One More Day Alive

Watershed events, like a parent’s illness, can move us towards our own healing as we reflect on family, relationships, and soul.
 
A few months ago, while bogged down in the ultra-important details of promotions, media interviews and speaking engagements for my latest book, life got in the way.

It was 9 a.m. when I called my mother’s house to say hello and was greeted by the cold, distant voice of a young man I didn’t recognize — a paramedic.
“Your mother fell and she’s not responding, so we are going to transport her to St. Joseph’s Hospital,” he informed me.

“What?” I shouted back almost uncontrollably. “What’s wrong?” “We don’t know,” responded the voice. “She is not responding.”

The lack of info was terrifying. The 10-minute drive down to the emergency room was an eternity — rushing against the lights while fighting mentally not to rush to conclusions or imagine the worst. A parking nightmare later, I was in the emergency room and no longer had to imagine.

My mother was not moving! My eyes frantically searched out the heart monitor to assure myself she was still alive. I watched and waited helplessly as a whirlwind of people and machines surrounded her.

“Do you know what year it is?” a doctor shouted at my mother, but there was no response.

Again he repeated the question. I watched my mother’s lips desperately, waiting for anything. Then suddenly, happily, I saw the slightest movement and heard the sweetest sound: “2009,” came back the answer, faintly. Thank God! She was OK, or at least aware.

The storm of activity around her slowly dissolved and tense voices grew calm, a sign I hoped that things were improving.
A doctor turned to address me. Finally, information.

She had suffered a stroke, and there was a blood clot about the size of a quarter located in the middle of her brain. It was located too deep within the brain itself for them to relieve the pressure or drain the blood without threatening her life. But nobody knew how extensive the damage was yet, or the danger. All we could do was to wait — but for how long?

A friend arrived. She was a physical therapist, so she could help me to understand what the doctors weren’t yet telling me. Thank God, I thought. But her professional opinion only sent chills down my spine.

“She will recover, right?” I asked her. “She could,” my friend cautiously replied, “and she might not. There is no way to know. But either way her whole life will change, and so will yours. Just do the right thing and trust God.”

But there were a whole lot of “right things” to be done. And God didn’t seem to be saying anything I could understand.

How much would she recover? When would she recover? How would we care for her, what would we do with her house, with her expenses, her bills, her cat? Where was I going to find the strength, the wisdom, the time and the resources to handle this? Why did this happen now?

A wall of anxiety and depression overwhelmed me.

As I stared at her lying there in a mesmerizing mesh of tubes and wires, my eyes suddenly fell on the most unexpected thing — her hands. Suddenly, they didn’t look old to me, but were the same ones I remember reaching out for when I was a child, the ones that always reached back.

I reached down and squeezed her hand. Without a word spoken, she squeezed back. I knew instantly what I needed to do and how I would find the strength to do it.
But it was just the beginning of a journey that would transform my life, her life and the lives of everyone we knew.

PART 2

Within 24 hours, my mother had regained her ability to speak and use of her right side. Thank God, I thought, at least she was out of the woods. Not quite.

“We need to do an MRI to determine if the bleeding in her brain has stopped,” she said soberly. “But your mother refuses. She is afraid of the machine. She says she’s claustrophobic.”

“What!” I screamed. Why had nobody told me? I only went home for a few hours to shower and clean up. My mother was barely conscious and they were leaving life and death decisions to her!

“If we can’t do the MRI, we can’t do much more for her,” the nurse said coldly. “If she doesn’t want the MRI we cannot force her. But then we don’t know if she is going to have another stroke.”

Here’s a little info for any of who have never been in the hospital – when you don’t follow orders, they stop giving them. They were giving up on my mom.

But at least I wasn’t the only one pulling my hair out. My brother arrived a few hours earlier. We were scared, angry – and now frustrated with my mother. Why was she doing this? She was a headstrong woman – I had learned to accept that for all its pros and cons over the years – but now it was endangering her life, and it was hurting us.

We spent the next hour trying to talk her into the MRI. Finally someone made a simple suggestion – what if they allowed me into the scanning room with her while they performed the MRI. Amazingly it worked. Suddenly she agreed.

Later that night we entered the room together, and she entered the narrow tunnel of the MRI machine, while I held her leg from outside the tunnel. After a half an hour of incredibly loud clicks and clacks that could have traumatized even somebody who wasn’t claustrophobic, it was done.

I needed to sleep, so I grabbed a few hours back home then rushed back to the hospital the next morning for the results. But I spent the next 24 hours waiting for info that never seemed to come. “We are still analyzing the results,” was the common chorus.

As I glanced up at the Crucifix on the wall, I said a prayer. Please send me a sign. Just then as I looked away, I saw a familiar face in the distance. It was a friend from the local coffee shop. What was she doing here? Then I remembered – she was a doctor—– a neurologist, and of all the coincidences – in THIS hospital?

“Please help me,” I practically begged her. “My mother had a stroke and nobody will tell me anything.” She led me down the hall to the doctor’s lounge where she showed me everything – the results of the MRI, my mother’s case file—and she carefully explained every single detail of my mother’s case.

“It looks like the bleeding has stopped, and I don’t see any permanent damage,” her words were like a gift from God. “I think she could have a full recovery. But–” she added, “it’s up to her when and how that happens.”

The next day they moved my mother out of the ICU – next stop the rehab facility. She would have to quickly learn to trust people she didn’t know who were telling her to do the opposite of what her body was saying– to walk when her legs said they couldn’t, to stand when her body said rest, and to stop worrying in the midst of the battle of her life. That was not an easy thing for a woman who had had trust issues her whole life.

I had to trust God would put people there to help me, especially the rest of my family. That was easier said than done. We had not been a cohesive unit for a long time, not since my parents split up after thirty years together.

We all had our reasons – for not trusting, not working together, for running away. None of us had done the best to help each other. Now we had to.

PART 3

Hospital rehab programs place people in one of two categories – those that heal and those that don’t. Unfortunately they placed my mother into the ladder.

She was scared, stuck literally and metaphorically. And rehab programs, especially those funded by Medicare, don’t tolerate anything less than success. If you don’t make progress, you’re out and with only a few days notice.

So suddenly and without warning they asked us to take my mother home– helpless. She could not even get herself in and out of the bathroom, and she could not afford 24-hour a day home health care. Their solution – a nursing home!

Now telling my intelligent, capable, and headstrong mother to go a nursing home was a sure way of getting her to use her good hand to throw a heavy object at me. Plus, it didn’t seem right. She deserved a real chance to recover her independence.

Out of the darkness came one voice that cared– the physical therapist friend of mine who came to comfort me when my mother first had her stroke.

“Let me work with her,” she practically ordered me. “If we can get her into my center for one month, maybe we can get her well enough to go home.”

It was worth a shot. I had to trust my friend, and my mom had to trust me.

“Mom I know you can come back from this,” I explained. “But it’s not going to happen here. We need to go somewhere else for a little while – a month. I promise we will bring you home after that.”

“You are the boss,” she said simply. I was flabbergasted. It was tantamount to the falling of the Berlin Wall! My mother had ceded control. Now it was up to me – to us – to deliver.

A team of newly dedicated therapists at Arizona Grand inspired by my friend worked on my mother seven days a week. The first day she stood on her own. The first week she was walking. By the end of the month she was doing sit ups and yoga. There was no way to explain the progress. Actually there was. They cared. My mother knew it, and she trusted them.

Each night either my brother or I visited, trying to boost her moral. Sometimes we succeeded, and sometime we failed. Sometimes we looked past the person – the mother, the human – we were too obsessed with fixing her.

But little by little we cleaned up our acts and tried to respect, to appreciate and to make each other shine. We scrubbed twenty years of grime and grease off the floors and the walls of her house. We changed the carpets, and cleaned out the past as much as we could. She did her best to let us let go of the past.

A month after my mother’s stroke I was speaking to my brothers almost every day; we haven’t done that since I was a teenager. My oldest brother – who kept to himself too much for his own good—became my teammate. Together we worked on the game plan for my mother’s recovery.

Today my mother is home. She is walking more, talking more every day, but we depend heavily on the kindness of friends, new and old.

We cannot “make’ her heal. But every day we learn to love, to grow and to rejoice a little bit more instead of squandering these days wishing things were different.

I reflect on that as I slip in a CD of old jazz standards. I ask my mom to stand up and let go of her walker and hold onto me instead. For the first time in over a decade I dance with my mother.

“The memory of all that” sings Ella Fitgerald. “No they can’t take that away from me.”

Chris Benguhe is a former PEOPLE Magazine Reporter and now a columnist for the Catholic Sun and the author of the recently released Overcoming Life’s 7 Common Tragedies: Opportunities for Discovering God  
This article appeared orginally in theCatholic Sun, Phoenix AZ, from which it was adapted.

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