Fallen: A Trauma, a Marriage, and the Transformative Power of Music Read Online Free PDF Page A

an individualized one, depending on the patient and the surgeon, although the most general guidelines indicate that a preoperative score of lower than 8 on the Glasgow Coma Scale and the presence of one or more fixed and dilated pupils significantly increase the risk of an unfavorable outcome—defined as severe disability, persistent vegetative state, or death.
    In Simon’s case, by the time the neurological team had cleaned up the large subdural bleed in his left hemisphere, tissue had begun to swell out through the opening of the dura, the relatively inelastic membrane that surrounds the brain. The decision to not replace the skull bone was straightforward, because to do so would have compromised this bruised tissue. There was, simply, no space left.
    I AM STILL waiting as this surgical procedure unfolds. Surrounded by the serious faces of Guido, Jer, Barb, Lou, Dave, and Ryan, I can no longer deny that this is really happening. So I phone Simon’s parents and my mother. I contact Eli’s best friend’s father, a pilot, and arrangements are made to fly Eli in from Vancouver Island. Everyone will arrive tomorrow morning. Tomorrow. In this large generic room with a closed door, too little oxygen, and a terrifying excess of telephones, it is a remote concept, tomorrow. Tomorrow, it seems to me, might never come. At least not in the way the entire rest of my life has taught me to expect it to.
    And we wait.

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IF...
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    WE ARE STILL waiting.
    As we wait, time narrows to a crystalline point between two opposing tensions: the longer we wait, the more our anxiety grows; the longer we wait, the longer we know Simon is still alive. I count the hours. If he was on his way to surgery at 1:30 when the hospital called me at home, then he has been on the operating table for at least five hours. Six hours. Seven hours. Jer and Barb have left, with promises to return tomorrow, when a nurse comes to tell us that Simon is out of surgery and is in the recovery room. At 9:30, another nurse, who introduces herself as Toni, asks me to come with her. She leads me down a winding hallway, explaining the layout of the floor, how access routes change when the cafeteria, Sassafras, closes at night, details that are so bewildering to me in the moment that she might as well be reciting complicated algebraic formulas. She leads me through the sliding doors of the ICU and into a conference room and tells me, once again, to wait.
    A voice is shouting Simon’s name. “Simon! Simon! Wake up, Simon!” I walk to the door of the conference room. At the end of the long hallway is a glassed-in room where a group of doctors circle a bed. “SIMON!” There is the sharp snap of a handclap. I move toward the glass room. The doctors turn as I enter, and I get only the briefest glimpse of Simon—his lips, his beautiful lips, so swollen—and the tubes and machines that are everywhere before someone—Toni, I think—is pulling me out of the room and ushering me back to the conference area. This time the door closes behind her.
    “SIMON IS VERY sick,” Dr. Griesdale, the head Intensive Care doctor, explains when he sits down at the conference table with me. It is the second time I am hearing this phrase, and this time it strikes me as profoundly wrong.
Simon is very sick.
It is grossly inaccurate, I think—more a concession to my current decreased mental functioning than a true representation of the situation. Simon doesn’t get sick, I want to say. His twenty-four-hour flus last an hour, two at the most. Simon is strong. Not sick. But the doctor, pale and serious, is still talking. “Simon is very sick” is only the icebreaker. I instruct myself to pay attention. It is important to pay attention. Focus on the details.
    “Simon has a serious brain injury,” Dr. Griesdale continues. “It is life-threatening, and it will get much, much worse before there is any chance of it getting better.”
    There are three stages of a brain injury, he explains.