An Excerpt from Chapter One of Flashes of Light: How to reboot your life, your business or both when chaos strikes by Ann M. Babiarz, as told to Michael A. Babiarz
Creative Consultant: K. Lee — Editor: Annamaria Farbizio
©2015 by Ann M. Babiarz and Michael A. Babiarz, J.D., all rights reserved (see notice below)
Chapter 1: In the Beginning (part 5)
My ER nurse proved prescient, and instead of being discharged home, as I dearly wished, I moved from emergency services to intensive care. I was grateful that most of the staff there went out of their way to ignore my husband’s presence in my room before or after the set visiting hours. I not only craved his comfort and companionship, but he helped interface with the now bewildering parade of doctors, therapists, and other assorted medical personnel who seemed to enter and depart my room at all hours of the day and night. The aphasia at that point was severe, and it made it difficult to interact with medical providers who, overstressed and overburdened, spent limited time with me.
Communication is key for even the simplest of everyday activities. Yet we often don’t recognize how precious it is until it is compromised in some fashion. During my stay in ICU, staff did not want me up and about, no doubt due to the risk of subsequent strokes. I had no appetite nor thirst, as IV tubes continued to sustain me. Although my husband always jokes with me about being a urinary camel, the inevitable urge hit several hours after being moved to this unit. My nurse smiled, and returned with a bedpan. I’m not sure if it was my years of training to be a lady, a feeling of humiliation, or some deep-rooted psychological trauma, no doubt with which a therapist might have a field day, but my bladder decided I could wait. The nurse misinterpreted my impaired speech to mean an inability to go rather than a lack of need, and within the hour, a staffer catheterized me. This was the first of many ignominies.
Back on the home front, we discovered two more urinary dromedaries. Carl and Willy, accustomed to relieving themselves 4 to 5 times per day, now found their primary caretaker, Michael, otherwise occupied. Forced to wait 12 to 14 hours between walkies, our two now-geriatric hounds were good as gold. Throughout the days, weeks and even months that followed, they cooperated beautifully with irregular and chaotic schedules. While we tend to unduly anthropomorphize our pets, I felt they sensed the situation and adjusted their behaviors accordingly.
Soon, deemed stable enough to move from ICU, I transitioned to a regular stroke recovery unit in the hospital. I believe however, that prior to my transfer (although my memory is foggy about the timing at this point), I got a comprehensive consult from a neurologist. He explained that I was a lucky woman. I didn’t so much have a stroke as a shower. Blood clots littered various areas of my brain. Fortunately, the only notable impairment from this shotgunning was expressive aphasia. Fortunately!?
The elephant remaining in the room was the cause. A battery of tests so far turned up nothing. From the test for certain legal and illegal drugs in my bloodstream administered in the ER — apparently younger people having strokes are often the result of drug experimentation — to various scans and exams, I kept presenting as a vibrant and remarkably healthy woman, with one obvious exception.
During those hours in the ER, ICU, and then the stroke recovery unit, as I watched almost detached from the scurrying activity around me, in crept my first sense of a dark heaviness. What if I could not regain my speech? A coach who cannot talk is a coach without a business. What if I was permanently disabled? And what of the bills that were to come from this hospital visit? I had a bare-bones hospitalization insurance plan, selected because of its low cost and my excellent health record. I would have been required to purchase a more comprehensive plan, but the government modified regulations under the Affordable Care Act to allow people to keep their own plans. Ironically, had I been forced into a different arrangement, I would’ve had better coverage. I fretted within my head about mounting numbers being calculated somewhere within the bowels of the hospital’s computers.
My normally positive personality now battled with dark thoughts of a fearful future.
Read more of Chapter One in our next posting — blog posts entered Mondays and Thursdays. For information on the book, please visit: Flashes of Light.
©2015 by Ann M. Babiarz and Michael A. Babiarz, J.D., all rights reserved
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