Chapter Six
SIX
My feet dangle over the edge of the hospital bed as Miguel and I wait for the doctor to return with the test results.
“It shouldn’t take this long to get the CT scan results,” Miguel says, looking at his watch. His jittery energy is not helping me stay calm.
“I wish you would just sit down and chill out,” I say. Maybe focus on me. “You’re making me nervous.”
“Maybe I should go say something,” he says. “Ask a nurse when the results will be ready.”
“Please don’t. They’re doing their jobs.”
“Maybe. Or maybe they forgot about us.”
“It’s an ER. They’re busy. We just have to be patient.” I’m slightly annoyed that I have to manage him right now. Miguel can’t take a vacation if there’s no parasailing at ten or snowboarding or mountain to climb.
“How much did you drink at Jo’s party?” He stops in front of me, arms crossed like when he’s coaching Rachel from the sidelines of the tennis court.
“I told you, a couple of glasses of wine.” I frown. “And a shot. A citronelle shot.”
“You did shots?” His eyebrows shoot up.
“Shot. Singular. Why? It was a party.”
“I’m just wondering. Sometimes you get pretty tipsy.”
“There’s a difference between tipsy and blackout drunk.” There was a handful of times in college when I drank so much I blacked out, but that was decades ago. I don’t drink like that anymore. No one my age does, at least not anyone I know.
“I didn’t say you got blackout drunk, Caren. I said sometimes you get pretty tipsy, which you do.”
“I wasn’t drunk. I don’t feel hungover. I feel groggy. It’s different.”
“But it would explain a lot, right? How you fell and hit your head. It’s the most logical explanation.”
I begin to protest but stop when the doctor enters, carrying a folder.
“Good news,” Dr. Malik says. “There’s no bleeding on the brain.”
“Thank God.” Miguel exhales loudly.
“No skull fracture, no stroke.” He gives me a sad little frown. “But you’ve clearly suffered a concussion due to some kind of trauma to the back of your head. That much is obvious.”
“Do you know what caused it?” Miguel asked.
“No. That we can’t tell just from the wound.” The doctor shakes his head. “Let’s shift gears for a moment and talk about your memory. Earlier, you said you couldn’t recall anything about last night.”
I nod. “I remember up until about maybe eight, eight thirty. Then nothing until about—” I turn to Miguel. “What time did I get home this morning?”
“A little after six.”
“But you remember coming home?” the doctor asks.
“Yes, but nothing before that. I don’t even remember where I spent the night. I was wearing the same clothes as last night, as if I never went home and changed.”
“So, what you are experiencing is a specific type of amnesia called post-traumatic amnesia.”
I recoil at the words. Amnesia takes me back to the soap operas my grandmother loved—Guiding Light, General Hospital. “I don’t have amnesia. I know who I am.”
The doctor pulls a rolling stool closer to me and pats my knee.
“I don’t want you to be afraid. This is not the stuff of movies where you don’t know your name or where you live.
Post-traumatic amnesia can result from an injury to the head, and it can lead to the inability to remember events that took place directly before the event, which we call retrograde amnesia.
” Dr. Malik pauses and looks at me intently to gauge how I am taking this.
When he is satisfied I am not going to burst into tears, he continues.
“It can also cause people to be unable to remember new information right after the event, which is called anterograde amnesia. Or it can be a combination of both types.”
“And I have both?”
Dr. Malik offers a gentle smile. “It looks that way.”
“Lucky me.”
“When is she going to recover?” Miguel asks. “I mean, she will get her memory back, right?”
“I know it’s hard to watch someone you love struggle like this.
” Dr. Malik looks up at him. “It can be very frustrating. One way you can help Caren is by talking through what she remembers, as she remembers.” He turns back to me and continues in a soothing voice.
“You might want to keep a journal and jot down things as they come back to you. Sometimes memories return in fragments, other times in whole scenes. We have a support group here at the hospital for people who have experienced brain trauma. Talking to others can help you with some of those feelings of disorientation and anxiety.”
“You want me to go to group therapy?” I cringe at the thought. Over the past four years we have spent thousands on therapy for Rachel and therapy for me, so I can come to terms with feeling like I might have failed Rachel. “I’m therapied out.”
“Look, traumatic memory loss is not like tearing your ACL or breaking your wrist. Those injuries are obvious and straightforward to fix. Brain injuries are invisible to the eye, and the road to recovery takes time.” He smiles.
“If not a therapist, I really recommend the support group to help you through what can be a very disorienting process.”
“How long does this disorienting process last?” I ask, trying to squelch the panic rising in me.
“No two cases are the same. Some people regain their memories in hours, some in weeks,” he says. “For others it can take months, and in some rare cases, patients may never recover them fully.”
My whole body stiffens when I hear those last words. How can this be happening to me?
“I’m going to send in the nurse, who will give you a handout on activities you need to refrain from to help your brain heal.”
“Like what?”
“Nobody likes this, but you need to stay off screens as much as possible for the next six weeks.”
“Six weeks! I can’t do that. I need to be on screens for my job.” Job search is more accurate. I only have one client right now and I can’t afford to lose her. I need to be online, applying for jobs and updating my LinkedIn page; plus, I have a screening interview tomorrow.
“I understand that it may not be possible for everyone,” Dr. Malik says. “But you must try to minimize your time on screens. No more than thirty minutes a day. Got it?”
I pull a face and turn to Miguel for commiseration, but he shakes his head. “Don’t look at me.”
Dr. Malik sighs. “You wouldn’t walk on a broken ankle, right?
Give your brain a chance to heal.” The doctor stands up.
“There’s one more thing. We are legally obligated to contact law enforcement when we know that someone has been physically assaulted, but this is a gray area.
We don’t know what happened to you last night. ”
“You think I was assaulted? I mean, I would remember that, I’m sure.”
“Not necessarily. The brain can try to protect you by erasing frightening things. And we can’t tell from your injury.
It’s certainly not out of the question. Your head wound is consistent with blunt force trauma.
Worst-case scenario, when your memory comes back and you realize you did fall, then you wasted half an hour with the police. But if you remember something else…”
“Like if someone attacked me?”
He shrugs noncommittally. “If that turns out to be the case, you’ll be glad to have initiated an investigation. To not have to start from scratch. If it were me, or my wife, I would call the police.” Dr. Malik pauses. “And it’s not a bad idea to run a tox screen.”
“Wait, what?” Miguel asks. “You think someone roofied her?”
I shoot him a look. “Why is that so crazy, because I’m almost fifty? Who would want to roofie me?”
He laughs nervously. “I didn’t mean that.”
“Tell you what,” Dr. Malik says. “We’ll take some blood before you leave and send it to the lab. It takes a few weeks to get results. It’ll put your mind at rest.”
On the ride home, I press my face against the cold glass of the window to help keep me awake.
I’m thoroughly exhausted, the kind of full-body fatigue I associate with having the flu or jet lag.
The nurse said that this was normal and that it might linger for several weeks.
The whole thing feels like an awful fever dream.
Just last night I was drinking in the Allards’ backyard, toasting our kids, and now I face a road to recovery. I hate that phrase.
“I want to call the police when we get home,” I say as we pull onto our street.
Miguel does not respond.
“Did you hear me?”
“I heard you. If you think that’s the right move.” He pulls up in front of our house and cuts the engine.
“I do. Don’t you? I mean, something happened to me last night, Miguel. I don’t know what but I think the police should be involved.” I unclick my seat belt. “It would be nice if you supported me.”
He takes my hand in his and squeezes it. “I do support you. We’ll call the police, okay?”
Once inside, I curl up in the living room with Kugel at my feet as Miguel makes the call from the kitchen.
Ensconced in the sofa’s soft pillows, I feel the pull of sleep.
I take out my phone and look at the call log.
The last person I spoke to was Yumi, and the call ended at 8:36 last night.
A text from her also time-stamped at 8:36 reads:
You OK? Got disconnected. Pls check in.
And my response:
I’m fine. Just going to call it a night. Talk tomorrow.
I have no recollection of either the phone call or sending that text. Maybe I can stop by Yumi’s later and ask her what we were talking about.
“What are you doing?” Miguel asks in a teasing tone. He walks over to the sofa. “You’re not supposed to be on screens.”
“I just needed to check one thing. What did the police say?”
“Someone is coming. But you heard what the doctor said about screens.” There is an edge to his voice that I don’t recognize.
“Why are you being like this?” I ask. “I’m an adult. I can decide for myself. Besides. He said to minimize screen time.”
“You know that’s not what he said, Caren. You’re not thinking straight. Don’t you want your brain to heal?”
He holds out his hand. Every inch of me resists turning over my phone.
It feels like an admission of guilt, that I can’t be trusted to take care of myself.
And there is something unsettling in the tiny shift in power between us.
It’s too reminiscent of a parent confiscating a phone from a naughty child.
But another part of me wants to submit. He’s not wrong.
I do want my brain to heal. Exhausted by my own internal debate, I relent and hand over the phone.
I pull the throw blanket over me, ready for my nap, when the doorbell’s sharp chime echoes through the house.
Miguel slips my phone into his back pocket and looks out the window that faces the front stoop. “That was fast. The police are here.”