Stir (4 page)

Eli doesn't like sweets—nobody's perfect—but he does have a soft spot for a few select things, oatmeal cookies being one of them. These are his favorite. They're big, chewy saucers, crisp around the edges, with just enough whole wheat flour to warm up the flavor. To scoop the dough for these, I use a 1½-tablespoon cookie scoop, piling two level scoops, one on top of the other.

1½ cups (135 grams) rolled oats (not instant)

1 cup (125 grams) all-purpose flour

½ cup (57 grams) whole wheat flour

½ teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon cinnamon

1 cup (2 sticks; 226 grams) unsalted butter, melted

½ cup (100 grams) dark brown sugar

½ cup (100 grams) granulated sugar

1 teaspoon fine-grain salt

1 large egg

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Mix the first six ingredients (the oats through the cinnamon) in a medium bowl. Combine the melted butter, the sugars, and salt in a large bowl and whisk well. Then add the egg and vanilla and whisk until smooth. Add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture and stir with a rubber spatula or wooden spoon until just combined. Do not overmix. Cover the bowl and refrigerate for 20 to 30 minutes, until the dough is cool and firm but still scoopable.

While the dough is resting, heat the oven to 325 degrees and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Using 3 level tablespoons per cookie, scoop the dough onto the prepared baking sheet. The cookies will spread as they bake, so leave 2 to 3 inches between each mound of dough. I fit 8 cookies, staggered, per pan.

Bake for 18 to 22 minutes until golden brown. Slide the parchment paper with the cookies onto a rack and cool completely. Repeat with the remaining dough, making sure to begin with a room temperature baking sheet.

Makes about 16 cookies.

I
don't remember the start of the pain. All I know is, I was in it, sunk.

I felt around for the shape of it. A headache has texture and fault lines. You can rotate your neck and sometimes find them, bury your face in a pillow, dig your finger into your temple, hard. You may not get relief, but you can at least make contact, push the pain around a bit, and there's comfort in that.

This pain was different. Liquid cement and formless, everywhere, with no place to grab on to. I couldn't move.

When you bang your hip on the nightstand, your body knows what to do. We're designed to get hurt, to bruise, and then to reabsorb the spilled blood beneath the surface of our skin. Something else happens when the blood is in your brain. We're not designed for that. You typically do not recover from a bleeding brain, so there's no efficient biological system in place for healing, nowhere for the blood to go as long as it's trapped up there in your skull. And so it travels down along your spinal column looking for a way out, or a way back in. The pain of that seepage, that slow crawl, is an ocean. If the medications touched it, I couldn't tell.

Suddenly, the machines that I'd treated like toys seemed to have something to do with me. My condition was no graver now that I was in pain. My body was suffering from the aftermath of the hemorrhage that had already occurred, not under a new attack. But the pain turned me into a patient.

A few minutes went by, or hours, or days. People came. They must have, though I couldn't tell. Pain like this is the ultimate privacy. And then it was gone. I didn't come out of it in the way you sometimes feel yourself waking up, conscious before you've opened your eyes. I was just in my bed again, alone, with the feeling that something terrible had left the room.

Patty, the nurse who'd welcomed me to the Pit, was back on duty. I was relieved not to have to meet someone new, and it took me by surprise how happy I was to see her. I'd been there only forty-eight hours, but I already knew she was my favorite. It felt good to have a favorite, to have some kind of preference in that place.

That night, I heard groaning coming from somewhere in the Pit. Actually, it was more of a loud gurgle, like a groan that had been shoved under water against its will. It went on for hours. The voice belonged to a man, someone older. He was across the way from me and over to the right. He sounded frantic, as though he were trying to lift something too heavy off his own body. I wondered if he was in pain like the pain I'd been in the night before.

When a nurse came to change my IV bag, I asked if he was okay, and she said not to worry. By then he was shouting. She told me his name, which I'm not even sure she was allowed to do: Marshall.

I awoke the next morning in motion, on my way down to an MRI. Someone was pushing my bed from behind. I'd already had an angiogram, a procedure where they thread a tiny catheter up through your groin, shoot your brain full of dye, and take pictures. They hadn't found anything broken, but the images had been so clouded by the spilled blood in my brain that they wanted to check again. To be safe. They couldn't do an angiogram this time because the blood vessels in my head were in spasm. That's common after a hemorrhage and makes the risk of stroke during an angiogram too high. MRI is a noninvasive technique. They hoped it might show something new.

I didn't mind the narrowness of the tube, the cage that came down over my face, or the clicking and buzzing in there. The technician told me it was very important that I keep as still as possible, and I was glad to have something to focus on. After a few minutes, though, the hard scanner bed started digging into the back of my skull. Just one angry spot, at first, right above the base of my neck.
There must be a peg or something sticking up there,
I thought. I could feel it drilling into my head. When they were done I'd sit up, I figured, and the pain would stop.
Don't move. It can't be long.
But by the time they were sliding me out of the machine I knew there was no peg. The pain, the big liquid one, was coming back.

A new nurse appeared to return me to the ICU. She punched her fist in the air as she told me it was time to go, and said, “Cool beans!” She pushed the bed in an exaggerated way, bent at the waist and elbows, as though she were acting the whole thing out. The way she moved reminded me of a high school cheerleader, electrically upbeat, not entirely comfortable in her body, but faking it as best she could. “Cool beans!” she said a couple more times on the way, filling the silence.

A room had opened up in the ICU, an actual room with a window on one side and a wall made of glass that looked out onto the nurses' station when the curtains weren't drawn. My parents were there waiting for me. I tried to tell them that something bad was happening again, but no one seemed to understand what I was saying. My father asked the nurse to page the doctor. He looked scared. “Okay,” she said, “cool beans!” as she slipped out the door.

The pain was metallic and one thousand pounds. I was alone in it, again.

 • • • 

Someone was in the chair beside my bed. Eli. He reached over me and balanced a fresh ice pack on my head, wedged it into place with an extra pillow. I needed his face to look like his face, but instead it looked hard and flat, strange in a way I couldn't figure out, as though someone had found the knobs that control brightness and contrast and turned them way down. It was the kind of face you wear when something has happened, something that annoys you or hurts you, but you don't want to say what it is.

This face was new. I'd never seen it, because when there was something to say, we'd always say. That was what had kept us going the first two years we were dating, and I say “dating” only because I'm not aware of a word that means “newly in love and living continents apart.” We spent our first year “together” with me in England working on a master's degree, and Eli in Seattle, where he'd taken a job after college. The following year, I moved to Jerusalem and he stayed put, halfway around the globe. We met up two or three times a year in his country, or mine, or somewhere in-between. On our way to the airport at the end of one of these visits, we passed a store called Blinds to Go. I started it:

“Blinds to Go? How else would you take your blinds?”

“What?”

“Who buys blinds ‘to stay'?”

Eli jumped right in. “The venetian, please. To go!”

“On second thought,” I added, “I think I'll bring my windows in and enjoy those blinds right here.”

We were champs at running commentary. A brain hemorrhage, then, and its attending drama? Surely we had something to say about that. “Are you okay?” I kept asking. “Are we okay,” as though the crisis here were marital, a misunderstanding the two of us could work out. For the first time since I'd known him, Eli barely spoke.

I wanted to sit up in bed, grab him by the shoulders, shake him, hug him, shout, “Hey!” and bury my face in his neck. I wanted to step outside of all this, the real me with the real Eli, and talk about what had happened. I'd ask about all the parts I couldn't quite remember, and what the doctors had said so far. I'd ask him what I looked like when the pain and morphine carried me off, how much time was really passing between one fully conscious moment and the next. He'd tell me what he was thinking when he was sitting by my bed, and what he was up to in the world outside. Where was he staying? With whom? Where was he when he got the call? And then what happened? And then what?

“Are my parents behaving themselves?” I'd want to know.

“Sort of,” he'd say with a laugh, and I'd make him tell me everything.

Eli sometimes does this thing when he's sharing a story, where he'll come to the end and insist that's all he's got. Never believe him. There's always more to it at the very edges of his memory. You just have to know the right questions to ask, the right buttons to push, and that's what I'd do here, until he'd laid the whole thing out and we'd made sense of it, together.

 • • • 

The MRI had been inconclusive. I'd need another angiogram after all. An ultrasound was scheduled to see if my vessels had calmed down enough, and I asked my parents, both of them, to come with me. They walked on either side of my bed as the nurse wheeled me through the halls. The last time I'd been with both of them together was at my wedding less than three years earlier, one of them on each side, escorting me down the aisle. It was too narrow for three, so I'd had to hold them close, looped under opposite arms, in a not-quite family hug.

The technician squirted gel onto my face and neck and started moving the wand around. My parents were looking at each other, exchanging glances the way they had when they were married and I was a child. It was the kind of thing I'd felt back then but registered only when it was gone: that for a child there is shelter in the everyday words and glances shared by the grown-ups in the room.

I'd have an angiogram the next day. I was glad. Information was the only momentum I had, and I liked knowing that there would be more of it, soon.

 • • • 

The lights were dim when I saw the four of them looking down at me: Eli, his father, mine, and someone I'd already met, but couldn't place. The doctors had been hard to keep track of—residents, fellows rotating in and out and around my bed. I hadn't picked up that the doctor standing there now was the one in charge: Dr. Bruce Tranmer, a brain surgeon. No one was smiling.

My family appeared composed in the way someone cinched into a girdle appears thin: stiff, unbreathing, erect. Eli's father was flushed and mine looked gray. Eli's face had flattened out again into a solid wall, and I was suddenly sure that the angiogram had turned up evidence that soon I would be dead. It was the only explanation for the way they were looking at me. I sucked in my breath and grew still, bracing myself for the news.

Eli spoke first. “Jess, they found an aneurysm in your brain. You're going to need surgery to repair it.”

An aneurysm. A tiny, misshapen estuary where blood had pooled along the weakened wall of a vessel until, one morning on a treadmill, it popped. Dr. Tranmer explained that there are two different kinds. The first is called a berry aneurysm. It's round, like a berry, ballooning outward from the blood vessel through a thin “stem.” With a berry aneurysm, you can sometimes avoid open-brain surgery and instead fill it with platinum coils. The surgeon snakes a catheter through your groin up into your brain and places the coils through it from outside your body. The other kind, a fusiform aneurysm, is shaped more like a bean. It lies lower and flatter against the vessel and connects along its entire length. Without a stem to keep the coils from just falling out, fusiform aneurysms need to be clipped. And the only way to do that is to cut open your head. I had this second kind.

“But you can fix it?” I asked. I wasn't sure I understood. Dr. Tranmer nodded. “Yes.”

The plan was to saw through my skull, slice into my brain, and seal off the aneurysm with a titanium clip the shape of a tiny clothespin. Dr. Tranmer dropped one into my hand for me to inspect. He'd place the clip along the base of the aneurysm, he explained, cutting off its blood flow. The aneurysm would wither—I pictured a flattened bubble on a sheet of Bubble Wrap—and the vessel would heal beneath the strengthened wall formed by the length of the clip.

Now, when you are certain that you have but a few last gasps on this earth, and someone tells you that, actually, the news is brain surgery, the world looks suddenly rosy. What I felt, above all, was relief. Also a relief was the fact that I was back to feeling quite well. There was no more pain. In its place, euphoria had landed. I could sit up in bed now. Roll over. Listen to episode after episode of
This American Life
. Just being able to eat again made the hospital meals a treat, the way airplane food feels special by virtue of the fact that you eat it thirty thousand feet in the air.

Even the nights weren't particularly unpleasant. They were long, though, and came with heparin shots in my belly that weirded me out. A shot in the belly seemed different from a shot in the arm or the hip or the butt, places better fashioned to accept such an affront. A belly is defenseless and lovely. I dreaded watching the needles sink down into mine.

Every morning was the same. One of Dr. Tranmer's residents, Dr. Link, would come by and hold out his fingers for me to squeeze. At some point I stopped waiting for the string of questions and answered them unprompted: “Two thousand eight.” “George Bush.” “Burlington, Vermont.” Or sometimes, if I was feeling fancy, “
Fletcher Allen hospital
in Burlington, Vermont.” He said the same thing every single day before he left: “Hang in there.” Dr. Link was handsome in a strapping, Clark Kent kind of way and I started to think of those words as his scripted line. I told the nurses, and one morning as he was finishing up they gathered just outside my room. “Hang in there,” he said, and they giggled.

One of my professors called, the one who was supposed to examine me in Russian history a few weeks later. I felt nervous telling him that I would perhaps need to postpone the exam and was surprised when he laughed and told me that the department administrator had already completed the paperwork for my medical leave that semester.
An entire semester?
That seemed excessive. I felt great. So great, that I half expected Dr. Tranmer to appear with the news that the brain surgery he'd mentioned wouldn't be necessary after all.

A few days into my hospital stay, my father had given me a small stuffed bear with an orange ribbon tied around its neck. I named him Marshall after the man from the Pit. I couldn't stop thinking about him. He'd sounded so sick, and I'd heard that he'd had no visitors. Meanwhile, there I was with an entire crew; a stuffed bear; piles of cards; a windowsill crammed with chocolates; a drawing pad and bucket of markers that my mother had brought me; and a stuffed, smiley-faced flower with bright pink petals that, frankly, in the gauzy light of the ICU, gave me the creeps. I kept thinking of myself in relation to Marshall: his aloneness, his grave illness, versus my doting family and soon-to-be perfect health. I pictured poor Marshall languishing in the Pit while I resumed my life at home, far away from here. This was the way I'd positioned us in my mind, his well-being and mine on opposite sides of a wheel, locked in an inverse position.