Kelly
They started an IV, but Ted’s blood pressure continued to fall. The bottom number was down to 39, then to 32.1
I looked on, helpless, while the paramedics worked with Ted.
“If his blood pressure gets any lower, he’s not going to live,” one of them told me.
Luckily, a few minutes later, his blood pressure stabilized. I breathed a sigh of relief.
They put him on a gurney and carried him through the house and out to the ambulance. I followed.
Where are they taking me? I wondered. Kelly had said something to me about the hospital, but it seemed like I had been riding for so very long. Haven’t I?
Awhile later, I found myself in what I thought was familiar surroundings. I’d been in the same emergency room—Evanston Northwestern Hospital—only two weeks before. I’d brought Kelly there when she had difficulties breathing, but it looked different through my haze. Or maybe I didn’t know where I was at all. Wherever I was, I knew I was lucky to be alive.
Kelly
Two of our neighbors, friends of ours, came outside when they heard the ambulance. I saw them as the ambulance drove away with Ted inside of it.
“Kelly, are you okay? Is Ted all right?” Concern tugged at their faces, and it took me a minute to respond.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what happened,” I answered. I tried to smile for them, but I’m not sure it was much of a smile. “I have to go. We have to get him to the hospital as soon as possible.” I got in my car and took off.
We got to the hospital, and I had to explain what happened in great detail again, just as I had when I called 911.
“Ted just got back today. He flew in this afternoon. We went to dinner, and he seemed okay . . . ,” I told the doctor, but Ted’s complaints about his leg kept running through my head. “He has varicose veins,” I said, almost abruptly. “He mentioned his leg a couple of times today. Is that related to . . . to this?” I asked but didn’t give him time to answer, because my mind was in overdrive. What was happening to my husband? “He has them checked every year. He’s just been so stressed out. Who wouldn’t be? Four flights in four days, and three weeks ago, we were on a flight to Mauritius. He couldn’t even unwind on vacation. I was sick. He was working. The flight was twenty hours each way. Is that what it is? His legs? The flights? He’s so stressed out.”
The doctor didn’t answer, but he wrote down what I was saying. I think he was trying to keep me calm, but the questions were eating at me.
“He’s always been stressed, though. He’s always flown a lot, so he’s used to it . . . right? He was a managing director of Credit Suisse and a Price Waterhouse Partner. He flies all of the time.”
“Does he have any allergies, ma’am?” the doctor asked, still writing. “To shellfish, to the sushi, or something else he would have been exposed to on his trip?”
“No? No. He loves eating sushi. We eat it a lot.”
“Has he gained weight recently? Lost weight? Gone on a new diet?”
“No. He works out every day, always has, even during business trips.” Ted was more health conscious than anyone I’d ever known.
“Was he feeling okay? Was he really tired?” the doctor asked, moving his way down some sort of patient questionnaire while I fought the rising panic.
“He was fine, except his leg was bothering him. He usually wears compression socks on flights, but we were home, so he took them off.” Then I said, “Look, this guy takes better care of his body and is in better health than anyone I’ve ever met.” The doctor smiled. He patted my hand and went on with his job.
Sounds, Not Words
At some point later that night, I knew, in fact, that I was at Evanston Hospital. The room I was in was the typical sterile stainless steel on white that was so common in hospitals. I saw the doctors and nurses in their white coats and scrubs, moving around my bed, checking monitors. My eyes followed them as they swam past me.
I heard loud voices talking over each other. What are they saying? I thought. It was all sounds, not words. I couldn’t put the pieces together. Nothing gelled. I felt like the center of blurry turmoil, fully awake in the middle of a nightmare.
Why doesn’t Kelly understand? The thought kept circling through the fog. This was important. I had to tell her. She had to understand me. I touched my chin again, doing my best to focus my eyes on her blurred face so I could give her a meaningful look. Her hands came up, and I knew it was a motion of defeat. Why can’t she understand me?
I watched her hands fall and land on my arm. I knew they were there, because I could see them there, but the sensation was not what it should be. Her hands were so light, so much lighter than I remembered them being. I looked from my right arm, where her featherlike hand was still resting, to my left side.
I wonder if her hand would be heavier if she touched me on this side, I thought, and then I noticed the shaking. Were we having an earthquake? No. Surely, I’d feel it everywhere, not just in my right arm and leg. Yet, what other explanation was there for both appendages shaking so violently? My eyes swam a bit, fluttering, making me dizzy, but I forced them to obey me, pinning them on the arm that bounced about on the bed beside me. I had control over my eyes but had no such luck with my hand. And then, the bed started to move. I felt the feather lift away from my right arm.
No, wait! The scream echoed around in my skull, but no one heard me. Two white coats and my wife were standing so close, but they couldn’t hear me yelling to them. My wife! No! I have to tell her something . . . What am I trying to tell her?
They placed a cup in my hand, and I looked down at it. Four small orange pills sat at the bottom of it.
“You have to take the aspirin,” my wife was saying, and I was annoyed that she could speak. It was so much easier to tell someone something when you could speak . . . and when you could think. Think.
“Take the aspirin,” she said again. So I lifted the cup to my lips and dumped the aspirin in. No water. I never could understand how people swallowed pills without water, but I did my best, forcing them to the back of my mouth with my tongue. A gulp later and the pills were stuck at the top of my throat. Coughing and sputtering, I fought to get them down or up or out. Something! But they were stuck there. I choked and gagged and tasted a strange fruity flavor, and slowly the pills dissolved away. Then the bed started to move again, and I ignored the confusion about the aspirin as I looked back to my wife. The white coats moved me past her.
Think! This time I was yelling at myself. The bed was about to roll right out of the room, and I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to be saying to her. Think! This is important. I brought my eyes back to her face. I could see the tears on her cheek. Why is she crying? Why doesn’t she understand me? Think, damn you!
Kelly
“You can stay here, ma’am. They’ll take him down for the CT scan and bring him back here when they are done. Can I get you something to drink?”
I shook my head no.
Before Ted left, he kept touching his chin. I asked him what was wrong, but he just kept tapping his chin repeatedly. Months later, I learned it was because it had gone numb.
While Ted was gone, I called his brother.
“Hello?” The voice sounded tired and I knew I had awakened him. I felt bad for that, but I knew that he and his wife would want to know.
“Tom? It’s Kelly. I’m sorry to wake you, but I . . . we . . . Ted is in the emergency room. It’s okay. I mean, he’s okay right now, but . . . I thought you would want to know.”
“What happened? Was he in an accident? Are you all right? I’m putting you on speaker. Jeannette’s here.”
“I’m fine. No accident. We were just watching TV, and suddenly he wasn’t saying or doing anything. He was just staring off into space, and he wouldn’t respond. I didn’t know what to do, so I called 911,” I told him.
“What did they say? What’s wrong?” Tom asked
“They don’t know, but they got his blood pressu
re leveled out, and they took him for a scan. He’s okay, but he can’t talk.”
“Do you need us to come?”
“No. No, I just thought I should tell you. I’ll let you know what they say when they come back with him,” I said, and we hung up.
I couldn’t call his bosses. I couldn’t get into his BlackBerry to get the numbers. Why don’t I know his passwords? I should know these things. I fought with his phone, my hands shaking so much I could barely punch the letters on the tiny keyboard anyway. I finally threw the device at the empty bed, where it bounced and then landed with a soft thud, screen down.
Either the nurse didn’t notice, or she pretended not to.
“Ma’am, the doctor told me to inform you that they have taken your husband in for an MRI scan.”
The CT scan was negative, so they took him for an MRI.
All that time in the emergency room, nobody knew what had happened to him. When they brought him back from having the MRI, we went up to the CCU—critical care unit.
“Can I get you a cot, ma’am? It is getting quite late,” the nurse asked me after a while. I had been sitting in the small, uncomfortable chair at his side, waiting for him to say something. He didn’t. I took the cot, and I didn’t leave the room once that whole night.
Around three a.m., I had to push the call button. “What can I help you with?” the nurse asked as she entered the room.
“He, um . . . he had an accident, I think,” I answered.
She ignored my embarrassment. “Oh yes, I see. Not a problem. I will have one of the other nurses come in, and we’ll get him cleaned up in a jiffy.” She was so kind that I forgot to be embarrassed for Ted and went back to worrying. He had more accidents throughout the night. Is it possible he’s paralyzed? I had to trust that the doctors would know what to do if so.
“Can they put a catheter in?” I asked. It was morning, I knew, but the sun had not yet risen. I don’t think I had slept at all.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. We can’t do that yet. We’re still waiting for doctor’s orders.”
“Can you lower the volume on the machine so he can sleep?”
She shook her head side to side in response. She changed the bedding again and gave me a warm smile as she left the room.
Most of the night, Ted was restless. At one point, he pulled off his oxygen tube with his left hand and threw it away. I didn’t know if he was able to breathe without it. I didn’t know anything, and I felt utterly helpless.
1Some experts define low blood pressure as 60mm Hg diastolic.
CHAPTER 3
A Massive Stroke!
“ How are you doing this morning?” the nurse asked. It was the next day, Friday, and doctors and nurses had come and gone throughout the night and the morning. I couldn’t tell the difference between them. I could have already been visited by that same nurse hours before, but I didn’t recognize her. Kelly told her that we were both doing well, but surely the dark circles around her eyes and the worry filling them told the nurse a different story. Nevertheless, likely used to similar reactions from so many others in the critical care unit, she straightened a corner of the bed, checked my vitals, greeted the doctors who came in to check my vitals as well, and then left.
The doctors entered the room and stood beside my bed. They broke the news that my condition was the result of a massive stroke.
I heard what they said, at least I think I did, but I couldn’t process it. I knew the doctors were there, in the room with us. I’m sure my eyes were focused in their direction, but nothing made sense in my head.
Three weeks later, Kelly sat down beside my bed and held my hand. “Ted, do you know what is going on? Do you understand what happened?”
I didn’t.
“Ted, you had a massive stroke. Your brain has suffered a major injury,” she told me, both her voice and her eyes portraying the sadness she felt.
I was devastated, shocked.
“Don’t cry, Ted. We’ll get through this,” she added.
But it was too late. I was sobbing, and I couldn’t stop. I was, frankly, in total disbelief.
Kelly
That first night, Thursday night, when they took us out of the emergency room and put us into CCU, Ted was moving his legs and arms.
“Why are you doing that, Ted?” I asked him. He kept hitting his right leg with his right fist. He was pounding on his thigh with his right fist. “What are you trying to tell me?”
He couldn’t talk.
By the time the sun came up Friday morning, Ted wasn’t moving at all. He was conscious but not responding.
Some techs came in to do an EEG.
“What are you doing?” I asked, concerned, as they put a strobe light directly in Ted’s face.
“We’re trying to induce a seizure.”
I didn’t understand, but Ted was so out of it that I could tell he didn’t even see the flashing light.
I stared at Kelly. I knew her. I knew that I should know her. I can’t remember her name.
“Ted, it’s Friday. How are you feeling?” she asked me. It was a weighted question. She didn’t expect an answer, surely, but she was undoubtedly hoping that I would suddenly find the power to respond.
What is your name? I wanted to ask, but of course, I couldn’t.
When the doctors came in, she looked away and so did I. They put IVs and syringes in my veins, but I couldn’t feel them. In fact, I had no idea why they were doing it. I did know that the woman beside me, even though I couldn’t remember her name, looked worried.
“You were right, Ted,” Kelly told me weeks later, when I remembered her name and could process what was happening around me again. “It was your leg. The doctors, they told you not to worry, but you were right to question them. The doctors said the stroke was incident induced. It was caused by a blood clot. Deep vein thrombosis formed in your shin, and the clot got to your heart and then to your brain.”
“For most people, clots in the legs are risky because they can break loose, travel to the heart and then the lungs, and get stuck there as pulmonary emboli, or PE, which can be life-threatening. However, if the heart has a hole connecting the right side with the left side—a condition called patent foramen ovale, or PFO—then these clots can bypass the lungs and go directly to the brain. Ted indeed had a PFO, and that was the cause of his stroke.”
—Steven L. Small, PhD, MD, professor and chair of neurology, and E. Susan Duncan, MA, MS, CCC, speech-language pathologist and PhD student
“You’re very lucky, Mr. Baxter,” one of the doctors told me that Friday morning as he took my vitals. I wasn’t sure that I agreed. As my brain cleared, I realized that I wasn’t myself. “If the clot had gone to your lung instead of your brain, it would have caused a pulmonary embolism. You probably wouldn’t be with us at all.”
I didn’t die. That’s true. Of course, I also later learned that if the clot had dissolved after lodging in my brain, blood flow would have been restored, and a lot of the damage would have repaired itself. But the clot didn’t dissolve. As the blood flow was cut off from more and more parts of my brain, more and more of my brain cells died.
Kelly
In addition to the news about the stroke, that Friday morning brought a phone call from the founder and CEO of Citadel, Ken Griffin, who was notified immediately early Friday morning by Ted’s boss and Citadel’s CFO, Gerald Beeson. I had left a message with the chief legal counsel at Citadel, Adam Cooper, late the night before, as soon as we had gotten settled at the hospital. I had only met Ken Griffin once, two weeks before, at a dinner.
I had been sitting in Ted’s room, staring at him between the carousel of nurses ever coming and going, and then, suddenly, I was talking to the CEO of Citadel, a powerful man in the business world, to be sure. He was powerful in other arenas, too.
I told him that, honestly, I didn’t know what was happening to my husband.
“I would like to call you back later today, Kelly, for an update. Can I do that?”
“Let me see what I can do for you,” was all he said, and then he hung up.
Within forty-five minutes, a driver from Citadel brought me a cell phone.
And then shortly after that, an unfamiliar man dressed in the typical white doctor’s coat walked through the door of Ted’s hospital room.
“Hello, Mrs. Baxter, Mr. Baxter,” he greeted us, never leaving Ted out, despite his obvious inability to respond. “I am Dr. Jesse Taber, a neurologist with the hospital.”
Dr. Taber was absolutely fantastic: kind, compassionate, able to explain things. Ted and I would, even years later, consider him the best neurologist we saw. He never cut me off and always took the time to listen to me, even when I couldn’t get my points across to him precisely because of my emotional state. He knew enough to reply to me when I asked a question or made a comment. We were fortunate to meet with him.
“I think it would be a good idea to move you to the ICU, Ted,” Dr. Taber said, and that is what happened.
All because Ken Griffin made a phone call.
Since a stroke is a brain injury, there’s bruising and swelling, like with any injury. When older people have a stroke, the swelling is less of an issue because the brain naturally shrinks with age. There’s room inside the skull for the brain to expand after the trauma of a stroke.
I was only forty-one. I was young. There was no place for the swelling to go.
“This is what you can expect over the next several days,” Dr. Taber told my wife that morning. I wasn’t there. At least, I wasn’t functioning enough to comprehend where I was or what was happening. So, I wasn’t able to hold her hand or provide her comfort while she received the devastating news.
Relentless Page 3
