Dog Named Leaf (13 page)

T
HE HOSPITAL’S TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR
ICU
IS NOT THE KIND OF PLACE A
person who has just had brain surgery can easily remember. For me, this was probably because I felt as if my head had been slammed into concrete.

The hospital lights were unbearable. The gurney’s wheels clattered deafeningly. People’s voices struck me like bullets.

“Don’t scratch,” someone commanded, as I reached up to scratch my ear.

“He just pulled out a couple of stitches,” someone else said.

Then I heard Linda’s voice and tried to focus in on her blurry face. “You made it. You made it. You made it,” she kept repeating.

There was something important I was supposed to remember, but I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Assured by Linda’s voice, I sank back into unconsciousness. She would be my link to whatever came next.

I have no idea how much time passed. It could have been seconds or hours.

Linda remained in the room when Gale arrived for her visit. Her blurry figure triggered a memory. “Red Lobster,” I slurred.

Linda and Gale laughed. I didn’t understand why. I was only fulfilling the agreement I had made to her at the restaurant. My brain still worked. I was still here.

For a split second, I saw Leaf’s face.

I faded in and out of consciousness. Nurses had Linda and my family and friends return to yet another waiting room. After a shift change
the ICU doors were locked. Linda got someone’s attention, and a nurse led her back to my room again.

After Linda left the ICU waiting room, a woman who was also waiting for a surgery patient asked Arlene, “Is she famous?” The woman had recognized Linda from a photo in the
Minneapolis Star Tribune
months ago. It accompanied an article about the animal-rescue book we’d written. The photo showed my wife on a raised platform. She stood nose-to-nose with a giraffe from the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans who had survived Hurricane Katrina. It struck me later as one more surreal occurrence in my brain-surgery saga.

Linda said one moment that especially touched her was when Aubrey held my hand in his and said, “Glad to see you, my friend.” I vaguely remember Aubrey’s face. I felt his loving presence. He stood close by on my left side. The lilting Jamaican accent in his kind voice came from a distance.

A numb yet constant pain filled my head. Nursing staff regularly monitored my pain medications. Throughout the night they changed fluids bags and checked my heartbeat, blood-sugar level, and important vital signs. Their presence made me feel safe. The room was quiet. The curtains were drawn. I rested.

The next few days after ICU were a blur. My pain ranged from mild soreness to throbbing excruciation. I became a 110 percent supporter of pain-management medications.

I fluctuated from feeling I could do anything to barely being able to open my eyes. In the neurology recovery ward, the curtains stayed drawn to keep my room dark. Light hurt my eyes like a dagger stabbing the inside of my skull.

One side of my face was swollen from the surgery. My skull felt hollow. A scar stretched from the top of my head to just above my ear. A strange echo reverberated whenever I spoke. I didn’t feel like myself anymore.

My mother, sister, and daughter took turns with Linda and stayed with me throughout the entire week. Because I seemed to be making a better-than-expected recovery, they all felt comfortable returning to Georgia the day before I was to go home from the hospital.

After Gale, Susan, and Mom left for the airport, Linda took a lunch break. While she was gone I called Leaf’s doggy day care. I must have sounded like a drunk phoning from a bar. I don’t recall much of what I said, and my speech was slurred. The person who answered assured me that Leaf was fine. I immediately went back to sleep. Leaf was doing well—that’s all that mattered.

Steroids to ease the swelling on my brain agitated me. They created illusions of power and control. The nurses and Linda told me to press the call button when I needed to get out of bed. The steroids, however, made
me feel like Superman. I thought I could handle a short walk to the hospital room’s bathroom, but when I pulled myself out of bed, I staggered and fell full force on the hard tiled floor.

Linda returned from the cafeteria to find a nurse helping me back to bed. “He got up by himself,” she told my wife. Her tone sounded a bit like snitching.

Linda was horrified. “Why did you do that?” she asked me. “Did he hurt anything?” she asked the nurse.

“No. I’m fine. Nothing wrong with me.”

The nurse rolled her eyes at me as she helped to hoist my legs onto the bed. “Use your call button next time,” she said.

I couldn’t find the words to explain to Linda why I’d done such an imprudent thing. Desperate to be independent, I needed to prove how quickly I’d recover. Nothing had changed. I’d still be employed, independent, dependable. A fully functioning man.

Prior to leaving the office, I’d told my employer that I’d be back at work the third week after surgery. The company needed me to fly to an important client site the fourth week. “There are various suggested days for recovery, but a couple of weeks should work for a healthy man like me,” I’d told the company’s president and my boss. They were sympathetic and weren’t trying to pressure me. But after all the time required for presurgery tests and procedures, I had very few vacation or sick days left.

Panic drove me to not think clearly even before the surgery. While no one told me I’d lose my job if I didn’t get back to work fast enough or couldn’t operate at full capacity, people who can’t do the work they were hired for are sometimes let go. I clung to the belief that I could push myself to handle the job. My employee health insurance would be essential to at least partially pay the catastrophic medical expenses, and I didn’t want to lose that.

To Linda’s dismay, the president, my boss, and his second in command from my company came to the hospital during the first week
and only a few days after my surgery to check on me. They mentioned they were in the city on a site visit and decided to stop by. They arrived at midday when I was awake and alert. This gave them the impression that I was making a remarkable recovery. I felt relieved that they saw me at my best. After asking general questions about the surgery, the men talked about the work ahead of me and wanted to know when I thought I’d be returning.

At first I thought it was nice of them to visit. Linda felt that this was a fact-finding mission. She believed they wanted to assess whether their employee would be able to work and travel. I didn’t agree with her totally. They were honest, decent individuals who did a lot professionally and personally to support their office staff.

Linda cautioned the men that the doctors said I must not talk for long. She hoped they’d take the hint and not try to pressure me. She knew I was the main liaison with the major client I was scheduled to visit in four weeks.

By the time the men left, Linda was upset, and my anxiety level had soared. Their visit reminded me that my days and nights would be hard after I was released from the hospital. I knew then that the three weeks I had for healing would be inadequate before returning to work. Would I be able to pull off convincing everyone that I was back to normal? Even so, I was determined to make it happen.

Losing my job and not being normal again were in my thoughts. The president and vice president were compassionate and ready to do whatever I needed for a full recovery. But everyone was feeling tense. Our company had just been acquired by a larger firm, and there were rumors of breakups and layoffs.

Amy, the head nurse, stopped in to check on her resident pet-book author. She chatted about her pets and told us how much she enjoyed reading the books we’d given her and the nursing staff. Up to that point we were happy to tell her that my nursing care had been excellent.

Before we left the hospital that day, I felt something gnaw at me. I would have to rely on, even trust, others for my well-being. That frustrated me. I had always been the one who took care of things.

I resolved to send clear messages to everyone and myself that my brain function was not diminished. In my confused state of mind, I thought people were treating me like an invalid whenever they offered to help. Reduced to my father’s dependence after his stroke, I was every bit as ready to lash out as he had been. Unlike my father, who had lived the rest of his life in miserable helplessness, I resolved to be invincible.

But just how long and to what extent would I stay out of control of my own body, of my own life?

A
FTER
L
INDA BROUGHT ME HOME FROM THE HOSPITAL AND SETTLED
me into bed, she headed out to the drugstore to pick up my postsurgery prescriptions and then to doggy day care to bring home Leaf. Meanwhile, happy to be home, I fell into a deep sleep.

Eventually my ticket-to-life deliverer bounded into the bedroom to greet me. When he smelled all the strange hospital odors that still clung to my body, he became extraordinarily quiet, attentive, and affectionate. Pulling himself up with his paws on the side of the bed, he scrutinized and sniffed me carefully. Although my prescription-drug-laced breath and swollen face must have surprised him, he still licked my cheek. There’s nothing quite like unconditional love.

“Hi boy,” I said softly. “How are you doing?” I petted his head and swiftly fell back to sleep.

My wife had a lot on her shoulders. She had to administer to me on a strict schedule from a portable plastic file cabinet full of pills. One day, she gave me something at noon that I was supposed to take at dinnertime. Anxious that I’d suffer some traumatic effect, Linda called Nurse Jody to confess. The stalwart and seasoned neurosurgery professional assured my wife that I’d be all right.

It was essential to my recovery that I slept in a darkened room. Linda shut the blinds and hung sheets over the curtains to allow in the least amount of light. She kept me as comfortable as possible. I alternated
between sleeping, asking if it was time yet, please, for pain medication, and believing I ruled the world.

In between taking care of and monitoring me, Linda also handled all our pets’ needs. Then she would head upstairs to her office to work on our writing projects, answer e-mails, and talk to friends and family about how I was doing.

To her horror, I climbed the stairs to her office one day. “I thought you were asleep!” she gasped in alarm.

“Let’s take Leaf to the dog park,” I said. At that moment I felt this was a reasonable request.

“How about if we go out in a day or two? After you’ve had time to get more rest? You’ve been through a lot, you know.”

“Well, if you don’t want to drive us, I’ll take him to the dog park myself.”

Linda got up from her desk. She rushed over to where I teetered on the top step.

“Come on downstairs,” Linda cajoled. “I’ll make you some tea.”

Sounding like Homer Simpson, I crooned, “Uhmm. Tea.”

She escorted me downstairs and deposited me on the living room couch. Leaf, being a good caregiver-team member, came over to seal the deal. He planted himself with his body across my leg so I wouldn’t get up. While Linda made tea in the kitchen, I thought I also heard the sound of rattling metal. Was she hiding the car keys?

As the days of my recovery at home continued, Leaf worked hard to get me to become more active. He frequently brought his favorite ball to me, and his eyes pleaded for playtime. “OK, here it goes,” I would say, throwing the ball down the hallway for him to chase. It wasn’t our beloved dog park. But it was the best I could do.

The first day Linda drove Leaf and me to the dog park in an attempt to get back to our normal routine, I was every bit as much of a sight as the recovering patients I’d seen in Dr. Nussbaum’s office. A tan baseball cap
covered the neatly stitched surgery scar that wound from the center of my skull to below my ear. It would eventually be covered by my hair. But in this early stage, its swollen pink stitches were visible. The right side of my face blossomed with black-and-blue bruises. I looked like an extra from the movie
Fight Club.

I sat on the picnic bench, debilitated and morose. I didn’t have enough strength to throw the ball for my eager dog. Instead, Leaf had to settle for Linda. He looked disappointed when she didn’t throw his ball as far. Each time he brought it back, he dropped it at my feet instead of hers. His face read,
She throws like a girl.

The day after I got home, our neighbor, a kind man with a quintessential Minnesotan accent, knocked at our back door. Linda was upstairs working, so I answered. When I saw who it was, I remembered that he had offered to cut our grass.

“I finished the lawn,” he said after I opened the door. I motioned for him to come in, but he stayed at the doorstep. Maybe because this was his first glimpse of my bruised face and swollen eye.

“Thanks so much,” I said. I would have liked to be more cheerful. But as he stood in the doorway, bright sunlight shone behind him and hit my eyes like bricks. My head started pounding with pain.

Trying to be helpful, he said, “You have to remember to pick up those pinecones. They got stuck in my mower when I ran over them. Almost broke the blades.”

I knew my neighbor, retired from a full-time job he’d held for thirty years, meant well. He wanted me to know that I had to take care of this pinecone business if I didn’t want damage to my own lawn mower.

After he left and I closed the door, I went back to bed feeling depleted that I hadn’t been able to keep up with my lawn. I resolved to free myself from this uncomfortable state of dependency.

A couple of weeks into my recovery, Linda and I walked with Leaf by my side along the Mississippi River in dog-park heaven. I threw the ball for Leaf to chase, but it landed in water too deep for his comfort zone.

A small fish jumped near where his ball had landed. Leaf was not about to swim where there might be creatures underneath trying to nibble at his paws. He stared at the ball, turned his head to look at me, and barked.

Surprisingly, my little guy mirrored the determination I now had. He was not going to ask anyone for help.
I’m going to man up,
he seemed to say.

Leaf tentatively moved toward the ball, which now floated even farther away. He quickly lost his nerve and backed off. He barked at the ball again. He whined and pleaded for it to change course and return to him.

Leaf knew how to swim. He just didn’t seem to be confident in himself in these rapidly moving waters. The swift river currents would give anyone pause. They might be strong enough to sweep up a small dog and carry him away.

Leaf’s frustration grew. I prepared to remove my shoes and wade out to rescue my fellow’s ball. Linda said, “He has so many other balls. Just let that one go.”

Of course, her logic made sense. But my brain still wasn’t consistently sending or receiving logical thought. “He’s really upset. He needs his ball,” I replied.

Before I could finish untying my shoelaces, a family walked by with its own short-legged dog trotting alongside. Their dog, a terrier-mix, took note of the situation and instantly figured out what was happening. From the shore, the dog looked at Leaf alternately pining for and glaring at his ball floating away on top of the dark water.

Without hesitation, she jumped into the water, swam, grabbed the ball in her mouth, and brought it back to shore. Her family watched the scene unfold. When she dropped the ball at Leaf’s feet, they shouted, “Good girl!”

Leaf grabbed the precious ball and wagged his tail with gusto. “Thank you,” I said to the dog’s cheering section. They looked quizzically at my tan baseball hat and visible scar. Their expressions conveyed both sympathy and the instant revulsion I was becoming accustomed to.

“What’s your dog’s name?” Linda asked.

This broke the Frankenstein monster spell. “Lizzy,” they answered. They proceeded to tell us what a great dog their little pooch was.

“She’s very brave,” I added, as they turned away to continue their walk. “Thank you,” I called after them. I felt grateful that I hadn’t needed to get my feet wet.

After they left, Linda looked relieved. “I’m so glad that little hero kept you from going in after Leaf’s ball. What if you had slipped on the rocks?”

As we resumed our walk, I thought about Lizzy. She’d made the conscious decision to help a dog she didn’t know. No complaints. No fuss. Just do the good, kind deed, the right action, and be on your way.
Maybe receiving help from others didn’t have to be such a sticky proposition after all.

I had to go back to my job in just a few days. I was not about to take disability. I assumed that the stigma of having been incapacitated enough to qualify for disability would follow me to any new job. Anxiety over what might happen when I went on my next business trip filled me with stress. I’d have to do computer-software training for a class of strong-willed, talkative people in my weakened and often confused state.

I would need all the help I could get. And I’d better learn how to ask for and accept it.