I only found out recently how the kids felt the next morning when they woke up without me. My younger one said “ I cried.” I never knew that. All I knew was that they went to school but were later taken to the airport and put on a plane for Nassau. My mother and the kids ended up staying with friends. She thought it wasn’t a good idea to let them come to the hospital so they spent the first few days shopping and going to the beach.
Initially when I arrived at the hospital the doctors were talking about migraines, possible sinus infection or a nervous breakdown, I was too young for anything else. The first night there I had a major pain attack in my head and I recall the nurses rushing in and giving me a shot. I had all sorts of i.v.’s going. The most painful was the Potassium one. It burned and after having it on and off for a month, it ultimately scarred the veins in my arms making them hard and painful.
When my X walked into the room, I was aware he was on his way from Europe, I was happier than I had been in months. His face was a real joy for me. He stayed with me, stroked my hair, and made me feel like everything was okay. Even curled up and slept with me overnight on the tiny hospital bed within the tangle of i.v. tubing. On the third day he even took me into the shower and washed my hair for me. It was one of the few times I remember pure and utter love from him. That was short lived.
A month before I had started seeing T. I use the term “seeing” loosely. It was a phone relationship for the most part, an intense one, that had included 3 days together. I never thought it would be serious enough to tell my X, otherwise I would have. Even worse, T was peripherally connected to my X as a work colleague and had just spent his last two days in Europe, the period when I had the emergency and entered hospital, working with him. He had just found out.
The truth is that over the next few months this relationship morphed and grew into something that was wonderful and painful at the same time. The X and I fought on and off about my new attachment, and I questioned it too, but not until much later. T ruled my life and my other relationships until fairly recently when I made the decision to walk away.
The next day the kids came to visit me for the first time. My older one, M, was like me, just asked nicely how I was then pretended like I was perfectly fine. My younger one, D, stood at the end of the bed tearing up, not wanting to come near me. I realized my voice was probably scaring her. It was very high pitched. I would find out much later that was due to a paralyzed vocal chord. Someone described it as my “Minnie Mouse” voice.
She eventually came toward me and sat on the edge of the bed, but wouldn’t look at me. It weirded me out, but I coaxed her and soon she was better, not her normal self, but close enough to get her to talk a bit. D and I have always been emotionally connected and her reaction to my illness is still there, the concern, the worry, the anxiety over whether I will leave her again.
Both my mother and my X were concerned that the hospital hadn’t done the tests right. They pressed them to do an MRI below the neck as all the previous tests had been done only on the head. As I was wheeled over to the MRI room the kids ran in to say goodbye. They were leaving with him to return to work in Europe. They would stay with him for the duration of my illness, a couple of weeks, the doctor had assured us.
He had also made arrangements for my mother and I to fly back to Toronto and go to a hospital there. We would leave in two days. Just after I said bye to him and the kids, we were given the results of the MRI. I had had a stroke. It was called Wallenberg’s Syndrome, a tearing of the arteries leading to my brain stem. A clot had formed in the right one, the worse damaged of the two. I would end up in hospital for 3 months.
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