Mommy's head is sick
About twenty-four hours ago, my mother had a stroke. She was at a restaurant in the city with her husband, and an ambulance brought them to the emergency room. I arrived shortly after they did. When I arrived, she was confused and lost, but not agitated. The doctors recommended that we administer tPA, a medicine that breaks up blood clots. This caused bleeding in her brain, and my mother became extremely agitated. She thrashed and screamed in the hospital bed and pulled out the tubes leading into her arms. She had to be restrained, then sedated. She screamed pushed off the bed; it took six of us to hold her down. I held her right arm and wrist so another needle could be inserted.
I came down by coincidence: I called my mother to offer to get tickets for a Diana Ross concert. Michael answered: “We’re in the emergency room. Your mother’s had a stroke.” I called a cab, changed, and came down.
My mother was tired and afraid. She didn’t know who we were, or where she was. They rolled her up to the intensive care unit, and we saw her into place. She was asleep when we left her (no overnight visitors are permitted in the ward).
We came back this morning, and she was agitated. She struggled and cried “help help help fire fire fire” and my father’s name. She was confused and babbled — not all of the sounds made words I knew. It’s best when she’s asleep. They weren’t able to take further scans overnight because she moved too much and ruined the exposure. This afternoon she finally slept under sedation, and they were able to take her in to be scanned. I am sitting in the room with her now, waiting for the experts’ interpretation of the image. She is snoring slightly, her mouth agape. Her hair is a bedraggled mess tangled in the wires glued to her scalp (they were able to confirm that she is having seizures, and it seems that the seizure medication helped her calm down).
This is far from the first time my mother has been in the hospital: she had two rounds of breast cancer and broke her back during the time I knew her, and she is only barely recovered from bunion surgery. But this is the first time I have ever seen her delirious. This is the first time she didn’t know who I was.
Broken tatters of life: transient, fugitive, fleeting. “We were out to dinner, and she just — had a stroke,” says Michael on the phone across the room from me. Her bed is between us. We don’t know what’s to come. I’ve been calling everyone I know: “my mom had a stroke,” and I can feel the weight on the other end of the line. Some people made a noise like being hit.
Most of my friends and family are not terribly religious, but they all send their thoughts and love and (shockingly) prayers. I wish I had payed closer attention. I wish I remembered every detail. Did she begin to struggle before or after the drug was administered? When did she scream? What did she say?
When I got there, I knelt by her head and greeted her — she turned to me and said, “Preston, could you help me plug it in?” or something. It meant “I don’t know why it isn’t working but Preston can help.” It was the way she asked — asks? will once again ask? — me for help when she couldn’t get the television working.
Michael can’t resist speaking to her, as though she can hear. I worry she’s going to wake up and the screaming will start again. Michael’s father had eight strokes.
