Another excerpt from my book

This takes place in the hospital just after having surgery and finding out about the stroke. Hopefully, I get the message across that I wasn’t all there yet. Also, I hope to get the point across that love is exactly what i needed at the time.

 

My eyes blink, snapping pictures of those around me. There’s a doctor, I think, at the foot of my bed. Snap. Lindsay is curled up right next to me, gently touching my leg. Snap. My mother has that worried mother look in her eyes and it makes me remember just how strong she is. Snap. My dad is hunched over the foot of my bed near the doctors, a determined expression radiates from his eyes. The doctor speaks:

“Brett. You had a stroke after we performed surgery to remove your aneurysm.”

I digest the words, dissecting them and interpreting them at once is too difficult.

He’s talking to me. Something went wrong. Stroke, what is the word stroke? When was there a performance? I don’t remember that. I know I had surgery. And the last part of the sentence boggles my mind. They removed part of my brain, my aneurysm. Part of me is missing. An instant sadness wells up from inside, permeating itself throughout my body. I look back at the doctor.

“I… I don’t… get.”

That’s not at all what I was trying to say.

Lindsay leans over closer towards me, rubbing life back into my cold body. She whispers the sentence back into my ear with 500x the amount of love that the doctor had. Each word is treated carefully, leaving her lips with passion and sincerity and the words flow gracefully and elegantly into my ear and make sense. I had a stroke. The word ‘stroke’ makes sense now. The folder for the word ‘stroke’ is tucked away, deep inside my brain, under blood and inflamed tissue, and dying neurons and cells. The word stroke comes back to me. My psychology classes come back to me and I can remember videos of the disabled elderly with speech problems and motor problems and memory problems. That’s me. I understand. But it’s a cold understanding. It’s the kind of understanding that sends shivers down your spine and creates a giant lump in the pit of your stomach. The kind of understanding you go through when a relative dies. The kind of understanding that is necessary for growth. The kind of understanding that you are simultaneously hurt by and proud to have conquered.

Lindsay leans over again and whispers something else in my ear:

“You…” She’s understanding too. “You lost motor function” She takes another second. “You lost function to the right side of your body Brett. But it’s going to be Ok. You have lots of love and positive energy and family and friends and the most amazing doctors and…”

She gets up and leaves the room. This is really hard on her. The doctors continue on with their words that I just can’t understand. They aren’t spoken with enough love.