A Million Years with You (30 page)

 

I loved everything about the Chamonix Valley. French food, of course, is the best in the world, but I would have traveled to Chamonix just for the cheese. It came from a goat farm on one of the mountains. And I could have spent the rest of my life on Ramsay's front steps, looking at the view. During the next few years on our visits I would do just that. But then one day when I was back at home, thinking of Heather and Ramsay, the phone rang.

It was Heather. She was crying. There had been a mountaineering accident and Ramsay had been badly hurt. She learned this while shopping in Chamonix, where a storekeeper who knew her saw her passing on the sidewalk and came out to tell her. He'd heard about it on a radio that broadcasts calls for the rescue helicopter. The helicopter had taken Ramsay off a mountain and taken him to the Chamonix hospital. But by the time Heather got to the hospital, Ramsay had been taken somewhere else, and she didn't know where.

Heather was eight months pregnant. I told her to be strong. I told her I was on my way. I told her I'd call Steve, who was in Prague at the time and would get there before I could. We hung up. I called Steve. Then I called Stephanie in Texas—the person who would be the information center, keeping track of all of us, taking phone calls, communicating any news, and organizing whatever needed to be organized.

The phone rang again. It was my close friend Sy Montgomery, calling for our daily chat. I told her what had happened and that I was going to France. Believing that I consider myself too tough to ask for support, she announced that she was going with me. I arranged for someone to feed the dogs, found my passport, scraped up what money I had in the house, and put a few things in a suitcase.

The phone rang again. It was Heather, who had learned that Ramsay had been taken to a regional hospital in Sallanches. She also had learned how the accident had happened. Ramsay had been guiding a novice skier down a well-known off-trail slope when his ski caught on a ledge of white rock that was sticking up out of the snow. In the past the snowpack had been thicker and the ledge had been covered. Ramsay had skied there with clients many times before. But the world was warming, the snowpack was shrinking, and the ledge was exposed. Ramsay flipped over. French guides didn't wear helmets while skiing, so Ramsay didn't have a helmet. His head hit the rock. He thought he was okay and stood up.

A man and a woman were skiing behind him and his client. They saw Ramsay fall. They skied down to him and saw that he was dazed and bleeding. They told him to lie down. As he did, he lost consciousness. The two people had a cell phone and called the rescue helicopter. After it came and Ramsay was carried aboard, these two splendid people led the client down the slope to safety.

The helicopter took Ramsay to the hospital in Chamonix, which dealt mostly with broken arms and legs. By then Ramsay was in a coma and the doctors couldn't help him. So they sent him by ambulance to the hospital in Sallanches. But even that hospital had no neurologist or neurosurgeon. The nearest neurosurgeon was in Switzerland.

Heather was calling from a cell phone while on her way to Sallanches. By the time she got there, Ramsay was in the operating room, where a doctor was performing surgery. In time the doctor came out, soaked with Ramsay's blood. He told Heather that Ramsay had less than a 50 percent chance of living but would be sent by ambulance to a neurosurgical hospital, part of the University Hospitals in Geneva.

Heather called a third time to tell me this, but spared me the thing about 50 percent. After the phone call ended, Sy came with a driver, who took us to the airport at eighty miles an hour, and we flew to Switzerland.

 

I remember nothing about the trip except that Sy was with me. We took a taxi from the airport to the hospital, where we found Ramsay lying on his back in the ICU, deep in coma, his face swollen and covered with dry blood that had come from his ears. There's nothing to say when you see that someone has been bleeding from the ears. You just know that things will never be the same.

Ramsay's eyes and mouth were shut. Steve and Heather were standing beside his bed, looking down at him. Sy and I looked down at him too. Quietly, Steve said he wanted to tell us something, but he'd tell us in the hall. From the expression on his face, I knew that what he had to say was nothing good. People in coma can sometimes hear things even if they don't seem to, so I was glad to be the hall when Steve told us that the doctors weren't sure that Ramsay would ever come out of the coma. We went back to his bed and continued to look at him. We stood there for hours in silence, not talking, just looking. There was nothing else to do.

Various monitors were attached to Ramsay. Sometimes we'd look at them. At one point a green light above his bed began to blink. We looked at that too. The blinking stopped but soon began again. A nurse came by and said that Ramsay was getting a phone call. Since he couldn't take the call, we just watched the green light. It eventually stopped, but again began blinking. This time Heather found the phone and answered it. The caller was a guide who had learned of the accident. Heather told him as much as she knew, and thanked him. In silence, we continued to look at Ramsay. But again the light blinked. Another guide was calling. A third guide called later. Word was spreading.

 

Heather and I went to the financial office to learn what we could about payment. We asked that the hospital keep Ramsay no matter what, because we would find a way to pay for it. Just then one of the doctors came by and heard what we were saying. He told us not to worry about payment. The important thing was to get the patient well, he said.

We then learned that even though Ramsay was in Switzerland, the French health-care system would cover his hospital bills. As a licensed French guide, Ramsay had a French green card and thus could receive the health care available to all French citizens, young or old, sick or healthy, rich or poor. The French took care of their own, which was more than the Americans did, and for which right-wing Americans scorn them.

Heather and I started back to the ICU. On the way we heard an orchestra playing Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3. The orchestra was in the hospital lobby. The musicians were volunteers, playing for the benefit of the patients. The gorgeous music was going up the elevator shafts. We were enraptured. We would never have imagined an orchestra playing beautiful classical music in a hospital, and there we were, experiencing it. We stood there for a long time, just listening and breathing, while our souls absorbed the music. It felt like clear air after one has been suffocating. Then we went back to the ICU and stood beside the bed to look at Ramsay.

 

Steve found us rooms in a hotel, and late that night we went there. After we had gone to bed I heard Heather in the next room, crying. I knocked on the door and she opened it. She said that Ramsay was her closest friend. She said she needed him and didn't know what she'd do if he didn't get better. She put her hands on her pregnant belly. A little boy was in there. I remember wishing he was already born so that his father could have seen him. I also thought that Heather might rather be alone, so I went back to my room. Again I heard her crying. I'm unable to cry in such circumstances. Aside from this, Kothonjoro, how do you like Geneva?

In the morning we all went back to the ICU. Nothing had changed except that the blood had been washed off Ramsay's face. He was still lying on his back. His eyes and mouth were still shut. He hadn't moved since we had last seen him. He might be in a coffin, I thought. But he was alive—his heart was beating. We saw this from the monitor. We stood beside his bed and watched the monitor.

 

Several times a day we'd call Stephanie in Texas. She'd been taking phone calls from friends and family, giving them whatever information she had. She'd also been evaluating the various rehab centers for brain-injured people if and when Ramsay would be able to enter one. And if he were to come home, she'd been checking his American health insurance to see what it would cover. In short, she took care of everything related to this accident, and it gave us strength just talk to her.

One day Ramsay's eyes moved under his eyelids. The next day his lips and one of his hands moved. The neurologist measured his brain waves with some kind of machine and, based on what she found, decided that he could be moved from the ICU to the regular part of the hospital.

She was a kind and considerate person. She took time to explain to us that Ramsay was making progress, and she showed us what the machine had produced. Steve understood what she was showing us, but I didn't. By then my mind had gone as blank as Ramsay's. Steve was listening for both of us.

The doctors put Ramsay in a ward with two other people. He must have known he was somewhere else because he started to get up. Two male nurses hurried in and looped a tape around his hands to tie him to the bed rails. Although he was still in a coma and again lying on his back, I noticed he was working one hand loose. When it was free, he used it to free the other hand. A doctor came in, saw that Ramsay had freed himself, and tied his hands again, this time with twine using twenty or thirty knots for each hand. “Let's see him get out of that,” said the doctor.

The twine had plenty of slack. Ramsay's hand moved down to feel the slack, then to feel the knots. Somehow, just from the way they felt, he must have understood what kind of knots they were, and he began to untie them. Although flat on his back, without looking at his hands, he did this efficiently, methodically, and without hesitation. To untie a knot with one hand and without looking at it was quite an ability. He'd acquired it from climbing, and it was still with him, deep in his brain. Although I knew he shouldn't be untying himself, it was a beautiful sight, and in my heart I was cheering.

As he opened the last knot I spoke to him. He gave no sign that he heard. I spoke again, but for him I wasn't there and neither was he. In the depths of his mind, he was far away, but he had purpose. With amazing agility for someone in a coma, he vaulted over the bed rail and started to leave the room. The two male nurses were talking in the hall and saw what he was doing. They walked him back to the bed and injected him with something. He sank to an earlier level of his coma.

 

After another week or so he could say a few words. He seemed to be getting better. Guides from different parts of Europe came to visit him, many of them bringing gifts of money. I hadn't appreciated the closeness of the guiding community, but why wouldn't they be close? Up there with the Ice Maiden, where most people will never go, they had little in common with the rest of us and everything in common with one another.

 

The neurologists and neurosurgeon who had been caring for Ramsay had a conference. They thought he should be moved back to the Sallanches hospital and from there to a rehab center. Steve and I wanted him to come home. So did Heather. Ramsay, who by then could talk a little, managed to say that he and Heather should stay in France. But if they did, what would happen to Heather? She'd be alone with a brain-injured husband and her first new baby. Not only did she want to go home, she wanted to go home quickly. The baby was due in less than a month, and if she waited much longer, the airlines wouldn't take her.

At about this time I thought I should do something about a phone call I had received shortly before Heather's fateful one telling of the accident. The earlier call had been from my doctor. It seemed that I had breast cancer. A biopsy had confirmed this, and I was supposed to have had a mastectomy. Instead I'd gone to Switzerland. One can't ignore such things forever, so I thought I should do something about it. Sy had gone home a few days earlier. I took a taxi to the airport and flew to Manchester, New Hampshire, where Sy met me. Steve and Heather went back to Les Houches, and Ramsay was taken by ambulance to Sallanches.

 

For a family to go through brain injury, breast cancer, and birth all at the same time only to experience a happy ending is more than one can expect. Yet that's what happened. When I got home, Stephanie flew from Texas to be with me, and she and Sy took me to Boston for what I thought would be essentially a drive-by procedure. A previous hysterectomy, every step of which I watched in the mirrorlike light fixture above the operating table, had been a walk in the park and was more than welcome because the pregnancy scares and the bother of menstruation were gone forever. But the mastectomy gave me a serious wound infection and made my chest look lopsided. Even so, it captured the cancer. As for the breast, I expect they gave it to the OR dog.

Meanwhile, Ramsay was discharged from the Sallanches hospital and went home to Les Houches. He'd been told to go to a rehab unit in the Chamonix Valley, but the waiting period was several months, so he listened to Steve's and Heather's advice and agreed to come home. At first his doctor wouldn't let him travel, and because of Heather's advanced pregnancy, things got a bit dicey with regard to time, but at the very last minute the doctor told him he could go. He had by no means recovered, so the long flight was difficult for him. But Steve and Heather helped him.

I thought of them as they were flying. I thought of wild geese because wild geese stay together and help one another. My mind's eye saw four wild geese, one of them as yet to be born, flying through the wind and night above the ocean.

 

Steve and I owned a house with a barn across the road from our house, originally a guest house or a rental property. Heather and Ramsay moved into it. Not long after that, the phone rang in the middle of the night. It was Ramsay. The baby was coming. Evidently he had driven Heather to the hospital despite his uncertain condition. Heather's mother had planned to be with her but was still at her home in California and couldn't get there in time. Would Stephanie and I take her place?

Normally the drive took forty minutes, but we were there in twenty minutes. Stephanie had to take the elevator, but it was long in coming so I ran up the stairs to the maternity section. On the way I heard singing. It was Hindustani music. Normally in New Hampshire one hears country music, so I assumed that the hospital had found an upscale radio station. But at the top of the stairs, people were gathered to listen to the song, and one of them pointed to one of the rooms. There I found Heather and Ramsay, Heather sitting on the edge of the bed with Ramsay on a chair facing her. Their foreheads were almost touching and they didn't look up. Together they were singing
Jaya Jaya Shiva Shambho Jaya Jaya Shiva Shambho Maha Deva Shambho Maha Deva Shambho Jaya Jaya Shiva Shambho
, over and over, on and on. They had learned such songs in India when Ramsay was designing a course about teaching avalanche prediction for the Indian army, and the song was a
dhun
, which means “resonance,” in this case resonance with Shiva. It was working. With it, they sang Heather through her pain.