You’re going to be okay

Twenty years already. Really?

I have pretty vivid memories of August 22, 2000. It was a Tuesday, and I simply don’t remember what the morning and workday were like. I imagine they were unremarkable. An event on the bike ride home was life-changing, and in the moment, hours and a few days forward had a very real possibility of being life-ending.

I was rolling westward on Mount Hope, a major four lane thoroughfare from Okemos on the east, through East Lansing and Lansing. I was approaching the intersection of Mount Hope and Aurelius. This corner has a rural feel while being well within the city limits of Lansing. The northeast corner is a wetland, and former toxic waste site. Across Mount Hope is Fenner Arboretum, acres of trees and prairie. The southwest corner is a vast cemetery, and the northwest corner were greenhouses and a tree nursery. What it did not have was anyone or any place to get help.

Slowing to stop, I tilted my head to look at the red light facing me. A sharp pain suddenly occurred, and I thought, ‘Oh, great. A crick in my neck.’ In only a couple of seconds, the ‘crick’ was re-defining what 10 was on the pain scale. In just a few seconds more, I was sure this was either a stroke, or a brain aneurysm. With no place to get help, I resigned myself to bike the rest of the way home. The light turned green, and I began to pedal. Once through the intersection, a new thought, ‘I can ride my bike, so I guess it’s not a stroke. An aneurysm, then. Not good.’

I made it the mile and a half home, shoved my bicycle into the garage, and made my way weakly into our house. ‘Hello, Sweet Pea,’ greeted my wife, Marcia, ‘Are you okay? Do you have a migraine?’ My one syllable reply ‘No’ must have told her something. ‘Do you need to go to Emergency? ‘Yes.’ I muttered.

I think I went to the bathroom, changed from cycling shorts to regular shorts, and walked to the car. “Take the pork chops out of the oven in fifteen minutes. I’ll be back, or get someone to stay with you. Dad will be alright’, said Marcia in a raised, but calm, voice.

We went to the nearest emergency department, a mere five blocks away. For a couple of minutes, we waited patiently in the waiting room. The person ahead of us, an elderly man was speaking loud enough for us to hear, about a fall he had four weeks ago, and was just now seeking treatment. ‘I think I’m going to throw-up from the pain’, I told Marcia. Apparently, magic words in triage. I was quickly moved to a wheelchair, the other man moved aside, and I was taken to an exam room while Marcia was finishing the paperwork. My wristband had my arrival time of 18:13 or 6:13 PM, less than 25 minutes from the intersection where the pain started. ‘He needs a head CT, and morphine for pain’, the doctor ordered. In just a few minutes, the doctor reports back: ‘You have bleeding in your brain. A sub-arachnoid hemorrhage, an aneurysm most likely. We’re going to need to transfer you to Sparrow’s Neurointensive care, but there aren’t any beds available in the unit, so we have to wait until they clear a bed.’

I felt anxious, and scared; bad, but not too bad. My pain was tolerable, until it wasn’t. It was already more pain than I had ever felt, and now it was even worse. More morphine was given, and my mind went wandering. Disassociated sentence fragments: ‘A different room’, ‘a room with a monitor’. I hear a baby crying. The baby with a broken arm is playing with a ball with a jingle bell inside is what I hear, unable to make any sense of the monitor beeps and alarm signals that were actually happening.

Lying in a bed, in the dark, hallucinating – this is how it ends? Except that time has become fluid, now and then, past, present and future are watercolors running together. A real sense of fear that I won’t survive.

Lights switched on, the EMT’s arrived to take me to Sparrow. They lifted me from my bed to the gurney, connected me to a portable monitor, and away we went. There had been a bad storm with a lot of lightning. ‘Power’s out all over the place. I’ve never seen lightning like this’, said one of the EMT’s. I tried to figure out what roads we were taking by the motion of the ambulance. ‘Can’t take Pennsylvania, it’s flooded again under the railroad bridge’, the EMT continued.

Arriving at Sparrow, I can smell the rain evaporating from the sun-warmed concrete. (That smell takes me right back to the ambulance bay, to this day.)

The resident doctor, and a doctor just beginning her rotation in NICU, and a nurse went through the intake process. Simple questions to assess my brain function: What is your name? What day is it? Do you know where you are? Who is the president?

The nurse asked if I had an advance directive. ‘What’s that?’, I asked. She explained. ‘Do I need one?’, I asked. She responded, ‘Well, you’re conscious right now.’ I took that to mean that I was still conscious, but that could or would change.

Finally, I was all hooked up to the equipment, more drugs administered, and I was left alone. I realized that I had been holding on to the fear of dying, like a clenched muscle held for too long. Clearly, being intensive care meant that my condition was serious, if not, critical.

Somewhere in that brief interlude, I ‘heard’ words as clear as if they were spoken to me: ‘You’re going to be okay.’ It was not a thought that was circulating in my head, and it was attached to the feeling of being okay – simply okay. It was unconnected to an outcome, as if in the moment, living, surviving or dying were states that I would be okay in, no matter what.

Twenty years on, I still can be comforted by the simple thought: You’re going to be okay.