String of Pearls
Cathy Gibson
When my son Robert slammed his head into a skateboard ramp with enough force to crack his skull and to rupture a blood vessel in his brain, I thought about change. Not about the work-a-day change that defines our lives and happens without fanfare, but about abrupt change that reroutes the trajectory of one’s life.
Robert’s accident happened on the Fourth of July. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, I sat on our front steps watching my husband lay granite stones along our walkway. Robert had been dropped off almost a week earlier at an extreme sports camp thirty miles east of State College, Pennsylvania, and seven hours from home. When the phone rang, I thought Robert was finally checking in. Instead, it was a nurse from Robert’s camp telling me that my son had hit his head and was in an ambulance on his way to the emergency room. The sound of lawn mowers and passing cars ceased as if doors and windows had slammed shut. I still have the paper on which I wrote the camp nurse’s name and number, the name of the hospital, and when the ambulance was expected to arrive. I also wrote “head,” “seizure,” “ambulance.” Over the next hour and a half, I wrote the names of the ER doctor (Catherine), the nurse (Joseph), and the patient representative (Helene). Later that afternoon, I scribbled “life flight,” “neurosurgeon,” and “Geisinger Hospital, Danville, PA.” After this last entry, I grabbed that piece of paper, a map, a quickly packed suitcase, and my cell phone.
For seven long, lost hours, I drove and tried not to think. But I could not banish persistent thoughts of what my son was going through or would go through without anyone whom he knew or loved at his side. I could not halt the nauseating, unbearable thought that my son might not be alive when I arrived. Somewhere around Port Jarvis, New York, the crackle of a fading radio signal brought the voice of a man urging me to place my burden in God’s hands. I would have laughed cynically if I saw something like that moment played out in a movie; but, at that time, I was not willing to reject any messages that would give me hope or comfort. Whether this was a sign or simply random chance, I knew that Robert was in the care of others—human and divine. Still, I worried about how life sometimes irretrievably slips from man’s —and into God’s—hands.
Many years before my son was delivered into my hands, I remembered seeing a public television special on head injuries that affected me deeply. In it, a successful investment banker, driving home from work on a leaf-slick road, lost control of his car and hit his head precisely where it would do the most damage. He lost his capacity for speech and memory. He sat childlike in a body-stained La-Z-Boy as his sad-faced wife spoke to him as she would a disobedient child. In another story, an eighteen-year old boy mis-stepped on a granite staircase and fell backward, crushing his skull and ending his life. Both of these men woke up one morning, had breakfast, kissed their loved ones, and went to work or school, never sensing their lives would soon be horribly diminished or extinguished. I often wondered if they perceived danger—a shiver, a tightening scalp, or momentary vertigo—the moment before their lives went off course but ignored the signs. Did the hair on Robert’s neck bristle the moment before he took his plunge? When my mind placed my son in that family room chair and in that morgue, I pulled the car over and sobbed—for him and for me.
But each day does not stand alone as if nothing had come before. The poet Billy Collins once described each day as “resting somehow/on the one before it/all the days of the past stacked high/like the impossible tower of dishes/entertainers used to build on stage.” This day happened because my son inherited his restless soul from me, and the need to flirt with danger from my husband. From the unzipping and rejoining of our DNA, the branches of his life were laid out, guaranteeing that he would love to move quickly and with reckless abandon. This day, for Robert, was stacked precariously upon the days before.
Yet I have spent most of my son’s days trying to protect him from any danger. I worried about the side effects of immunizations. I imagined playground accidents at every turn. I feared he would choke on hot dogs, coins, buttons, and McDonald’s McNuggets. He was the last in his class to walk to school alone. It seems just when I ceded my inability to control everything that could happen to my son, I received stunning confirmation of that fact. Every fear I ever had about his safety was suddenly absolute. Not surprisingly, when I walked into the emergency room and saw my son alive and awake, I vowed to renew my vigilance.
Robert joked with me in his corner of the emergency room, although his words were slurred and he seemed on the verge of going to sleep. “Mom, you would have liked the helicopter ride,” he said. I was relieved and grateful to be able to speak to him as if we were home and I were putting him to bed. I thanked God with every scrap of sincerity I could muster.
One hour later, Robert was crying and in severe pain. “Make the headaches stop,” he said as I corralled nurses and doctors to find out why things had changed so quickly, so dramatically. When the neurosurgeon arrived at midnight, he told me that Robert needed to have surgery to stop bleeding in his brain. I remember hearing a rushing sound in my ears as though they were bleeding. I sat and placed my head beneath my knees. Then they took him away for surgery.
When Robert’s brain ricocheted inside his skull, a tiny vessel in his parietal lobe let loose, leaking blood into an ever-expanding pool with nowhere to go. Neurochemicals glutamate and acetylcholine cascaded into the synapse, altering the chemistry of his brain. Lactic acid flooded the cells, depressing glucose metabolism and slowing breathing and heart rates. Compressed and damaged axons began to swell and separate, causing the loss of irreplaceable neurons. I imagined these tiniest of pieces of Robert crashing into each other like billiard balls, setting off a chain reaction that reverberated throughout his whole body. I thought about that thread of DNA on which the events of Robert’s life were strung like pearls. If I could somehow rearrange the sequence of his life, what would I change? What could I change? He could, in a moment of inattention or haste, slip off a granite curb. He could rush home to a waiting family and lose control of his car on a leafy suburban street. But on this night, the surgeon would stop the bleeding and arrest the damage, giving him one more pearl on that precious strand of life.
I was folded into a small waiting room couch when the surgeon came in and touched my shoulder. “All done, ” he said. “They’re closing up. He should be out soon.” It was almost 4 a.m., and his voice seemed to be the only sound in that deserted and sterile corner of the hospital. I thought about where I was less than twenty-four hours ago: finishing a run, watching my husband complete yet another home improvement chore, and thinking about my teenage son. Now, I felt as if thirteen years had not passed. My body ached as if he had just been delivered and was still tethered to me. My heart ached with as much desire as when I was waiting to see him for the very first time.
In the early hours of July fifth, I saw my son again. His unnaturally round and red face looked more like an infant’s than that of the maturing thirteen-year-old I dropped off at camp one week earlier. His eyelids were puffy like a newborn’s and his exposed skull was devoid of hair. Just above his right ear, fourteen surgical staples lined the swollen flesh of his skull like a grotesque zipper. Monitors beeped and clicked, and green lines charted changes in heartbeat, blood pressure, and oxygen levels. Robert slipped in and out of drug-induced sleep as nursing shifts came and went. Occasionally, another parent would quietly pass by like a ghost, briefly eclipsing the harsh fluorescent lights shining into our darkened room. I never saw the face of another child in pediatrics ICU, but I heard the repetition of their beeping monitors and the pumping of respirators. As morphine shots became less frequent, Robert became more wakeful and was moved to the pediatrics ward.
But with his wakefulness came other worries. On his first walk around the hallway, his left foot slapped the ground as if it were asleep, and he had a halting “old man’s” step. There were conversations he couldn’t remember. I cycled between apprehension about what damage would be uncovered, and elation that Robert was alive and would soon be going home. Still, I thought about the children in ICU whose curtains were drawn and whose families were quietly gathering. I thought about the beautiful bald children who were in for their monthly chemo visits. I thought about the parents of those children confronting changes they could not control, and conceded that, for now, we were the lucky ones. Joyce Carol Oates observed that “to be a realist…is to acknowledge that all things might be other than they are.” When Robert was discharged, I knew that things might be other than they were, and I was grateful for this outcome.
Robert slept for most of the seven-hour ride home and for much of the next week.
He gradually spent more time awake but had little energy. He could not read. We went nowhere and planned nothing. I sat in his room while he slept. Our days passed without awareness of what day or what time it was. We noted each day’s passing in the brightness of the sun through the windows and the waning daylight. C. G. Jung once said, “You will find yourself again in the simple and forgotten things.” When my friends called and told me that I must be having a horrible summer, I could not tell them otherwise. I could not tell them that there was a languorous quality to each day as if time and pressure were suspended. I could not tell them each day was a treasure of simple and forgotten things.
“Life is a mirage suspended above chaos,” wrote Gretel Ehrlich in her essay “Spring.” Why will one child’s life quickly wind down behind the hospital curtain while another walks away from near death? “Useless questions,” wrote Ehrlich. Each moment contains rolling dice. Like the random trajectories of atoms, anything can happen: life or death. I have stopped asking why my son was injured. I have stopped worrying about the paths he will follow. I know that on any given day, anything can happen—from the mundane, to the horrifying, to the sublime.
Billy Collins said that each day is a gift, “mysteriously placed in your waking hand/or set upon your forehead/moments before you open your eyes.” As I head out for my evening walk, I notice the smell of wood smoke and the newly bare branches against a line of winter white clouds. I think about the gifts placed in my waking hand, and I know that things might be other than they are.
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