Slipping through the fingers

Sometimes, the image comes unbidden to my mind's eye.

It's a white hand in the half-light, fingers curved slightly and clawing.

It's Demeter's hand. Oh gawd. Oh gawd.

Demeter fell.  This was twenty weeks ago, and I still get blindsided by flashbacks.

We were nearly home, so nearly home, walking back from one of her medical appointments as the weakened sun dipped towards the horizon in mid-January.  Demeter was plodding along with her walker, stopping to rest her tired shoulders.  I suggested she might like to rest in the bus shelter that we were passing.  I had kept close to her shoulder during the walk, but now she stepped beyond me, aiming for the resting place. 

It seemed to happen in slow motion.  These things do, I guess.

Her walker seemed to glide out of her grasp.  And she reached out in a straight incline, and her body crashed into the pavement, seeming to bounce slightly, her left arm stretched out above her head. And I saw her left eyebrow blowing up like a slate-grey balloon.

And she wouldn't answer me.

And her eyes were wide, staring, and white.

People gathered, giving advice:

"Leave her."

"Get her on her side."

As I bent over her, her hands, white and grasping, reached out in staccato.  As I turned to answer somebody, I felt her fingers digging into the backs of my legs.

Someone called 911.  I fumbled for my phone:  "No, I know you've called, but I have to get my husband.." And I couldn't get my phone to work; I called Demeter's landline by mistake.  Later, I turned on her answering machine, and heard the nightmarish babble of voices, with my voice saying, "She's not responding; she's not responding..."  I meant my mother lying on the pavement, not answering me, staring blankly.

I managed to reach the Resident Fan Boy, struggling to describe where we were - so close to home, only two blocks away.  Someone, seeing my confusion, gave me the address and cross streets.

I stood behind Demeter, who insisted on sitting up, so I could support her back.  She said something was pressing down on her head; I realized it was me, bending over.  I straightened up, as the ambulance arrived, followed shortly by the Resident Fan Boy, who had strode up a back street.

The paramedics thought she had broken her arm, but changed their minds as they examined her.  It was a dislocated shoulder.  "Why am I going to hospital?" Demeter asked as they bundled her away.  They explained, and re-emerging to ask me about medications, told me that she had asked again.

I know something about brain injury.  I watched numbly as the red lights whirled and flashed, realizing I couldn't go with her, in this time of pandemic, or even visit.

The RFB and I dropped off her walker, purse, and coat at her apartment.  At home, I made phone-calls.  

I shook for two hours.

That was twenty weeks ago.  The shape of our daily lives has changed.  Demeter was home in three days, and slowly finding ways to claw back her prized independence.

Her neighbour across the hall had a fall about a month ago and spent three weeks in hospital, as his mailbox remained unemptied.  The mum of a friend up-Island fell before Christmas, breaking an already replaced hip, plus three breaks below the knee.  There was talk of amputation, and she's still in a wheelchair.

Demeter is now doing short walks around the block on her own.  I go in to prepare her meals and do her laundry.  Things could be a lot worse - and probably will be, at some point.  

Not yet.

But this is why I haven't written in a while.

Four walls around me

We had a disaster in January.

Not fatal, not tragic, but it may take me some time to go into it, to touch where it hurts.

But this morning, this song turned up on my YouTube feed.  It's not new, but in that way that life has, the lyrics have changed their meaning for me.

I sat in front of the computer and sniffled a little.

You might, too.

Face-plant in Chelsea

Elder daughter suddenly appeared on FaceTime on my phone this morning. She wanted to show me her teeth.

Maybe I should explain.

About three weeks ago, elder daughter was in London. She had arrived three days before, booked into an AirBnB in Hampstead, done a London Walk, taken the Chunnel to Paris to meet up with a Belgian friend for a day-trip, and on a Wednesday morning, was on another London Walk in Chelsea. I think it's safe to say that she may have been still recovering from jet-lag, although I'll bet she'll hotly deny it.

She'd paused to take a picture of a rather unremarkable sculpture in front of a Mercedes-Benz dealer, noticed the group had progressed up Cheyne Walk, so ran to catch up. Somewhere in front of Keith Richard's old house, she slid home, leading with the left side of her face and torso. Her fellow walkers helped clean her up a bit with wet-wipes and bandaids.

I believe she completed the walk, but was unable to go "home", because she had a ticket for Ian McKellen's King Lear at The Duke of York's Theatre in the West End that evening.

To say this put a dent in her visit is a understatement. It put several other dents into her, as well.

By the evening she was sporting a burgundy shiner to compliment a road-rashed jaw and scraped knuckles.

A brisk exchange of texts ensued, whenever both she and I had WiFi access, mostly pleadings on my part to get a gel pack and ice, ice, ice.

On the train to Sutton Coldfield to visit cousins the following day, she developed a chronically painful shoulder. By the time she was en route to Heathrow, a little over a week later, she was in agony from sore ribs.

She had to wait through the Labour Day weekend to see her doctor. The receptionist told her that they were booked for the day -- until elder daughter mentioned "slight" problems breathing, and the receptionist's voice went up a couple of octaves.

So elder daughter has been on anti-inflammatories for a week, at which point she chose to tell me that her front teeth are no longer symmetrical.

Well, they looked okay, but I told her that her grandmother knocked three teeth loose when she was a teenager. About a decade later, I came out, and so did one loosened tooth. The other two made their exit with my sister.

Elder daughter will consult with her doctor and dentist. I've told her to blame it on her crazy mother. They've met me, after all.

For three weeks, I've had "Brimful of Asha" on the brain, except I find I'm substituting "Face-plant in Chelsea", and "Ev'ryone needs a pavement to fall on; ev'ryone needs a pavement..." My twisted psyche strikes again.

Carpe diem

I'm nipping into a supermarket for a quick purchase, so I slip down the side corridor, which ends behind the cash registers.

I'm listening to a podcast, earbuds in, so am momentarily confused as a lady wearing the store's worktop backs into me. Beyond her I glimpse a splayed arm.

I yank my earbuds out, and step to the side. A man is stretched out on his side, eyes unfocussed, limbs jerking in a seizure. An older man in some sort of uniform kneels by his head, supporting him and restraining him. I can't tell if the elder man is a paramedic or a security guard; I don't want to just stand and stare. I glance discreetly (I hope) over my shoulder as I make my way to the shelves, doing my best to get out of the way. The kneeling man seems to be consulting with a semi-circle of three supermarket employees.

Around us, business as usual. People are maneuvering their carts around the trembling, sprawled man -- there is just enough room to pass.

It feels callous to make my small purchase and leave, but I have no help to offer. It is clear that they are waiting for medical assistance.

I decide to depart by way of the main store, figuring a gurney or stretcher will need a clear way in through the corridor. I emerge into the street to find a young woman bearing down on me on her bicycle. As I sidle out of her way, I notice she's clad in a yellow visibility vest. She's a police officer, a vanguard of the approaching ambulance, which I don't hear for several long minutes. I'm at the bus stop when I spot it several blocks away, zigzagging its way through stubbornly oblivious motorists and pedestrians. It finally pulls up outside the supermarket, and after what seems to be a long pause, the paramedics climb out, set up the gurney and wait by the door where I was nearly bowled over.

My bus takes me away from this man's altered day. Gazing out at the passing buildings, I imagine his morning: sunny, with no hints of the sudden bend in the road.

Unbeknownst to me, a friend of mine is being driven down the Pat Bay Highway outside Victoria by her husband, who suddenly suffers a major stroke. In the confusion and panic, she grabs the wheel, ending up in a ditch with her neck broken. She will spend the next week visiting her speechless husband while hobbled by a body brace.

Last night, I learned of his death.

Every now and then, we are confronted with the unpredictability and fragility of our situation. As with the shaking man on the supermarket floor, I have no help to offer beyond prayer and an inadequately worded note.

Nothing to do but seize what handhold I can find and hang on for dear life.

Victorian Vertigo

When I was ten or so, my church was in James Bay, an old neighbourhood of Victoria, BC which used to be a bay before it was drained and built up. (When the Big One comes -- the super-earthquake for which we're rather overdue -- James Bay will not be a fortuitous place to be.) One Sunday, they took the R.E. (Religious Education) classes out to the breakwater for an outing and since my mother was teaching one of the classes at the time, she came along. I don't recall how far Demeter walked out (the breakwater is very long), but I remember she was dressed in brown and what a state her stockings were in when her vertigo overtook her and she crawled off the wall on her hands and knees.

The Resident Fan Boy was very sympathetic when he heard this sad tale, being a sufferer from a fear of heights himself. We made a trip out to the breakwater last summer with younger daughter and while both made it to the end, which affords an unimpeded view of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the southern edge of Esquimalt and the mouth of the Inner Harbour, neither enjoyed it very much. It's true; the sea wall, which is about ten feet across, felt very narrow with the sea several feet below on either side.

However, during the past year, the powers that be have erected a metal fence on either side, so Demeter declared that she would like to make her first repeat visit since her last ignominious retreat in torn pantyhose during my childhood.

The barriers made all the difference. Demeter strolled happily down to the very end and, using my Nikon, snapped seascapes for her "cover photo' on her Facebook Timeline. Then she made her way back in triumph, and took a header down the ramp at the café, despite the fact that she was watching her feet and holding firmly to the rail.

Oh, she was okay. She's a retired physiotherapist and had the presence of mind to roll, ending up with two enormous goose-eggs on either side of her forehead which made her look like Boris Karloff in Frankenstein.

Her stockings were fine, not a run in 'em.

A matter of minutes

I had the first inkling that there was trouble when I spotted the guy parking the CTV van in front of the coffee shop.  Shouldering a video camera with a stand, he jaywalked and disappeared around the Indian Embassy.

I was already late, having just given the Accent Snob his pull around the block so he could await our return in relative comfort. As I reached the corner, I saw my bus long before I should because it was parked well behind the bus stop. A few more steps and I knew why.  There was an overturned car on the sidewalk in front of the seniors' residence.  It was balanced precariously on its crumpled and smoking roof. I made a quick decision to cross the street to make a path well away from the ambulance and the accumulating crowd.  I could see police and paramedics leaning in gingerly to speak to someone who was evidently still in the car.

Bewildered, I asked a knot of onlookers at the next light when this had happened.  "About four minutes ago," someone replied.  I felt something shudder and drop from my chest to the pit of my stomach.  About four minutes before, I would have normally been standing almost exactly where that upside-down car was now teetering.  I averted my eyes from the knocked-over mailbox, the chunks of cement planter and what appeared to be puddles of red, and hurried to catch a bus on an alternate route where a loud-ish lady informed me that "people waiting at the stop were hurt".

Shakily, I fumbled text messages to the Resident Fan Boy and elder daughter, then proceeded to Nepean to retrieve younger daughter.

That evening, I strolled out to the drug store and saw workmen blocking the broken panes of glass with fibreboard.  I caught the eye of one of the young men and grimaced.
"This was pretty terrifying"
"Yeah.  Good thing no one was hurt."
"Uh... Three people went to hospital, and two of them had serious injuries."
"Oh?  The insurance guy was just here and he said no one was hurt."

Well, he would, I thought, picking my way through some leftover debris in the crosswalk.  "Serious non-life-threatening injuries", the reports had said.  To most people, this seems to mean "okay".  No one seems to consider that people who drop out of the news reports because they haven't actually died, face weeks, months, or even years of recovery -- or even no recovery at all, especially if a brain injury is involved.

Elder daughter tells me she's never been so glad that we have a dog.

A soupçon of perspective

A footnote to the events of last week which have curtailed my blogging somewhat: When the Resident Fan Boy finally was admitted to the Neurology Ward after 24 hours in Emergency, he had a room-mate who had recently been transferred from Intensive Care. He was a young man, late teens or early twenties, who had been thrashed at a Hallowe'en party. I never actually saw him, as the curtains were drawn around his bed. All I could see and hear were his family's and his pregnant girlfriend's family's comings and goings, plus the occasional expletives. The girlfriend's mum came out to apologize, and I assured her I'd heard worse. When the family left for a dinner break, the RFB and and I continued to chat. Every few minutes, the young man would ask us to be quiet. He wasn't rude, but it was smack in the middle of visiting hours, and I'm afraid I flipped a bird in the direction of the curtains. It wasn't until later that I realized that the young man had no idea of what time it was, and that for all he knew, the Resident Fan Boy and I were gabbing late into the night.

For the remainder of his brief stay, my husband had quite a few exchanges with his neighbour, usually en route to the washroom:
"Did my family come to see me last night?"
"Yes, they did."
(Fifteen minutes later.)
"Did my family come to see me last night?"
"Yes, they were all here."
"Did they speak to me?"

When the Resident Fan Boy was safely home in the bosom of his own family, we often spoke of this and shook our heads at how bad it could have been for us, and wondered what the future held for a father-to-be whose short-term memory had been beaten out of him. We mulled over this until last Thursday. That's when his obituary appeared.

Painful Irony

"Crosswalk" by Vermont artist Gillian Klein

The springlike evenings that have marked early November may have been some comfort to the Resident Fan Boy as he lay stunned in the street after a cyclist slammed into him. My regular readers (all five of you) may recall my "gremlin" experience of a couple of weeks ago when I was assailed by fears of my husband's untimely demise on the verge of a business trip to Québec City. So, of course, when the crisis came, it was in a crosswalk less than two blocks from our house. The Resident Fan Boy remembers stepping into the street when the signal changed.

 That's all he remembers.

Back home, I was flitting between tasks, and beginning to wonder why my husband was late. I thought, given the balminess of the day, that he had chosen to walk home from downtown Ottawa which takes about 40 minutes. Elder daughter had left to do homework at a friend's, and of course, she didn't know the number. I had instructed her to call it in when she arrived, so when a classmate pounded on our door a few minutes later, I went prepared to say that elder daughter was gone, and as yet, unpinpointed.

But that wasn't why she was there. Her dad, who knows the Resident Fan Boy from church, had been driving his daughter home from hockey practice when they saw the Resident Fan Boy knocked to the pavement. Her father had the presence of mind to pull his car in front of the RFB's supine body, ignoring the honks and rude gestures from his fellow commuters. His daughter remembered we were up the block and hightailed it to our front steps.

I was attempting to keep calm. I didn't know where elder daughter was, and I couldn't leave younger daughter alone in the house. Luckily, the classmate guessed elder daughter's whereabouts and hauled out the ubiquitous cell phone.

 Somehow, I remembered to turn off the mini-quiches baking in the oven, and she agreed to wait for elder daughter at the house, while I led younger daughter down to the intersection where I could see flashing lights. Pounding on the traffic signal, I bounced impatiently on my heels watching the paramedics shift the Resident Fan Boy onto a body board. Several cars sailed through the red lights past the ambulance before I made it across the road.

It was, as I've noted, a warm evening and there was quite a crowd: the ashen-faced young cyclist who gave me a slip with his information; a medical student who had been waiting for a bus across the road; a pediatrician who patted my arm, saying apologetically, "Wrong kind of doctor!" and her husband. Of course, RFB's fellow church-goers were doing their best to reassure me and fill me in. 

The paramedics were asking me questions. "Hasn't he told you himself?" I stammered, gazing at my husband who looked back at me with mildly bewildered eyes, just before they had to tip the board to allow him to vomit. We were gently steered away before younger daughter saw this; she had begun to cry quietly.

Not much to do. Fellow Church-goer offered to drive younger daughter and me home to pick up things and proceed to the hospital. While my husband was loaded into the ambulance (his first post-accident memory), I watched the passing cars in fascination, honking impatiently, cutting each other off, their drivers chatting on cell phones, oblivious to the irony.

My late grandmother imagined Hell would be an airport. I've always imagined it would be an emergency room: bleak, noisy, frightening and dull, all at the same time. I was not overly surprised when the Resident Fan Boy didn't remember the accident, but I fought back the panic as he asked questions I'd already answered.

 I'm the daughter and the sister of physiotherapists. I know the symptoms of brain injury. At one point, they sat him up in a "peri-chair" to make room for other casualties. He crossed his legs and dozed, occasionally waking to complain of the pain in his head (from the road-rashed haemotoma on his right temple), and his dislocated shoulder.

The really frightening part came when the doctor arrived with the results of his CT-scan, and suddenly he was bustled back to bed.

Two "internal bruises" they said.
Transfer to the Civic campus of the Ottawa General Hospital, they said. 
Neurosurgeons, they said.

And, dear God, that's when I had to leave him, because our younger daughter is Special Needs and I had to get her to bed with the best semblance of normalcy I could muster. The nurses and doctor assured me they would take care of the Resident Fan Boy, but oh, I hated to leave him, all hurt and curled up awkwardly on his uninjured left side...

Home to smooth things over and prepare for a night of phoning Emergency at intervals ("slight bleeding to the brain", they told me at 2 am) and a day of getting younger daughter to second set of a battery of psycho-educational tests.

Obama was sweeping to victory in the States, and in bed, watching the older African-Americans, those who remember Little Rock and Selma and MLK, weep quietly during the acceptance speech, I grieved that Resident Fan Boy, a long-time election junkie, was missing this.

As of today, nearly 48 hours after the accident, the RFB is still in hospital getting mightily ticked off, which is the best sign of all I think. With each phone call and visit, he sounds more like himself.

But oh, you drivers, quit with the cutting off and honking and cell phones! And oh you cyclists, wear your helmets and remember you're a vehicle too! And as for us pedestrians? Practise defensive walking, I guess, because even crossing at the crosswalk with the signal is no guarantee...