I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia Read Online Free Page B

“Where is Patrick now?” she asked.“Who checked him out?” No one had. She said, “We’ll get the rest of this information later. Go now and get your son.” Jim drove home to get Patrick from the Knotes’ house. When he arrived back at the hospital, Patrick was rushed to the pediatric ER for a battery of tests. He had a small scrape on his cheek, but thankfully nothing worse.
    Jim was told that one of the hospital’s top neurosurgeons was coming on duty at midnight. This doctor was said to be brilliant, but antisocial, even kind of reclusive. “He asks for the night shift,” one doctor told Jim, “because he doesn’t like talking to people. Don’t expect a lot of bedside manner. But trust me, he’s as good as we have for making this kind of neurological call.”
    At 11 P.M. , a nurse at Harris Methodist examined me. Her notes state that I did not lose consciousness immediately upon being hit on the head, but passed out shortly thereafter. A subsequent note states that I lost consciousness “approximately three minutes post-injury” and remained out “for about five minutes.” Another note from that night states, “Patient is easily aroused but drowsy,” and is “oriented to space and time.” Yet another note says: “Patient’s left arm feels ‘funny,’ her left leg feels ‘heavy,’ and her head hurts ‘inside.’”
    At 11:20 P.M. , the famed antisocial neurosurgeon swept in like a character from a sentimental tearjerker disease-of-the-week movie. Dr. Joe Ellis Wheeler was middle-aged and portly, with pasty skin, salt-and-pepper hair, piercing blue eyes, and a pleasant Texas drawl. He examined me. Then he called Jim into his office.
    Jim recalls “a wall of leather-bound books. A great intelligence was there. He sounded like someone who had an absolute command of his field. Here was somebody I implicitly trusted.”
    Dr. Wheeler told Jim that I had suffered a closed-head injury,affecting not my skull but the soft tissue inside. X-rays showed no fractured skull, no compressed vertebrae. Jim asked him what could be done. Dr. Wheeler said, “The fluid is what’s killing your wife. If we opened her skull, because of the pressure inside, the result would just be catastrophic. The best thing we can do is just withdraw all treatments, the fluids, the IV, so the tissues can naturally reabsorb the fluids in her head. We need to give her body a chance to absorb the trauma.” Jim remembers Dr. Wheeler saying this, too: “I’ll be honest with you: most people with this level of internal injury do not survive.”
    Dr. Wheeler is retired now, and he recalls little of me or my hospital stay: “I saw so many people with horrible injuries, it’s hard to remember.” Dr. Wheeler says my husband’s account sounds plausible but exaggerated. “I would never have advised stopping all treatment,” he says. “I would advise slowing fluids down, because in an injured brain, fluids can make it swell.” Dr. Wheeler also says it was never his habit to tell loved ones that a patient might not survive. When asked, he’d say, “God never tells me whether people are going to live or die.” I am convinced that whatever decisions were made that night by either Dr. Wheeler or God, those decisions saved my life and I will always be grateful.
    Jim made another round of collect calls to his family and mine. He told them, “They’ve convinced me that the best course of action is to do nothing. We’ll have to wait it out.” He recalls saying, too, that I “had a chance of recovering, but it’s only a chance. I wasn’t trying to sugarcoat anything. I thought you were dying. There was desperation on the other end of the phone, once we got past ‘Can we come? Can we be there?’ Because there was no physical way to get from A to B. Everybody was going to check what flights there were in the morning, but there was nothing thatcould be done right then,” Jim says. “And you might not be there in the