Stroke

by Ricky Monahan Brown

  Finally, I could cry. When we were all done, two friends who were photographers took some shots. There’s one of the two of us extending our ring fingers to the camera, and Beth with a big smile on her face.

  She looks irreverent in that picture. Fucking classy.

  I look like I’m the luckiest guy alive.

  And I am lucky. And alive.

  Beth asks from time to time, ‘Do you ever think about your stroke? Are you aware of it?’

  I think she’s still a little surprised when I tell her that, yes, the residual deficiencies are always there. I’m always more or less aware of them, and particularly so when I’m tired. I have been very lucky, though: I’m fairly mobile, and given the location of my bleed, my expressive abilities are in good shape. Even the odd sensitivity that remains on my left side is weirdly enjoyable, in the right context.

  The estimated five-year survival rate for haemorrhagic strokes is around a quarter. Among the survivors, only around a third of them will go on to live relatively normal lives, and even among that subset, survivors’ experiences will diverge. Some of the luckiest ones will choose to ascribe the quality of their recovery to being stubborn buggers, and, sure, the competitive part of me that misses the intensity of my former life just a little bit and laughs when I pass some guy who is bellowing his putative importance down a mobile phone thinks that a competitive nature contributed to my recovery. Still, even that competitiveness is just part of the random set of variables that allowed for the sort of recovery I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy. I prefer to put much of the quality of that recovery down to the quality of the two and a half years I had already spent in Beth’s company, and the crazy, ridiculous dream of trying to get back to them again. While at the same time, remembering that none of us lucky ones would be part of that lucky third without exactly that – pure, dumb luck. Someone being present at the moment of the brain attack, a major neighbourhood hospital with a specialisation in neuroscience, a quick ambulance, the exact location of the attack, any one of hundreds of more variables. If love and hard work solved all the problems arising from a brain bleed, there would be a lot more alive and happy people in the world.

  Not that it was all luck. A lot of people did work really hard. The anonymous EMTs. Doctor Ayad, Doctor Im, Doctor Mihailos, Doctor Karp, Doctor Blum, Doctor Grunwald and Sparky and all the other doctors who attended to me. Steph and Sonoko and Liat and Michelle and Rodney and Ali and Dawn and Carrie and Ranjan and Mary and all the therapists. Paul and Jen and Jonathan and Matt From The Darts Team and Ex-Flatmate Mat and all the friends. Our parents, Ray and Kathy, and Paw Broon. Most of all, Beth, the love of my life.

  In my post-stroke interest in the way the brain works, I’ve discovered that the latest theories indicate that the phenomenon whereby time seems to speed up as we get older isn’t explained by the proportionality theory that suggests a year feels faster when you’re older because that year is a smaller portion of your life. The psychology writer and broadcaster Claudia Hammond says that the phenomenon arises due to something called the reminiscence bump, which in turn arises from novelty. It’s why we remember the experiences of our formative years so vividly; that’s when we experience so many things for the first time. Sexual relationships, leaving home, first jobs. The details around them reinforce the formation of our identity. It’s the reason your favourite album came out when you were seventeen.

  People who undergo a major transformation of identity later in life tend to experience this phenomenon. I’ve certainly met other stroke survivors – who continue to cope with quite serious deficits – who appear to have been able to use that turning point in their lives to find new purpose and enthusiasms that keep them young-seeming. The lucky ones, that is.

  I’m wondering if I should get remarried every five years – to Beth, of course – to slow down these remaining years and feel young. There’s so much to fit in.

  Epilogue

  As Good a Place as Any

  ‘Beth, honey. Do you think I should call the hospital?’ I ask from the next room.

  ‘You’re breaking your vows!’

  She’s been putting it off, waiting to see how things develop. She doesn’t want it to be nothing. However, we’ve been in that place before where the temptation is to delay, and the feeling is growing more intense. So Beth agrees that I should call Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary and try to convince them that they need to see my wife. The woman on the other end of the line asks for the details of what Beth is feeling, and I tell her everything I know.

  ‘Can you give her the phone, please?’

  ‘I’m not really sure that she’s able to talk right now.’

  ‘Bring me the phone!’ Beth calls from the bedroom.

  I do, and she makes it clear to the operator that we have to come in now. She’s still a New Yorker, right enough. The hospital is on the other side of the city, so I grab the go bag and help my wife down the stairs to the car. It’s a route we’re familiar with, up and out of the lower part of the city where we live, through the city centre and off out past the edge of Liberton, where my father’s father grew up. I’ve been ferried there with another asthma attack since we moved to Edinburgh, although that issue seems to have entirely settled down, now. I’ve had to take my father there a few times, and Beth and I have been there for any number of check-ups.

  Not long after Beth is admitted, our friend Penny arrives. She’s another American, an academic of a certain age, with whom we’ve become firm friends since moving to Edinburgh. She’s Beth’s kindred spirit, highly educated and feisty. For today, she’s our Edinburgh Sparky – here to look after me as much as Beth, and help clean up the mess. Penny and I sit with Beth as members of the medical team come in and out. I suppose I must feel just about as helpless as Beth did on that night back in Brooklyn.

  Penny and I chunter aimlessly on to try to distract Beth from any worries she might have, but things don’t seem to be getting any better. Time passes, and the rotating cast of young women who have been looking after her are beginning to look concerned. It’s beginning to look like there’s going to have to be some sort of intervention. Penny can’t stay.

  ‘Do you want your partner to stay? Do you want to stay?’

  ‘Yes,’ we both reply, and I follow as Beth is moved to a bed that can be wheeled to the operating theatre.

  When we arrive, I’m taken aside to scrub up appropriately, and when I return, the anaesthesiologist and the surgeon are talking Beth through what’s happening.

  ‘I like Irish people,’ she tells the anaesthesiologist, and he does seem very assured and relaxed.

  A nurse brings a chair for me and invites me to sit. As the procedure proceeds, I am instructed to stand from time to time while the chair is moved to where I am out of the way of the people who are doing the real work, and where I won’t be exposed to anything that might be considered distressing, then I am invited to sit again.

  There’s a moment of quiet as everyone else in the room works intently, and for a second I fear the worst. Then, when the surgeon is sure that Beth and the baby are going to be fine, he asks if I would like to stand and see our son being delivered. Of course I would, and in no time our wee boy is handed to a couple of nurses and the four of us go into an adjoining room to put him under a heat lamp and massage some life into his little body and have me cut the cord that still connects him to the delivered placenta. Then we return to the theatre, where Beth has been made comfortable and can hold the baby for the first time.

  It’s all very efficient, and as I look around the wide, bright room and the expert surgeon and the anaesthesiologist and the nurses, and consider the midwives who had attended to Beth in the birthing centre, I think to myself that Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary is as good a place for Ruairidh Hugh Monahan Brown to be born as any.

  Acknowledgments

  I’m very grateful to the many people without whom I or this book – and in some cases, both – would not exist.

  Thank you to ever
yone at Sandstone Press who gave Stroke a chance and helped make it something better than I could have imagined on my own. Thanks in particular to my sympathetic and insightful editor, Kay Farrell, who made the process of finishing Stroke fresh when that was exactly what it needed.

  Almost everyone who appears in this book in one form or another deserves thanks, not least the legion of paramedics, doctors, nurses and therapists who walk the pages. Thank you to all of them, especially Dr Ayad and Dr Im. I hope that my affection for them all shines through this story. Thanks are also due to the many stroke survivors I have encountered on this journey, every one of whom is brilliant and brave in their own unique way. The same goes for their many supporters.

  Thank you to everyone who took the time to visit me in hospital. I can’t tell you how much that meant and still means to me. Thanks, in fact, to all of our friends, and very special thanks to Jen and Paul and Jill. Your friendship and support means the world to us, and we will always be grateful for it.

  This book wouldn’t exist without the many teachers and students at the University of Edinburgh who have shared their wisdom and friendship with me over the years. Special mention must go to Allyson Stack of the School of Literatures, Languages & Cultures and to my comrade Beth Cochrane. Thanks to anyone who has ever considered themselves an Interrobanger, in any capacity at all. You know who you are. Thanks also to Ken Wilensky and Michael and Philip Vessa, and to Anushka Sinha, without whose wise counsel this book would have been completed under very different circumstances.

  I very much appreciate the support of the magazines, newspapers and journals that have published my short fiction, narrative non-fiction and poetry, as well as the folks who have given me the opportunity to present various artistic endeavours in front of various audiences. Particular thanks are due in both of these regards to 404 Ink. Portions of this book originally appeared, in earlier and different versions, in 404 Ink Literary Magazine – Issue 3: POWER (December 2017) and in Marbles #3 (May 2018).

  Building to a crescendo, special thanks to our families, who did what families are meant to do and came through and gave us their support when times were tough.

  Finally, and most importantly, my eternal gratitude to Beth Monahan Brown, my muse, my patron and the love of my life. You started the process of saving my life long before the night of The Event, and you do it every day. It turned out that I did need you in my life, more than either of us could have imagined. Although somehow, I think I always knew.

  This is, after all, a love story.

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