Stroke

by Ricky Monahan Brown

  It didn’t help that, at the time of my admittance, HJD was being renovated. Although the wards themselves, with their shiny, polished blue floors, were spick and span, the corridors were lined with mysterious items of hospital equipment. Thick polythene sheets draped along the hallways made the shapes of things blurry and indistinct. The elevators moved slowly. The voices of late-night visitors and the pleas of the stricken floated through the scenes of dilapidation. Despite the efforts of the staff, there was something phantasmagoric about the scene, mirroring as it did the disarray and confusion in the minds of the patients.

  I was moved into a two-man ward with a man named Alfonso Dallier. My first memory of Alfonso is that of meeting someone I already knew. I still had little handle on the passing of time, and memories still tended not to stick. Alfonso was memorable, though. Originally from Mali, he had subsequently spent a number of years in Haiti. Of possibly advanced but indeterminate age, his face was chiselled but not harsh, bobbling above a wiry frame. He was at his impish best flirting with the nurses, or scooting down the halls, gown flapping and tiny wee bum peeking out. With his carers in hot pursuit, he looked like nothing so much as the mischievous Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes, if Calvin was an eighty-something-year-old stroke victim.

  More often, Alfonso was in a heightened state of fury. He was furious about people who came into the room backwards. ‘He can’t come in like that!’ he would yell.

  He was furious about people getting his age wrong. To make matters worse, it seemed that no one could figure out from his records exactly how old he was. ‘I’m not eighty-three! I’m eighty-two!’

  He was furious when I kept my light on at night. ‘Make him switch it off!’ Being scared of the dark, he was equally furious about all the lights being switched off. ‘Switch the light back on!’

  He was especially furious when people wouldn’t attend to his constant demands.

  ‘Help me! I’m not dead yet!’

  ‘Well, no, mate,’ I would mutter to myself. ‘I can tell that by the bloody racket you’re making.’

  In fact, Alfonso could rage about anything. Over the course of a single morning, his rants could run from the state of the US healthcare system to the location of his pants. Which was a wide canvas. Despite all that, the first clear memory I have of Alfonso is not of his belligerent face contorted with rage, but the face of a scared old man.

  My first proper memory of Alfonso is one of the first memories I managed to make after my stroke.

  Having spent most of three and a half weeks in bed, and many of the nights fretting and perseverating, I would often wake during the night. Perseveration is a phenomenon I would never have been aware of if I hadn’t had a stroke. It means the repetition or prolonging of an action, thought or utterance after the stimulus that prompted it has ceased, and it’s an important word in this story.

  On this particular night, I was free of the condom catheter and awoke with a need to use the toilet. While I knew I was in the hospital as I began to create this new memory, I was too discombobulated to remember that I had suffered a stroke that had paralysed my left side.

  I pushed myself up, somehow, with a view to making my way to the toilet, wherever that was. I got, maybe, two steps across the room before Alfonso’s terrified face sped up at me from his bed. Good old Alfonso, though. He might have been scared of the dark, but in the face of ten stone of Scotsman crashing onto his elderly frame in the middle of the night, he located his panic button, and the nurses arrived in no time to get me back to bed.

  The 24-hour watch was resumed.

  From that moment on, I had a certain affection for Alfonso, notwithstanding his ornery nature. In my mind, I cordially christened him ‘The Wee Man’. For all his intransigence, Alfonso wasn’t a bad bloke. He prided himself on being a ‘church man’, who was ‘in the choir’. Although, oddly enough, when he got the Sunday service on the telly, it seemed pretty clear that even I’d make a better fist of ‘Christ Is My Saviour’, the twenty years separating me from Wardie Parish Church and my express bus ticket to hell for being a securitisation lawyer who had torpedoed his marriage notwithstanding.

  By the time I was transferred to the Hospital for Joint Diseases, it had become evident to Beth that the irreverence she so valued would be the key to us getting out of this storm together. For better or worse, she had tied herself to the mast of my ship. Otherwise, there was nothing to stop her from walking away. Nothing except love and the memory of the man she had been dating at the end of September.

  What do you do when the person you’re with is destroyed? Because make no mistake, for the time being, I had been destroyed. If a man is the collection of his memories, I had been erased.

  At Methodist, I would be asked, not just every day, but with every change of shift, the usual set of questions for the victim of a brain injury. Things like, ‘What’s your name?’ and ‘How old are you?’

  Most days, I knew who I was. On one day, I asked a passing resident doctor for some ice chips. ‘Get me some ice chips! I’m a very important man. I’m going to be the vice president!’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of the country, man! What do you think?’

  Getting my age right was always difficult. My stroke had occurred two weeks after my birthday, and that hadn’t been enough time for my new age to take. I was like someone writing the wrong date on his cheques after the turn of the year.

  As well as not being quite sure when I was, I couldn’t say where I was. One day, a resident doctor stood at the end of my bed and asked the usual questions. Beth sat in a hard plastic bucket seat, biting her nails and wincing with every enquiry.

  ‘Do you know where you are?’

  My eyes skittered back and forth as I scanned the empty space in my head. I threw out a guess. ‘A school?’

  ‘No. Can you try again?’

  ‘A building?’ I’d given up. I just wanted this to be over.

  The doctor persevered. ‘What kind of building?’

  ‘An office building?’

  Beth tried to help. ‘Have a look around.’

  I had a look around. Oh my god. ‘Am I in a hospital?’

  ‘Yes. You’re in hospital. Do you know why you’re here?’

  My eyes moistened. ‘Oh, crap. Have I had another stroke?’

  ‘No, Lover,’ Beth reassured me. ‘Just the one.’

  On one of our last nights out before the stroke, Beth and I had gone to a storytelling night in Brooklyn. The host, a guy called Peter Aguero, told a story about his wife, a woman with epilepsy. After she has a seizure there’s a thirty-minute period during which she’s like a computer rebooting. Every single time, he’s convinced that this is it, and he’s never going to see her again. That wherever she goes when she has the seizure, she’s never going to come back. Beth had a similar experience with me. I would bounce between good days and bad, and my mental presence would wax and wane like a sine curve, but less predictably. She worried that my recovery would be less like a computer rebooting, and more like our bloody awful cable box. I’d just sit there, stuck at some useless point, able to identify her as ‘my friend and helper’, but not able to recall what we always liked to call ‘Our Thing’.

  I did refer to Beth as my friend and helper one day. In my mind, it was meant to be sweet. She was my best friend. I wanted to acknowledge, without becoming too maudlin, how much I appreciated everything she was doing for me, but it just made her feel a little sad and scared. I only found out about that some time afterwards, because it’s difficult to gently communicate with a stroke patient. Whereas Our Thing was constant communication. Crashing weddings for free gin. Call and response in-jokes. Charming strangers as a couple in bars.

  In the short years, the too short years, leading up to my stroke, Beth and I would separately listen to a sex and relationships advice podcast each week. Maybe on the commute to work or on the train back to Harry’s to play in the darts league or at the office desk, eating lunch. Then we’d sit on the
balcony of our apartment to smoke and dissect that week’s calls and the host’s responses. Dan Savage would often return to his theory that there is no such thing as a soul mate. That there is no such thing as The One, but there are The Ones. What there is, is someone close enough to The One that we can make a decision to round them up.

  It was a theory that appealed to the rational romantics on the balcony. The dissection was good practice to instil the openness and confirm the compatibility our relationship needed. Sitting on our balcony before The Event, the warm glow generated by and for eight million souls cast across the red brick turrets of the 14th Regiment Armory opposite, Beth and I had reflected on what would become of us if our romance ended. We each speculated that we would return to our original post-failed marriage lives. For me, a string of increasingly infrequent affairs, each more melancholy than the last, as the shadow cast by the loss of the love of my life lengthened. She would return to her independent life, offering herself to a gay friend as a surrogate to satisfy any maternal urge. We would get by.

  Now, having half-glimpsed the possibility of a wee, bobble-headed, half-Scottish toddler one night in bed not so many months ago, Beth walked along the side of our apartment building, listening to the Lumineers on her way to get the subway to HJD. While the fulfilment of our daydreams seemed less likely, the alternative scenarios looked less tolerable. So, somehow, when she would get to the hospital, we would cling on to our daydreams. We would talk about opening a distillery in the Highlands. Incredibly, Beth had written in her diary, on Day Seven, I think it might be a really good idea.

  As far-fetched as they must have seemed at this juncture, these conversations helped us. We managed to maintain pleasant chats about the next post-recovery steps in our relationship. We discovered that’s important for a couple recovering from a stroke. The dreams and aspirations that do so much to sustain a relationship can be drowned in the blood and shit and tears and snot of the harsh reality of a stroke. It was good to remember from time to time that a partnership is for better, as well as for worse.

  As we chatted on the first Sunday after my transfer to HJD, Beth told me that everyone in the city was talking about the impending arrival of the hurricane that the media, and even the government, would soon nickname Superstorm Sandy. Sandy had started with a tropical wave in the Caribbean six days earlier, on Monday. By the time the weekend came around, awareness of the approaching storm had permeated the therapeutic bubble that cocooned HJD’s patients. The staff talked about it and swapped the news they had heard, and the hospital’s plans, with their friends at other institutions. On the wall at the far end of my bed, CNN ran on a TV at the end of a hinged, black metal arm.

  They were talking about a Frankenstorm. The term was meant to evoke the joining of Hurricane Sandy with a second storm front as it approached the east coast, to create a monster storm. As I lay crippled in bed, watching the news describe the six different levels of evacuation threat being allocated to New York neighbourhoods, the word grabbed me roughly by my delicate neural circuits.

  Certainly, as Sandy approached New York, she appeared increasingly monstrous. My experience of storm scares in the north-east had been that they would be talked up before blowing themselves out just off the coast. This time, the news reports talked of Sandy barrelling north-west towards New Jersey. This time, she did. As Sandy smashed into Jersey, there was speculation that she would push a wall of water into New York Harbor. The coastline around New York Harbor channelled the water that Sandy was blowing from the Atlantic into the city and into a narrower and narrower region. Because New York is mostly at or below sea level, includes large swathes of reclaimed land and is set within a coastline of bays, inlets and funnels, the threat was all the worse.

  As hour after hour of immaculately coifed, interchangeable anchors gleefully celebrated the fact that there was some real news to report, the rise of the waters in New York Harbor and the Gowanus Canal was mirrored by the rise of the anxiety in the topography of my brain. Throughout my stays in Methodist and Rusk, I was often agitated, and when this agitation descended, the nurses would hail Beth’s arrival. When I saw her arrive, whatever was going on would blow away like a cumulus humilis, and a sunny smile would emerge as I exclaimed, ‘Oh hi, Baby!’

  On the night of Sunday, 28th October, the day before Sandy’s arrival in the city, the Metropolitan Transport Authority shut down the city’s subway system. Beth left the office and went to Union Market to pick up some groceries before hunkering down. The experts were predicting that Sandy would sit over the metropolitan area for two or three days once she hit. They advised the populace to batten down the hatches, get supplies in, and prepare for the science that kept New York City running to be battered into the stone age. The city’s electricity would be going down, we were warned. Cell phone coverage would fail.

  By Monday, the storm had settled in the city like an ageing Scottish hipster and wasn’t going anywhere. The Breezy Point neighbourhood of Queens was ablaze, after rising sea water flooded the electrics of a home in the area. One hundred and twenty-two homes were destroyed in that neighbourhood alone. The news was apocalyptic. Intrepid reporters stood on the Jersey Shore, being pelted by the waves pouring over the boardwalk. The Gowanus, just six blocks down the Park Slope from our apartment, and one of the most contaminated bodies of water in the United States, poured over its banks and into homes.

  Then there was a massive phosphoric flash at the ConEd substation on 14th Street at the FDR Highway in Manhattan, clearly visible from across the river in Brooklyn. The blast looked deafening to the Brooklynites, even though nothing could be heard over the roar of the wind. A transformer had been flooded, and the resulting explosion knocked out power below Midtown. Liquid had compromised the city and destroyed its functionality.

  Up on 57th Street, a 150-foot crane boom flapped to and fro in the winds, twisted and crumpled, uncontrollable, like a stroke patient’s weak arm. Reporters worriedly admitted that nobody knew if the damaged limb could be brought under control before disaster struck, and it plunged a thousand feet onto a gas main. The power outages extended to Langone Medical Center at First Avenue at 30th Street on the East Side, where nurses were carrying newborns down nine flights of stairs so they could be transferred to a location with power.

  At HJD, the backup generator was operational, but no non-essential lights were operating. The two patients in Room 920, addled by the unfamiliarity of their situation, even before Sandy hit, were plunged into their own personal Bedlam. Poor Alfonso, scared of the dark, demanded that power be restored.

  My mind raced in perpetual, uncontrolled disquiet, and I begged to be allowed to use a phone. In the face of my ranting neighbour, I just needed to talk to my girlfriend, the nice girl with the brown hair and the glasses. She was clever and brave. She could persuade the staff to let me go home into her soothing embrace.

  The problem was, the phones didn’t work. I couldn’t call Beth. She couldn’t call me, and couldn’t get any information online. For the only day during my stays a Methodist and HJD, she couldn’t visit me, and I was lost. Unable for the most part to create new memories, I was without the anchor who tethered me to the frightening world outside. I was without the person who, as confused and out of time as I was, triggered something that made me smile whenever she walked into the room. That one day stretched and stretched, and without the ability to gauge the passing of time, the prospect of getting out and going home seemed to recede. Without Beth’s reassuring presence, the idea of going home suddenly didn’t seem any less frightening than lying in a hospital bed as the storm raged over the city.

  At last, Sandy relented, and the city haltingly checked the extent of the destruction, and what was working. By Tuesday evening, Beth’s fellow citizens were still in their homes and the roads were empty. She got a lift into town from Sparky, the ideal man for this job. An ear, nose and throat doctor, with a talent for facial reconstruction surgery, he was unflappable. With a banana suit in the trunk, he had
the requisite irreverence. Besides, because he worked a hundred hours a week, he was prone to falling asleep at the wheel and crashing, so empty streets were a good thing.

  When they arrived, Beth and Sparky found me still awake, with the rattled Alfonso and our 24-hour watch nurse for company. Sparky had to get back to Brooklyn, so they weren’t able to stay for long, in the dark. Still, the easy familiarity of Beth and her best pal was a salve after two days during which I had been plagued by terrible angels standing upon the sea and the earth, clothed in dark clouds, their feet as pillars of fire, their voices roaring like thunder along the claustrophobic Downtown streets.

  I still wanted to go home. Beth could only promise to come back the next day.

  By Wednesday, downtown New York had spent days in darkness. The staff at HJD couldn’t regulate the patients’ body clocks with electric light. The city outside, though, was slowly coming back to life. Beth was expected back at work, even though her office in the Financial District would be out of commission for six weeks. The foyer of the building conveyed the solidity and affluence of the typical late twentieth century financial cathedral while eschewing ostentatious flash, as required by tradition. A lustrous marble floor escorted the slap of leather brogues and the click of office heels past multiple security desks to various banks of elevators and escalators that ferried masters of the universe and peons up to the offices and cubicles above and down to the Dunkin’ Donuts and the dry cleaner’s below. In a world that was working properly, there would be no need to leave the building to attend to sustenance or hygiene.

  On this day, the scene downstairs resembled something from a post-apocalyptic movie. The cleaner’s and the doughnut chain store were completely submerged in floodwaters that reached the top of the basement stairs. Similar scenes were replicated across New York. There would be no power in the East Village for the rest of the week. The subways remained inert. Of course, even an act of god couldn’t stop the gears of finance, so Beth had to report for work at another office in Brooklyn. At least that was a little more local. The MTA had decreed that city buses would be free on Wednesday and Thursday. With everyone going back to work, the subway down and the city’s petrol stations dry, the three-mile trip from 15th Street took two hours.