Oxygen ping-pong
I’d sent my son downstairs to sit in the sunny atrium and call his friends. He needed a break. This was one time when I was glad for teenage friends on cell phones. A tiny touch of normalcy for him from the last couple of days.
All morning, we’d watched Ed’s oxygen numbers bounce up and down on the monitor. It was like watching a race where the lead was uncertain yet, but our “runner” might just bolt forward at any moment. Clearly, his levels were trending up. If they could just break through to normal….
I watched my husband sleeping in the bed. He was still on a lot of morphine to keep him quiet. However, given that his oxygen levels were inching toward normal, they started to bring the morphine dose down. As soon as his oxygen levels stabilized for sure, they wanted to get him off the respirator and bring him out of his coma.
The respirator had been a lifesaver for sure. But leaving him on it longer than needed risked infection. On the other hand, bringing someone out of their coma and removing the respirator is uncomfortable for the patient and excruciating to watch.
We wanted to be there to greet him on his “return from the coma”…and see, Was he still “Ed?” His brain swelling had not gotten any worse and was starting to improve. But the moment of truth would only come when he was awake. Then we would learn what all of this trauma had done to him.
They started the process. He groaned and became very restless. We couldn’t watch this part. It was too hard. Given that we had been on our vigil at the hospital for almost two days straight, we decided it would be okay to go home, shower, and change, and let this process unfold. The nurses agreed that we should do that and come back in a couple of hours.
That engineer brain
Ed is the sort of person who loves to figure out how everything works…and if it isn’t working optimally, to fix it. He was that way as a kid – collecting broken appliances and machines from the neighbors so he could take them apart and see what made them work. It was one of the many things I so loved about him. I longed to have that friend of mine back.
When I walked into his room on our return, he was asleep, resting quietly. He seemed much more peaceful than when we left, and it was a relief not to hear the rhythmic sounds of the respirator anymore.
Now he was being given oxygen through a mask, which happened to be lying on his face, crooked. As I reached over to straighten it, his eyes flickered, and mine bolted open wide. I just stood there, frozen, and held my breath.
Was my Ed, still Ed?
He hadn’t noticed me yet. Instead, his eyes were tilted down toward his nose, totally focused on the crooked mask. His brow was furrowed in seeming frustration and concentration.
I wanted to yell for joy! THAT was Ed. Without him even saying a word, I could see that his engineer brain was displeased by the “suboptimal” placement of his oxygen mask. He might have been groggy and still drugged, but HE WAS STILL ED, trying to figure out how to make some mechanical thing hew to his will!
Then he looked up, and for the first time since this began, I could see those beautiful, soft, blue pupils staring up at me. I couldn’t speak.
“Where am I?” His voice was gravely from the breathing tube, but he was clear and coherent. “What happened?” He had no memory of any of this since the ER.
Both my son and I were so ecstatic that we just cried. I gave Ed a short version of what had happened since the afternoon in the ER, and assured him he was doing great and would be just fine. Just seeing those beautiful, gentle eyes staring back at me and hearing his voice again were the best gifts in the world. I had started to despair of ever seeing and hearing him again.
“What happened in the ER?”
In that moment, I slammed the door shut on that conversation. I knew he was still weak and fragile.
“We aren’t talking about any of that right now. Not while you’re in the ICU. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you are alive! We’re just going to focus on getting you better now!”
He smiled, then drifted off to sleep. That was fine. I had seen what I needed to for the moment. Now, rest was what he needed.
Geometric figures
Once he was conscious, he started recovering quickly. It was like what the pulmonary doctor had said to us the first night: “Your husband is strong and healthy.”
In fact, strong and healthy was probably the reason that his sodium level had jumped up a bit too fast that first night. The doctor said that once the sodium had started to come back up, being healthy was a risk because the body would try to stabilize too quickly.
Given that, they still need to watch him for any signs of paralysis from that quick rise. And he still needed his vital signs followed to make sure his heart and lungs were okay. And continue to receive IV antibiotics for his pneumonia. They also wanted another MRI to see if the brain swelling had gone down and if there was any brain damage. So, we still had a ways to go. But things were looking up.
Later that day, they moved him into a “step-down” unit, where they could continue with close care, but more freedom than in the ICU.
I continued to stay with him, but sent our son home to spend time with friends and have some normal teenage life again. Ed was a little weird at this point because he was very weak. And he was mystified by the odd dreams he was having that were filled with geometric figures. We later learned this is common when you’ve had a lot of morphine.
Over the next day or two, we got him up and walking. Eating. And since he couldn’t get in the shower with all of his IVs, I sponge-bathed him. There are many ways to make love. As I washed his body and helped him feel like a human being again, it occurred to me that this, too, was another way. Each stroke of the washcloth was an unspoken expression of total love.
Thank you, Mariah Carey
His recovery sped up quickly. And at that point, I wanted him out of the hospital. He’d contracted a Staph infection, and I knew that the worst infections could be the ones you get in a hospital. So, once he was getting stronger, it was time to go home.
Of course, there was one last hitch. One of the lab tests was abnormal, so he had to have an ultrasound before they would discharge him. Fortunately, that turned out to be nothing.
Finally, words we never expected to hear – “We’re discharging you!”
It was cold out, and getting dark, as I drove slowly up the main street through town. I had the radio on, and that’s when that song came on….my absolute favorite song…the one I will ALWAYS associate with that moment in time, and with Ed: Mariah Carey belting out “All I Want For Christmas is You!” I’d always loved it. But NOW? THIS MOMENT? It said it all. Both Ed and I started to cry.
With Ed back in the house, life felt possible again. Our little family group was united again in our “nest.”
It didn’t matter if there was a tree, gifts, or anything. Nothing mattered beyond our joy to have Ed with us still. We’d wing the rest. In fact, when we got up the next morning, Christmas lights were strung up all over the inside of the house, like I usually did in the past. Our son had stayed up late to do that for us. It was Christmas in the very best of ways.
I never expected to see you up and walking again…
To express our overwhelming gratitude for all the nurses, doctors, lab and respiratory techs who saved Ed’s life, we went to a nearby gourmet grocery store and had them make up several gift baskets. And then we played Santa, going back to the ER, then the ICU to deliver the baskets of goodies and let Ed say thank you to them all, in person.
The young male nurse who had worked so hard on Ed that first night stared at Ed in shock…and then pleasure, as he shook Ed’s hand.
Quietly, the nurse said to me, “Frankly, if you had told me that night that he would recover and be able to walk in here on his own, I wouldn’t have believed it. I never expected it.”
I remember choking up as I told the nurse what I hadn’t said to anyone. “I feel like I failed him the night of his surgery….I listened to the doctor. I just felt like something was wrong, but I trusted the doctor. I should have brought Ed in here then.”
The nurse vehemently shook his head and stopped me right there. “Don’t even go there! You could have brought him in that night, and he might not have been bad, and we would have sent him home. And then you would have hesitated to come back when it really mattered. And he would have died. You did nothing wrong!”*
To this day, I still sometimes wonder. But it is what it is. I only know that on that afternoon, if I had picked up our son from school and gone home or even to the Urgent Care instead of right to the ER, Ed would have died. It was that close and that fast. The only reason he lived was because we were already in the ER when everything blew apart. And all of those wonderful people saved him.
So we went home. And celebrated our Christmas, and the best joy of our lives. We were all still together. We were determined to go on now, live our lives fully, and savor the gift of “us” still having a future together.
Four “certainties,” and a prayer
After all of the experiences through this time, there are a few things I was “certain” of, and one thing I prayed for.
The first thing I am absolutely certain of, is that on that afternoon, if I had picked up our son from school and gone home or even to the Urgent Care instead of right to the ER, Ed would have died. It was that close and that fast. The only reason he lived was because we were already in the ER when everything blew apart. And all of those wonderful people saved him.
The second thing I was certain of, I learned that afternoon in the ER. Life can go from normal to exploded in a matter of seconds. At that moment you are torn open to your core, and you realize that the only thing that matters is LOVE. Love. Love. Not the bills, not the irritations or the arguments. Not the plans, or the memories. Just…LOVE.
The next one is that our lives would never be the same. WE would never be the same. There was always going to be the “before times,” before this horrible event, and then, the “after times.” And who we would be, and how we would live, would be very different.
The prayer during all of this, was that when the time came, to please take Ed first, and not me. I don’t ever want him to know how those waiting room hours feel.
And the last certainty, was that I saw no need to ever tell anyone of the images I saw in the ER that day. Images that will be seared in my brain forever. In fact, I saw no reason to talk about that whole time. It was over and done with. Just move on and enjoy life.
Three certainties and the prayer were correct. That last certainty, though…not so much.
Soul Mosaic 
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