All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.
Open music in a new window.
ENTANGLED
Words and Music By Jim Robbins
Vocals by Krysten Ortiz
Flowers and birds and trees and us
are like threads of different colors
in a tapestry of light, a tapestry of love.
Fields upon fields of energy are woven together
by light. Love is woven through it all.
In each life some threads are destined
to be woven together. We are meant
to be entangled, weaving our own tapestry of love.
Can't you feel how we have been woven together
in a tapestry of love? Love is weaving our lives
together. Love is woven through it all.
PENDULUM DREAMS:
About eight months after my wife and I separated, our daughter Katie suffered a stroke.
icu update
Katie is in the hospital. They think she has
an aneurysm. No neurosurgeon here in fresno.
Flying her by helicopter to san fran. John
and I heading there now.
Many people were reduced to tears when they found out. A few people searched for a reason, as if hoping to find someone or something to blame. For the religious especially, it was unthinkable that God would cut down a lovely, vivacious woman in the prime of her life without a discernable reason. A few wondered out loud if she had smoked or used drugs or drank too much. I think for most people, religious or not, the self-preservation instinct makes it hard to admit that life can end abruptly without warning. Katie didn’t smoke or use drugs or drink. The doctors found an arteriovenous malformation, or AVM, and surmised that she had probably been born with it. Instead of a web of capillaries and veins connecting smoothly with an artery, a tangle of malformed veins over time eventually weakened, and an aneurysm near her right frontal lobe exploded. She was twenty-nine. During the craniotomy, the neurosurgeon removed a “nasty AVM with two aneurysms.” A scar, shaped like a question mark, curving from just above her forehead to the top of her skull and down to her right ear, remains.
When I received the phone call from John, Katie’s husband, I was alone in my condo composing a song for a musical, a fantastic tale involving a witch and a princess. (A few hours before I received the call, I had named the song "Entangled.") John managed to convey that Katie was in the hospital with what the doctors believed to be an aneurysm. John was taking a shower after work when Katie stumbled into the bathroom, plopped down on the toilet, and complained that she wasn’t feeling well. After John stepped out of the shower, Katie screamed and pressed her right temple with her hand. He caught her as she was collapsing. After he carried her to bed, he called 911 immediately. Katie had never acted like that before even during her worst bouts of pain.
After her stroke, over a period of several weeks, medical personnel continually saved her life, but her husband John was the first to do so by calling 911 immediately.
icu update
They think she might have an avm: arterial
Venus malformation? Nate in six feet under
had an avm? Doctors evasive about whether she'll
recover. She has a good chance since she is
young and strong.
If the timing had been different—if, for instance, John hadn’t gotten home before her stroke, or if he had hesitated to call 911, or if the rupture in her brain had occurred while she was driving home from work by herself, she in all likelihood would have died.
She was still alert and talking when the EMTs settled her in the ambulance, but John found out later that on the way to the hospital she had become unresponsive, and an EMT was forced to intubate her because she was no longer breathing on her own. (We also found out later that intubation probably gave her pneumonia because when the EMT was sliding the breathing tube down her throat, she vomited, and some of the effusion drained into her lungs. According to a nurse, vomit in the lungs often leads to infection.)
icu update
Arteriovenous malformation, a tangle of veins
and capillaries where instead the artery and
veins should connect in a smooth web. With an
AVM, blood within the high pressure system
of the artery flows into a malformed low
pressure system of veins. The tangled
connection eventually weakens and ruptures,
often during a bout of high blood pressure.
After I hung up the phone, I rushed to the hospital, but a security guard in a large booth would not allow me to proceed through the metal detector, an archway between the booth and the emergency room entrance. The security guard asked me to check on Katie’s status with a male nurse who was sitting in front of a computer on the other side of the metal detector. I then discovered that the hospital only allows one person at a time to see an emergency room patient. I insisted in a quiet voice, clearly but firmly, “My daughter has an aneurysm. I need to see her right now.” The security guard, however, refused to let me through because John was still with her. Suddenly, a large Hispanic man started fighting with a security guard in the emergency waiting room. Several policemen and security guards descended upon the man and shouted commands. The man calmly placed his hands on his head and got down on his knees. (John suggested later that the man might have caused trouble so that he would have a place to stay for a while. I am not so sure.)
I could not afford that kind of trouble, so I texted John and paced outside the emergency room for what seemed like ages. After John came out after what was probably only a few minutes, I got permission to enter the hospital and rushed through the metal detector into the emergency waiting room, where I had to obtain a pass from another male nurse before I could go back and search for her room, R14, which I finally found with the help of other nurses on the floor.
I found Katie unconscious in a hospital bed. Because of the breathing tube and the angle of the bed, I could barely see her face. The doctor showed me x-rays of her brain that revealed a subdural hematoma with a slight mid-line shift, caused by a stroke. The bleeding in her brain, in other words, had forced her brain to shift a little. The doctor admitted that he couldn’t say definitively what was causing the bleeding since he wasn’t a neurologist. Katie would have to be transported to UCSF Medical Center for diagnosis and treatment. No neurosurgeons in Fresno. I had to ask finally in a faltering voice, “Is she going to make it?”
The doctor chirped, “I am sorry, but I have to be evasive right now. It’s too early to tell. She’s going to be flown by helicopter to San Francisco in a few minutes, and we will find out more after she gets there.”
I muttered that it would probably be a good idea for John and me to drive up there right away, and he agreed.
I raced home and grabbed a few items, not realizing that summer in San Francisco is more like winter in Fresno. While I packed, I felt like I was moving clumsily the whole time, and it suddenly seemed to me that my inability to coordinate my thoughts and movements more quickly and efficiently was a terrible flaw in my character, and I started cursing myself, which had the effect of making it even harder to concentrate. Finally, still muttering, I drove to their house, and John and I sped up 99 after midnight, both of us hardly able to speak.
On the way, John confessed through tears that he was scared. I put my hand on his shoulder as we drove through a void of almond orchards, vineyards and cotton fields, and mumbled with tears in my eyes, “She's going to get through this, and so are we. Just imagine that she is healthy and happy. Send out positive thoughts into the universe. That’s the best thing we can do right now. Don’t dwell on the negative. That’s not good for you or her.” After dealing with numerous text messages, John closed his eyes and eventually fell asleep. As I was driving, I got a text message from my son Holden in San Diego. While driving, I wrote my first illegal text message with my right thumb at one thirty in the morning, which read, “sory j a sleep.”
At two thirty in the morning, while John was sleeping, I encountered road work on 152. A long line of cars stood at a standstill. I waited a minute until I noticed a car turning left onto a rural highway heading west toward Freeway 101. I had never traveled that highway before. All I knew was that it seemed to head in the direction that I needed to go, so I gunned the car and drove in the wrong lane for a hundred feet, then swerved left onto the highway. At first, the bumpy road headed west, but then it started to curve next to a streambed, and soon it seemed to be heading north. I began to suspect that I had made a bad choice, but I raced ahead in the darkness, suddenly feeling lost and alone. All I had was hope that I might find another road that would lead to 101 North. Suddenly I came upon a gas station near an entrance to Freeway 101 in Gilroy.
I confess that I almost nodded off more than once while driving the last leg of the journey. I only managed to stay awake by continually shifting in my seat while thinking about Katie. We finally arrived in San Francisco around three-thirty in the morning without any idea where the hospital was located. No one at the hospital in Fresno had been able tell us how to get there. The streets were completely deserted; we had the whole city to ourselves but no one to give us directions.
We eventually found the University of San Francisco campus and parked the car, thinking that the hospital might be nearby. As we stepped out of the car in short-sleeved shirts, we immediately started to freeze. We shivered for several blocks in a chilling breeze until I suggested to John that icicles were about to form on our mustaches and we should head back to the car. After consulting googlemaps again while blasted by the car heater, we eventually found what might be the hospital where Katie was being treated. As we entered the hospital, policemen were shouting at someone outside, and we were met by a suspicious security guard near the front window, who checked to see if Katie was actually in the hospital. No metal detector this time, however. John and I finally were each handed a pass and with a sigh, we rode the elevator up to the Neuro ICU on the eleventh floor. We had to hang out in a small, air-conditioned waiting room for what seemed like hours while they were stabilizing Katie in bed 4 of the NICU.
icu update
Katie probably born with avm. Another 29 yr
old in the icu has same problem. So far Katie
has no physical or cognitive deficits. No
impairments, in other words, thank god. No
drooping of the left side of the face. No
paralysis. She can move and talk.
I realize now that I wasn't allowing the seriousness of Katie’s condition to sink in at that point, but over the next few weeks, I began to identify medical euphemisms and understand the jargon. I eventually understood, for instance, that “stabilizing” meant finding all the right medications and the right amount of fluids to keep her alive. At one point she had eight different medications and solutions dripping into her body. To this day, I am not sure how many times Katie nearly died, but I could eventually tell when the doctors and nurses were becoming concerned due to their laconic jargon and the increased frequency of their visits. I learned how to read the monitor and could tell when her heart rate was dangerously high and her blood pressure dangerously low. After they took the breathing tube out the first time, I could tell when her oxygen level was getting to the point that she might need to be intubated again, which would start another round of sedation.
No comments:
Post a Comment