What My Stroke Taught Me
In my memories of the Scottish hospital, the sky is always blue, though I know that can’t be completely accurate. Summer was waning, and as my friends and I had already experienced, Edinburgh was prone to unpredictable storms. Yet, I can’t think of a single moment of rain in the two weeks I lay in bed. My morphine-soaked haze only allowed glimpses and fragments: the bracing air coming in from an open window, the rough comfort of my mother’s fingers wiping my fever-moist brow, my father’s tears. All of that must have been confusing to me, but when I think of this time, I remember more clarity than confusion. I remember the Quiet.
This was not a Quiet I had known before. It was a placid current, a presence more than an absence. Everything I saw or touched or heard pulsed with a marvelous sense of order. I had a nothing mind, a flotsam mind. I was incredibly focused on the present, with very little awareness or interest in my past or future. My entire environment felt interconnected, like cells in a large, breathing organism. To experience this Quiet was to be it.
However, this sense of serenity was not shared by those around me. After I had collapsed in an Edinburgh bar while singing karaoke, and the medics had taken me away in an ambulance, my friends called my parents in the United States. It was the middle of the night in Edinburgh, but early evening in Los Angeles, and no one was overly worried about my fall from the stage, since it appeared I was suffering a simple concussion. That all changed two hours after my hospital admission—when the results of my CT scan showed the actual crisis unfolding. An aneurysm had ruptured in my brain and the hemorrhage was spreading. A neuroradiologist explained to my parents how precarious my situation was—how often people died the instant an aneurysm ruptured, and even after treatment, only slightly more than half of these patients actually survive the next few days. With every second being critical, the doctor was preparing for an emergency operation. But my now-horrified parents were stranded in California. Their passports were in their safety deposit box, and the bank branch was closed for the night. My parents rattled on the windows of the bank the next morning, successfully convincing the bank to open early for them because there was no time to waste. My procedure was well under way when my parents boarded their flight the next morning, leaving my brother and grandmother behind at the house. The operation was already over when they got
