It got a little easier then, a little easier to talk to him, maybe because we had a goal to accomplish. Before long, it was time for me to leave, but I didn’t feel as bad as I had when I walked in.
“You should hear what they have to say,” Kelly was saying when I approached her and a group of doctors in the hallway, so we listened in on the conversation with the doctors.
“Are you sure?” I asked after they painted a picture so bleak. “I mean, he doesn’t seem to be as bad as all that. I was just teaching him how to use the remote. He was doing it. He wouldn’t be able to do that if this was going to kill him, would he?”
After all the angst the doctors put my wife through, none of their dire warnings came true. Nothing progressed the way they thought it would.
I did sit up in bed.
The CT scans showed that my brain wasn’t swelling, or at least, it hadn’t gotten any worse. My non-swollen brain didn’t push down on my brain stem and cause systemic failure.
MRIs showed three areas of my brain had been hit, as if I’d experienced three separate strokes, but it was really only the one incident. I had the immediate damage from the stroke, and it had evolved and progressed through the night because the clot had lodged in my brain. But even though the doctors said it was unheard of, I had no additional damage from the increased swelling.
Miraculous.
Kelly
“It’s just so crazy, isn’t it?” I asked one of the doctors a couple of days after Ted had been admitted. They were quite familiar to me by then; I had seen them so many times. They came and went often. “Ted didn’t have diabetes. He didn’t have high cholesterol. He didn’t have high blood pressure. He was and still is extremely strong—emotionally, mentally, and physically—but he was the one to have a massive stroke, not one of those guys chain smoking out there,” I added, motioning out the window.
“That’s what saved his life. He did everything right. A smoker may not have been so fortunate,” the doctor replied.
What I said about my husband was true. Ted always worked out, religiously, for his entire life. When he was working full time and going for his MBA at Wharton, he didn’t work out as much—maybe once or twice a week, but even that was more than what many people do. And that was the only down period that I know about. Even then, he still went to the gym, and he did some exercises at home, feeling like he was neglecting his body for the sake of his brain.
He always said, “I have to work out to stay strong, because you never know when you’re going to need it.”
And I always brushed him off.
But sure enough, he needed it.
“Ready to try sitting up, Ted?” the nurse asked. Five days had passed since my stroke and I came to the hospital. I couldn’t respond, but I was definitely ready. “We’re going to swing your legs around and help you into the chair. You lean on us if you need to.”
I couldn’t hold myself at all really, and there was no way that I could have done it without them, but I was so pleased to be in that chair. After a few more days in ICU, I was moved back to CCU in the hospital. Soon after that, Dr. Sullivan got me transferred to the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC). I was moved to RIC about nine days after the stroke. I no longer needed to be in an intensive care unit, but I still needed, and would for a long time, 24/7 rehabilitation.
Moving to RIC meant that at least I wasn’t getting any worse. At RIC, they focused on getting my body to stabilize and function as normal as possible. They wanted me to try things on my own, like sitting, moving my limbs, and standing. I wanted to try too.
“You’re sitting, Ted! You did it.” Kelly would cheer me on with every new accomplishment. During that first week, I gave her plenty of reason to cheer; I took twenty steps with a physical therapist.
If I can take one hundred steps, then I can do anything. I can beat this, I told myself. I basked in Kelly’s excitement in the second week, when I did just that. Somewhere in my scrambled brain, I knew that it was all up to me. My goal was to beat this—get back to 100 percent—and get back to my life. Work was waiting for me. I’d be there soon enough.
CHAPTER 5
Can’t Is a Four-Letter Word
Kelly
At RIC, Ted had physical therapy and speech therapy. And within a matter of only a few days there, he was pushing past everyone’s expectations.
It was unbelievable to see his progress, his determination. He battled for his recovery every day.
“No, Ted. It’s the weekend. The therapists aren’t here today. That means no physical therapy today,” I told him.
Ted just pointed, insisting. Making noise, making himself heard, even though he couldn’t speak as he once had.
“Is it okay if he goes in and uses the mats for a bit?” I asked the nurse. She looked around, almost as if she wasn’t sure whether I was speaking to her.
“I’m not really sure. I . . . well, yeah. I think it’d be okay. Go ahead.”
So I helped Ted get out of bed and to the physical therapy room. “All right, Ted. We’re here. What do you want to do?” He, of course, didn’t answer but pointed at the square stretching tables. There may not have been a therapist there to help him, but he was determined, and that meant that he wasn’t going to take breaks.
Come Monday, I’d end up telling the physical therapist, “Ted spent two hours in there on Saturday and Sunday.”
“What?” was the shocked response. Her head swiveled between Ted and me. I just smiled and shrugged.
“Nobody does that,” she said.
“I know,” I answered and laughed. Ted may not have been the same in every way, but he was definitely the same guy in that he was still as determined as anyone I’d ever known.
The therapists told him it would be okay to try to sit on the big ball to work on regaining his balance. He did crunches with his good leg up while they somehow held him.
“I’ve never seen anybody, Ted, with core strength like this after a stroke, or any injury,” the therapist said, “or the same determination.”
But that’s why he was able to make this recovery. He was always prepared for the worst. I don’t know anybody else like that either.
Those eight weeks as an inpatient at RIC are jumbled in my mind. It seemed like the stroke wiped out about 70 percent of my memory. And speech wasn’t a focus during my time at RIC at all. They were more concerned with my body getting back to functioning properly. I, of course, was concerned about all of it. I wanted to be better already.
“Eh . . . uh . . . ? Girl!” I said, frustrated that I knew that the woman in front of me was my wife, but I couldn’t remember her name.
At first, there was a touch of sadness in her eyes, but then excitement bubbled over.
“Ted, you did it! You spoke!” Her smile grew with each word she spoke. “Do you know my name, Ted? Can you say it?” I didn’t really answer, but she could see that I knew who she was. She could tell somehow. “It’s Kelly, Ted. Can you call me Kelly?” I couldn’t.
After a few moments, I just said “girl” again, but she smiled anyway. It was something; it was progress.
“Ted, can you tell me what your password is for the BlackBerry? I need to get some information from it, for your office,” she asked me.
But I simply stared at her. I don’t know if I changed my facial expression, if she could see the confusion in my eyes, or if I was silent long enough that she thought to say more herself.
“Your BlackBerry?” she asked and showed it to me. I touched it, but I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even know what she was asking.
“It’s okay, Ted. Are you ready to go to PT?” Again, I simply stared at her. I didn’t know what she was talking about. “PT, Ted. Physical therapy, like every day, the gym.”
Then, I knew. I knew what she meant, and I was ready, working to get up and out of my room before anyone was there to help me. I spent as much time as I could in the therapy room, which was like a miniature Equinox or Crunch gym. They had similar
equipment.
One of the nurses who was in the room came over to help me. “Hold on there, tough guy. Let’s get the chair over there. Working out isn’t going to do you a bit of good if you fall and hurt yourself,” the nurse scolded.
I knew I had started to climb the mountain to get back to where I was before the stroke, and I needed to know that I was making progress.
The Greenfield Filter
After about a week as an RIC inpatient, I noticed my right leg, near the shin area, was still bothering me. It would hurt for part of the day, and then for the rest of the day, I couldn’t feel it, which worried me. I wondered if the pain could be the start of another stroke and if those were the sensations you felt when you become paralyzed. I told Kelly about my leg, and she discussed it with one of my doctors, who suggested I have a procedure as a safety measure to prevent a stroke from happening again.
They wanted to put a vena cava filter, known as a Greenfield filter, in my inferior vena cava, in the middle of my abdomen area. The inferior vena cava (IVC) is a large vein in the middle of the abdomen that returns blood from your lower body to the heart. A vena cava filter is a cone-shaped metal device, like a basket, designed to trap large blood clots that break loose from veins in your leg or pelvis while allowing blood to pass freely through the filter around the clot. The filter would be inserted into the IVC through a small hole in a vein in my neck.
Kelly told me about this procedure and what they wanted to do, and they left the decision up to me. This was my first time having surgery like this, so I was a little leery, but I agreed to go along with the doctor’s recommendation. In the end, I’m glad I had it done. It only took me out of the rehab program one day at Northwestern Hospital, and eventually, my leg stopped hurting.
Living at RIC
For the first few weeks I was at RIC, I had my room to myself. It wasn’t big, but it had a window, and there was a washroom with a shower.
“Ted, let me help you get cleaned up before I go, okay?” Kelly asked one afternoon after I’d been at RIC for a couple of weeks. The nurse helped her move me to the bathroom so Kelly could wash me. Apparently, she noticed my look of appreciation, because after she had started washing my hair, she smiled. “I brought the shampoo from home. Smells good, doesn’t it?” It did. It smelled amazing and interrupted the never-ending onslaught of sterile hospital smells.
The smell, in fact, is what I remember most clearly about RIC. That and the sound of fresh syringes being broken from their packaging to stick an IV in my arm, draw some blood from my arm, or give me a shot. But when she washed my hair that day, I could imagine I was somewhere else. I only heard the water running, drowning out all the rest.
“Do you want to watch the game?” she asked when I was clean and settled in the bed again. I did. I used to play basketball growing up. When my visitors left for the day, I watched the Los Angeles Lakers on the small hospital TV. I remembered the game. I remembered the rules from high school. I remembered they were in the playoffs. I could follow the pace of it. I knew who was winning, who had the ball, and who won at the end. It was comforting.
“Is everything okay in here?” the nurse asked, just as Kelly had turned to pick up her purse. I knew Kelly was leaving, but I also knew that she would be back, and even if I didn’t remember her name, that gave me comfort as well.
“I’ll be right across the hall, Ted, if you need anything. The night nurses will be coming in soon, and they’ll come in to say hi,” the nurse said after she checked on us, and then she walked Kelly out. As much as I gained comfort from Kelly’s presence, I also looked forward to being alone in the room. I wanted to get better, and I thought that I knew better than anyone else how to do that. At the time, I was still forced to use a wheelchair to get around. The nurses, and sometimes Kelly, would help me get in and out of it, but I hated it. I didn’t want their help.
There were three shifts for the staff: morning, day, and night. During the day, there were maybe five nurses who checked in on me. But there were only a couple at night.
It’s almost time, I thought. I might not have had the ability to formulate how to say words, but I had put together on my own that during the nighttime shift, I wouldn’t be as closely monitored, and, well, as they say . . . While the cat is away, the mice will play. The wheelchair was close enough to the bed, and I wanted to prove that I didn’t need their help to get in and out of it any longer.
Minutes later: “What are you doing, Mr. Baxter?” the nurse scolded when she found me lying on the floor. She pushed the call button, which meant that both on-staff nurses were in my room. They didn’t generally like to be in the same room at the same time, because it meant that no one was available at the nurses’ station. I could see their frustration, and I knew that I had blown it. I just needed a little more time. I knew I could get in the wheelchair on my own.
Stop! I’m fine! I yelled at them in my head, but they, of course, didn’t hear me. I want to do it myself. Stop! They didn’t listen.
They didn’t know it, but I knew it. I simply needed time to prove it to them and to myself—I would stand up on my own, and I would do it soon. If I could get my body back, I could get it all back. I had convinced myself that 100 percent recovery was possible as long as I pushed hard enough.
But not that night. The game wasn’t as enjoyable that night, with my arms strapped to the bed. I stared at the screen, frustration suffocating me.
“What happened to your face?” Kelly screamed the next morning as she rushed into the room and gently laid her hand on my swollen cheek. I couldn’t answer her. I want to walk! I want to get out of this wheelchair! She didn’t understand, and the nurses couldn’t either. I can do so much more if you’ll just hear me; give me the chance.
Not long after that incident, they moved another patient into my room.
I had been there for about three weeks and was nearly halfway through my inpatient stint at RIC.
They introduced him by name, but the name didn’t register. “He will be your roommate for a while,” the nurse said cheerfully. Of course, she sounded far happier than I felt about the whole situation. They did separate the room with a curtain, though, and I figured all would be fine because I could still watch my Lakers games at night. However, instead of using his own wall-mounted TV on his side of the room, he talked on the phone every night—loudly—with his mom.
“Lakers are in the playoffs,” the nurse commented one evening as she made sure I was settled. Kelly had just left. “You must be very excited,” she said.
I was. I was happy to see them make it that far in the season, especially because it meant that I still had something to look forward to in the evenings. My roommate pulled the curtain shut, and the nurse smiled. “Not everyone is a Lakers fan,” she said and softly giggled on her way out of the room.
The game started, and I tried to ignore the loud conversation beside me, but my roommate’s voice seemed to only get louder as the game got underway. Soon, he was talking so loudly that I couldn’t hear the announcers. With no way to ask him to quiet down, I thought I’d give him a hint. I tried to drown out his conversation by turning up the volume. It didn’t work.
Quiet! Be quiet! The screams in my head translated to mere sounds, but they were enough to be heard. From the other side of the curtain, I could hear his voice change.
“Mom, hold on a second,” he said, and then, even louder still, “Hey, what are you doing?”
Yeah. Keep it down. That is what I heard in my head, though I couldn’t say more than maybe ten words at that point, so what actually came out was something like, “Loud.” It might have just been “Lod.”
“Sorry, Mom. I’m back,” he said into the phone, in the same loud tone. “No, it was my roommate. I don’t know what he’s doing over there. I can’t understand a word.”
Steep Learning Curve
The stroke had taken a lot from me. Later, after I was out of inpatient care at RIC, I returned home and had to relearn to do things—wal
k, talk, bathe, shave—all over again, and that meant that I made mistakes . . . stupid mistakes.
“What the heck are you doing?” Kelly asked me one day at home when she walked into the bathroom to find me shaving. I didn’t answer her, but I held up the razor, thinking it was pretty obvious what I was doing.
“Ted, that’s not shaving cream. It’s lotion.” To her credit, she was fairly patient. She didn’t take the razor away from me, but she did replace the bottle of moisturizer that I had set beside the sink with a bottle of shaving cream.
A big part of the occupational and physical therapy programs, while I was an inpatient at RIC, was the group therapy element. It was important for all of us to realize that we weren’t alone. It was good to know that it wasn’t just me. I wasn’t alone. The other stroke patients weren’t all experiencing the same things that I was, but they were facing their own challenges.
I formed relationships during these sessions with a couple of guys, two patients who’d had different things happen to them. One wore a motorcycle helmet on his head; I think he’d had a bad traumatic brain injury. The other was a young guy, a college student, who was back in rehab for the second time. We couldn’t have a normal conversation. None of us had the verbal capacity to do so, but another of the patients, who was quite fluent (though had obviously suffered a serious injury to his arm), was able to bridge the gap in our communication ability. With his help, I learned that my young friend had been in two serious car accidents and that he had really messed himself up as a result. I discovered that I still felt empathy for those who suffered, and I enjoyed the comradery.
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