrant and mobile
and hopeful. Not a wife serving her husband Christmas dinner in bed at six
o’clock in the evening because he was too fatigued to join his family at the
table.

You couldn’t tell me this was
the good, hopeful, prosperous plan of God for our lives.

Peaches and Quinn would only
be in town through the twenty-eighth. I wanted to spend time with her, but I couldn’t
very well ditch my husband to go hang with my best friend. She did the next
best thing by coming over to our house the day before they left.

She must have known I was
completely spent. She kept the kids occupied while I took a bath. Helped me get
them in bed, then helped me catch up on cleaning and laundry—something
only the closest of friends would do. And then she ordered me to turn on my
laptop. “We are going online and we are going to find out for sure what’s wrong
with Stelson,” she declared.

“The doctors can’t—”

She gave me the hand. “Don’t
get me wrong, I have the utmost respect for anybody who stayed in school long
enough to rack up two hundred thousand dollars in student loans. But I’m
telling you, our country’s medical system was hijacked when the Rockefellers
started funding certain medical schools.”

I glanced toward the ceiling.
“Umm…what difference does it make who the Rockefellers donated to?”

She clicked her cheek. “They
only donated to medical schools they deemed
certified
,” she held up
finger-quotes. “And the only
certified
schools were the ones that would
teach doctors to recommend pharmaceuticals using their supplies. Of course, the
more patentable drugs prescribed, the more money comes in. Everybody in the
loop gets paid big time.”

“But doesn’t the patent
process and the FDA ensure that drugs—”

I couldn’t even complete the
sentence before Peaches gave me the
be-for-real
look and said, “Don’t
drink the red Kool-Aid. Rockefeller actually
created
the American
Medical Association despite the fact that his personal doctor practiced
homeopathic medicine. Rockefeller lived to a ripe old age of 97 while the rest
of us are too blind to recognize that most of what we need for healing is
already available in the raw. I mean, if you get hit by a bus, by all means go
to the hospital. But a lot of what ails us is curable naturally.”

“So you’re telling me that
there’s stuff growing on trees that can heal just as well as what doctors can
prescribe? I mean, I know I’ve filled plenty of prescriptions that actually
helped me.”

“First of all, if
prescription drugs actually healed, the whole system would collapse. Really,
any large-scale man-made system is going to have corruption. You’re an
educator. You know it’s not right that every child in Texas has to pass a test
in order to graduate, right?”

“Agreed.”

“And you said yourself that,
often, principals get hired and fired based on who they know rather than how
well they can run a school, right?”

“Yes.”

“Same thing with the field of
medicine. Doesn’t mean every doctor is greedy, but some are. Now, some drugs
are fine. Antibiotics are not the devil so long as you don’t overuse them and
you know what caused the infection so you won’t have to use them again. But you
usually need a natural supplement to help your body absorb the drugs or to
fight off side effects—don’t even get me started on side effects. Really,
most doctors are trained to alleviate symptoms. If they actually cured people,
we wouldn’t need them or drugs as much.

“Second, have you ever tried any
natural solutions?”

“No,” I admitted. “I mean,
I’ve tried a few “old-wives’ tales”-type remedies here and there.”

“Did they work?”

Poking out my lips helped me
think better. Momma had a few concoctions, but Grandmomma Smith was the
do-it-yourself-healthcare queen. “Well, I do remember once, when I fell and skinned
my knee racing down the street with my cousins, my grandmother mixed up
something with what appeared to be oil, tea, and some other stuff she didn’t
let me see. She slathered it on my knee. That stuff worked so fast, even as a
child I knew it was amazing.”