Monique knew the mountain did not take her husband’s life, but in her heart she felt he was still buried somewhere deep within its womb. He must still be there...because the Roberto Sanchez, the husband, the father, the man she knew and loved, did not come home six months ago.
It took two long days of travelling for Jenny and Monique to get to Kathmandu. Those two days were filled with an anticipation neither one of them had ever experienced before. They came directly from the airport. The moment the cab stopped, they shot through the doors into the clinic where Robert was, forgetting all their luggage. Fortunately, the cab driver caught them before they started up the stairs.
“Ah, just put their luggage behind my desk. It will be safe there,” said Doctor Tiber, a young man who was dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans and possessed a Grizzly Adams lumberjack beard that matched his outfit. “Ah, it’s great to meet you, Mrs. Sanchez, and you must be...Little Rock?” He reached both his hands out to Monique and Jenny and shook their hands at the same time.
“Robert has told me so much about the two of you. Now, your husband is doing well but when you go in, he might be a bit groggy because I had to give him something for the pain.”
“Pain?” Monique asked. Pain? Somehow in the euphoria of the miracle, Monique had not thought of pain, only joy and rebirth.
“Yes, he is in quite a bit of pain. His leg—”
Monique interrupted the doctor. “Oh, yes they had told us that he hurt his legs.”
“Well...” The doctor sort of grimaced as he said that. “Well, yeah, the hurt is quite extensive. But, look, I’m sorry, we can talk about this later. You must want to see him. Please follow me.”
Kathmandu was not a rich city and its hospital clinic reflected that. But Jenny and Monique took little notice of the doctor, who looked as if he had just been out chopping wood, or the walls and their peeling paint. They were so excited as they walked down the little hallway toward Robert. They approached a white door with a small, scuffed window in the middle. Doctor Tiber stopped as he put his hand on the doorknob.
“Just give me a moment, please. Robert would never forgive me if I didn’t help him look presentable for you two.”
“It’s okay.” Jenny smiled. “Believe me, I’ve seen my Dad at his worst.”
“I’m sure.” Dr. Tiber smiled. “But I promised him. Just a second, okay?”
Dr. Tiber walked through the door. Jenny tried to look through the little window but it was quite scratched and blurry, so all she could see was a shadow moving across the room.
Pain? thought Monique. Extensive hurt? She shook her head with a little quirky smile. It was strange hearing these words because pain and hurt just hadn’t been in her vocabulary of thoughts for the past two days.
It was only a moment later when Dr. Tiber opened the door.
There was her husband, propped up in almost a sitting position. Half of Robert’s face was discoloured from frostbite. His legs were under some kind of dome and covered with a sheet. He looked terribly tired, like he would fall asleep at any moment. His eyes were not fully opened and his head was rolling like he was in a bit of a drunken stupor. Yet, he had a smile that said it all. He was alive and was smiling.
“Daddy,” Jenny screeched with delight.
Robert lifted both hands, as if he was a blind man reaching out for something in front of him to hold on to.
Jenny ran to her father and grabbed his hand. Monique took the other.
“Oh, my girrrls...Mmmy girls,” Robert said with a bit of a slur. “I looove you...”
“Oh, Daddy...I love you so much!” Jenny said as she kissed her father’s hand and pulled it to her body, clinging to it.
Monique put her hand in Robert’s hair, which was greasy and matted. She kissed her husband’s forehead three times before she rested her head on his and closed her eyes. “I love you, Bobby...So much...I love you so much,” she whispered as tears rolled down her face.
“Oh, Daddy, how are you? How are you?” Jenny tried to smile but her voice cracked with emotion and her tears started to flow as well.
“Well, I’m nooot dead,” Robert said. “So you can stop crying.” Robert then clumsily pulled both his wife and daughter to his chest. “Thank God, you’rrre here...Thank God, I’mmm alive!”
Those words had haunted Monique for six months now. She reached over to take a couple of tissues from the Kleenex box on the washroom counter. If she was going to get back into that Leaning Tower of Pisa room, she had better make herself presentable again.
She wet the tissue and ran it under each eye to clean up the mascara that had made black half circles there. Alive? she wondered. What kind of alive is this?
They stayed in Kathmandu for eight days. For most of that time, Robert was quite drowsy or asleep. Dr. Tiber told them that the clinic could do very little for Robert.
“I can’t really give you any more information, Mrs. Sanchez. I can only fix Robert up enough for him to get back home to a much better equipped hospital.”
“But, in your opinion, Doctor, how long will it take for his legs to heal?”
“Really, I feel your question is best answered after you return home. I can only tell you both his legs have been badly broken. I have set them enough for travel but they might require surgery to repair the damage. And the frostbite, I’m still not sure about. I’m sorry—it will be wise to wait for your specialist back home to tell you about any procedures.”
“Why’s he sleeping all the time?” Jenny asked.
“Well, it’s a combination of things. One reason is the pain medication.”
“And what’s the other?” Jenny sounded worried
“Well, frankly, the real reason is that when the body goes through a major trauma, such as your father’s has, it shuts down, trying to save all its energy for healing. I know at the moment he seems mostly out of it. But don’t you worry, Jenny,” Dr. Tiber smiled, “your father will come back to you. You will see soon enough after I start to wean him off the morphine tomorrow.”
The next day, Dr. Tiber had Robert taken off the morphine. He gave him a new pain drug that didn’t dull his senses as much, which made him a lot more coherent and mentally present. But it also brought alive a Robert that was now terribly irritable and negative.
This wasn’t what the doctor promised, she thought. The husband coming home with her was a different man, one that she had never seen before. This Robert had little patience and was mostly quite distant. Both Monique and Jenny found themselves constantly apologizing for every little thing they said around him and avoided all talk of the accident and the state of his legs.
“Jen, he just needs time. Daddy doesn’t mean some of the things he’s saying now. He’s just dealing with a lot pain, but don’t worry honey. If anyone can handle it, we both know your father can!”
“I just wanna be home, Mom.”
“Me too, baby, me too.”
“When Dad gets home, it will all get better, right?”
“Of course, baby, but for now we need to be patient with him, okay?”
“Okay, Mom.”
“Good. We just have to accept he’s not going to be himself for a while and maybe he just doesn’t want to talk. Okay? So let’s just give your father a chance to get all healed up and then he’ll be back to normal. It’ll get better when we get home. Now come on, let’s try to sleep, okay?” Jenny laid her head on her mother’s shoulder and tried her best to get some sleep during the long flight home.
Robert could not live at home right away. He needed to be put in a medical facility that could care for his legs until it was determined what treatment was needed to get him walking again.
Because of the extent of his injuries, he had to have two different specialists looking after him: one was a frostbite specialist and the other was a doctor who specialized in breaks and fractures. That meant they had to find a hospital that provided these treatments. The only hospital for this was Mount Sinai.
“I’m sorry, Monique
, but I’m not going to any place called Mount anything!” Robert firmly said.
“We don’t have a choice, Robert.”
“Well, why can’t we just go to two different hospitals?”
Monique knew that in his condition it was impossible to be transported back and forth between two different hospitals so she joked, “Mount Sinai is a great hospital. And look, for years you got to pick which mountain you went to, so it’s time for me to choose one.” But Robert found very little humour in it.
“Well, Robert,” Dr. Sarah Schwartz said. “I spoke with Dr. Hussein and he says the frostbite in your left leg is manageable and he thinks you might get close to fifty percent of the nerves back and working. Unfortunately though, your whole knee joint and fibula bone—the bone below your knee—was splintered and broken in too many pieces to recover naturally. So we will have to try and surgically repair it with rods and screws. Since the frostbite damage is very limited, I’m very hopeful that you will recover and have a working leg.”
“Working, what the heck does that mean ‘working?’” Robert snapped back at doctor.
Doctor Sarah Schwartz was a tiny, elf-like woman with short, spiky, grey hair. She was about sixty years old but spoke in a very youthful voice.
“By ‘working’ I mean you should be able to put your full weight on it and walk and maybe do some light running. But you will likely only have fifty percent feeling in your lower leg and foot because of the nerve damage.”
Robert let out a loud, disgusted sigh. Monique half smiled, trying to excuse Robert’s behaviour. But Dr. Schwartz knew Robert’s sigh was nothing compared to how he might react to the news of his right leg, so she smiled and said, “Oh, it’s okay, we should all be allowed our reactions. Robert’s legs have been through a lot of trauma.”
Then the doctor retrieved a huge yellow envelope and pulled out what looked like some kind of x-ray of Robert’s leg. She held it up in front of her and started talking.
“Now, this is your right leg and if you notice here, just below the knee...all that white area? Well, Robert, your right leg was broken and bent ninety degrees in the wrong direction. On top of that, because it was exposed to the ice for a long period of time, the frostbite started here. Look at this area, just below your knee. Because it got very little blood flow for such an extended period of time, all the tissue and the nerves there died. There is no chance for tissue renew—”
Robert interrupted the doctor. “So what can you do then?” Without waiting for the doctor to answer, Robert continued, “I know, I’ve heard. You remove all that muscle and tissue and replace it with other parts of my body, right? Yeah...I hear you take it from my behind.” He then looked right at his wife and joked, “Great, I’m going to have a bum knee.”
Monique tried to laugh, but then noticed the doctor was not putting the photo of Robert’s leg down. She must have more to say.
“Well, Robert, I wish I could do that for you, but I’m sorry, I can’t,” the doctor said. “Your leg has been without blood for too long and gangrene set in. That is the white area below the knee.”
“How can you heal that?” Monique asked.
Dr. Schwartz put the photo down. She looked at Robert. The two words every climber works fiercely to avoid had just been said: “frostbite” and “gangrene.” Robert dropped his head into his hand and muttered, “Ah, damn!”
Monique looked at her husband and then back to the doctor. “Well, what...What can you do then?”
Dr. Schwartz took in a deep breath. “We have to amputate the leg just below the knee.”
Monique felt faint. She grabbed onto Robert’s hand and spoke to the doctor in a panicked voice. “Amputate? Cut his leg off? Is there nothing else you can—”
Robert took Monique’s hand. He patted it a couple of times then brought it to his lips. He gently kissed her hand and then put it onto her lap. If Monique had known this was to be the last time her husband would ever bring his lips to kiss her, she would have memorized it. She would have emblazoned the memory of that kiss with something more profound. Maybe she would have turned to her husband and kissed him back.
But instead, Monique turned to Dr. Schwartz and asked, “Isn’t there anything? Some kind of experimental treatment? Anything?”
Robert raised his arm and gently said, “Shhh” to his wife.
Monique abruptly turned and faced Robert. “Shhh?” She stood up and almost screamed, “Shhh is all you can say? They are going to take your leg off, Robert! Come on, fight for it.”
She turned to the doctor. “You don’t understand, Doctor. They said he was dead...dead! But he survived! Do you know how many tons of ice fell on him?” She turned to her husband. “Robert, say something!”
Again, Monique looked directly at the doctor, waving her hands as she spoke. “They said it was the size of a small apartment building. An apartment building! Can you imagine that falling on top of you? He can’t have survived all that...all that...only to lose his leg! Please, please...there has got to be something else?”
Monique’s question was left unanswered. Dr. Schwartz gave her a sympathetic smile. The doctor had witnessed this desperate scene many times and knew it was best to allow people time to react. Monique felt a little weak from so many emotions, so she reached behind her, grabbed the arms of the chair and slowly lowered herself down.
Robert spoke the moment she landed in her seat. “When?” was all he asked.
“Tomorrow, Robert, tomorrow at the very latest. I would like to admit you tonight.” Dr. Schwartz then looked at Monique and said, “I’m sorry it is such short notice and, believe me, there is nothing else. What’s going on below your knee is endangering your life; the tissue inside you has been dead for too long and is starting to spread.”
Dr. Schwartz then smiled as she spoke about rehabilitation and all the latest developments in prosthetic limbs. She even mentioned a double amputee who had just competed in the Olympics. She said, depending on the surgical progress on Robert’s right leg, he could be walking in months.
Neither Monique nor Robert responded. Monique just held out her hands as the doctor handed her pamphlets, each displaying smiling people showing off their artificial limbs.
Within three hours, Robert was lying on a hospital gurney and being wheeled into a small shower room by Bruno, a male nurse with long dreadlocks. Monique followed them and was just about to enter the room when Bruno said in his faint Jamaican accent, “I’m sorry, lady, this room is only for the gents. But don’t you go worry, I’ll get him all fixed up in no time.”
“Fixed up?” Monique asked.
“Oh yes, we need to shave his leg all pretty for tomorrow. You can wait down the hall in room two thirty-seven. Lots of chairs there. We’ll be fifteen minutes. Okay?”
“Mon, go home,” Robert said.
“No, it’s okay, Bobby. I’ll wait.”
“Please Monique, just go home.”
“No, Bobby, it’s okay. I’ll stay.”
“Why, Monique? There’s no reason...Please just go home.”
“It is okay, man. It will only be fifteen minutes, not long. Your lady can wait just down the hall,” Bruno said with a smile.
“No, it’s not okay,” Robert said, showing a bit of frustration. “Please, Monique. Could you go home please? I’ll be fine.”
Monique paused for a second, not knowing what to say, then she blurted out, “But Bobby, we need to talk!”
“About what Monique? What? They’re cutting my leg off...No talking is going to change that. You heard the doctor, it’s dead. It’s gotta go.” Robert stopped, took in a long breath and then spoke gently to his wife in a more pleading voice. “Look, Monique, could you please just go home? You heard the nurse, they are going fix me all up. It’ll be all right.”
“But, Bobby, this is all happening too fast! We should—”
“Monique, please! Could you please listen? I don’t want to talk about it, okay? Don’t worry, they are just shaving the leg tonight. Now, p
lease just...just come tomorrow after they fix me all up. Please?”
Bruno reached into his pocket, pulled out some tissues and handed them to Monique as he saw her eyes welling up with tears.
“Take your time, I’ll just stand over there until you two are finished,” Bruno said. He then took a good fifteen steps away from Robert and Monique and leaned on the wall to give them some privacy.
“Oh, Bobby, Bobby...” Monique sighed as she gently laid her hand on his right leg.
Robert winced in pain. “Ahhh, don’t, please that hurts.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I just wanted to touch it before—” Monique couldn’t hold it in any longer so she put her head on Robert’s chest and cried softly.
Robert waited a little, then lightly patted his wife on the back and said, “Mon, I just need some time alone, okay? So please, could you go home?”
Monique wiped her face with the tissues and desperately forced a smile. “Of course, Bobby, of course. You need some time alone. It’s just so much to take in...and I’m not as strong as you Bobby. I mean, you’re amazing how you’re able to...Oh, I’m sorry for crying. I know if anyone can handle this, you can. I know. You’re the most—Oh, I’m sorry. It’s selfish of me to be the one crying. It’s your leg...and you must be going crazy with all this. But I just don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry, but I...I understand. I’ll...I’ll go home, okay. Just promise to call me before you go to sleep then?”
“Okay, sure.” Robert said as Monique leaned over to kiss him. But Robert tilted his head so that only his forehead was open for the kiss. Monique held her lips on his forehead for a few seconds and she slowly whispered, “I...love...you...”
As her lips let go, she looked at her husband and he looked at her. Robert raised his hand to touch his wife’s face just like all those times at the door when he would trace his fingers along her lips, telling her they were his reason for coming home. But instead of the caress and words of coming home, he just reached out with his index finger, tapped her nose and said, “Don’t you worry. You just come back when I’m all fixed up, okay?”
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