AROUND
THE KITCHEN TABLE
By
Donald Ward
Reality
profoundly changed by faith, hope and love
Colleen marked the second
anniversary of her aneurysm Aug. 13 by having a seizure. Ambulance trips
to the hospital, followed by a CT scan and blood tests, are the new
normal in our lives.
A seizure is a short period
of abnormal or excessive activity in the brain. It can be accompanied
by wild, thrashing movements of the arms and legs, or it may involve
no more than a brief loss of awareness. It may be accompanied by convulsions,
and there is often bleeding from the mouth as the sufferer has bitten
her tongue or lip. Usually she remembers nothing about it afterward,
but she may take days to recover, as the experience is exhausting.
Not surprisingly, Colleen wants to know why it keeps happening. I explained it to her in terms of a car travelling on one road suddenly veering off to travel on another. There are an unimaginable number of roads in the human brain, though, with uncountable intersections and millions of traffic lights, so it’s impossible to tell exactly what’s going on.
The doctors have been honest
enough to tell us they don’t know, either,
This seizure was milder than her previous ones have been. She remembered
going into it and coming out, and within half an hour she was alert
and articulate. They decided not to do a CT scan at the hospital because
they had the results of all the previous ones. Her seizures had caused
no additional brain damage before, so there was no reason this latest
one would cause any, either.
In the past, the results
of the scans had always been reassuring, but I saw their point, and
I was reassured by their confidence because it matched my own.
The ER was quiet on a Friday
afternoon, so I assumed the tests would come back fairly quickly. “Last
time it was four hours,” I said.
“That sounds about
right,” the attending nurse said. There were only three other
patients in the cubicles, but the blood work from all the hospitals
in the city goes to the same lab.
By this time Colleen was
becoming impatient. There was nothing wrong with her; she wanted to
go home. “This is silly,” she said.
I was more cautious, but
I had no wish to wait around for another four hours, either, with nothing
to do but imagine the conditions of the patients in the other cubicles.
There was a television in the waiting room, but I couldn’t wait
there with Colleen.
Then a doctor came in and
advised us to go home. He would phone me later with the test results,
he said — mainly they were looking for the level of a particular
medication in Colleen’s bloodstream — and prescribe something
by fax to our local pharmacy if necessary. In the meantime he would
consult with a neurologist and give us a referral that we could follow
up later.
With gratitude, my daughters
and I helped their mother get dressed and took her out to the car. She
was a bit unsteady on her feet, but otherwise none the worse for her
experience. Ironically, she had to sign a form saying that she was leaving
“against medical advice” before they would let her out of
the hospital.
Reality often exceeds expectations,
I’ve found. When people urge you to “face up to reality,”
what they really mean is that you should look at your situation with
despair and expect the worst. This will prepare you for the inevitable
loss you are about to experience. But reality is changed, often profoundly,
by faith, hope and love. I have seen that so often in the past two years
that I cannot doubt it.
I said it in the beginning
and I say it again now: we shall defeat this demon with love.
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