Read The Promise of Stardust Online
Authors: Priscille Sibley
The Promise of Stardust
DedicationFor Tim, who has given me his heart and the courage to write. And for Robert, Cole, and Ethan, who have taught me why it is important to never give up.
As for me, to love you alone, to make you happy, to do nothing which would contradict your wishes, this is my destiny and the meaning of my life
.
âNapoleon Bonaparte
A Conversation with Priscille Sibley
Highlights from the Space Shuttle Timeline
Meteor Watching: A Few of the More Prominent Annual Meteor Showers
   1   The Emergency Room CallLate that nightâon our last nightâwe lay in awe, mesmerized again by the Perseid meteor showers as they transformed stardust into streamers of light. They were an anniversary of sorts for us, a summertime event Elle and I cherished, and we fell asleep on the widow's walk of our old house, my beautiful wife curled up beside me, her head resting in the crook of my arm.
If only I stayed home in the morningâif only I'd looked over at Elle and realized nothing I could or would ever do was more important than keeping her safe. If onlyâJesusâ
I've heard patients' families play the “if only” game. In the eleven years I've been a doctor, I've come to expect the denial and the bargaining. But reality is cold and hard and, all too often, irreversible. I did not stay home and neither did Elle.
I was already at my office, studying an MRI that showed what I suspected was a glioblastoma and wondering how much time I could buy my patient by excising his malignant tumor, when my receptionist buzzed me. “The hospital is on line three. Said it's urgent.”
“Thanks, Tanya.” I picked up the phone, still staring at cross sections of the temporal lobe. “This is Dr. Beaulieu,” I said.
“Hi, Matt. It's Carl Archer.” The emergency room doc cleared his throat. “You need to come over.”
“Page Phil. He's covering the hospital.”
“He's already here. I need
you
to come in. It's your wife.” Carl's voice sounded as tight as screeching tires. “She's had an accident.”
His tone, more than his words, conveyed the gravity. And its weight kept many questions tamped down in my throat. If Phil had already arrived, were Elle's injuries neurosurgical? Or perhaps my partner simply happened by the ER. Maybe he was standing there telling Elle jokes to distract her from something minor.
Please
, I thought.
Don't let her be dead
.
“Is Elle all right?” I asked.
Carl cleared his throat again. “It's serious. Come now. I'll see you in a few minutes.” The dial tone sounded.
I leaped out of my chair and charged through the waiting room, past a woman standing next to her wheelchair-bound son, barely turning to my receptionist to say where I was going. After sprinting the four blocks to the hospital, I arrived at the emergency entrance in a cold sweat. I pushed through the double doors and headed straight to the trauma area. My partner, Phil Grey, stood next to a red code cart, its drawers open. He wore sterile gloves, a gown, and a surgical mask. An IV pole, decked out with a dozen IV bags and pumps, stood against the gurney. Lines of all sorts sprang from the patient's extremities. Not Elle. Please, not Elle. The ventilator hissed its accordioned wheeze as it pumped oxygen into the hose coming out of her body. The nurse stepped aside, and I saw Elle's face, white as the bed linens, dried blood caked in her blond hair. The only indicator that she was still alive was the tracing across the cardiac monitor.
Her body was rigid and arched, her toes were pointed, and her hands were curled under. The position is called decerebrate posturing, and it is an indicator of severe brain damage. I dropped to my knees, knowing whatever happened had devastated her brain.
I can't say exactly what happened next. Maybe someone dragged me to my feet. Maybe I staggered up of my own volition. Phil said something about Elle and a fall from a ladder, something about a grand mal seizure in the ambulance. And Carl was hovering and saying something about a full cardiac arrest and a Glasgow score of five. Somethingâabout being down for only four or five minutes. Somethingâabout her fixed and dilated pupils. Somethingâabout her CAT scan. Somethingâabout surgery.
I touched Elle's cold contorted hand. People were staring at me, pitying me. People I worked with. People I didn't give a damn about. I pulled a light pen from my pocket and checked Elle's pupils.
Come on, Elle
, I thought.
React. Prove my gut reaction wrong. Prove. Them. All. Wrong
.
I flicked the light across my wife's green eyes, which weren't green at all but black. Her pupils were blown and huge.
I checked her reflexes and found nothing but more evidence that the accident had destroyed Elle's brain.
I met Phil's eyes, eyes filled with tears. “Let me show you the CAT scan. I just put in the ICP monitor. Her pressure's high. We started steroids and mannitol. I want to get her downstairs right now. I'll do everything. D'Amato is scrubbing in with me. The OR is all ready for her.”
For a flitter of a second, I thought I would scrub in, too, but then my sensibility returned. I could no more cut into her brain or watch anyone else do it than I could turn into a superhero.
Phil held up the CAT scan that showed the bleeding compressing her brain tissue. I steadied myself against the wall. This could
not
be happening.
Less than twelve hours before, Elle and I had made love on the widow's walk. I must still be sleeping there, having a nightmare, worrying about Elle leaning against the rickety railing. I had to force myself to wake up. As I glanced aroundâtaking in the textures of the emergency room, the definition of the lines on Phil's face as his logical mind planned out his surgical approach, the axle grease on the gurney's wheelsâI renounced reality in favor of believing it a vivid nightmare. Powerlessness pounded my denial like a drum. I wandered back into the trauma room as the nurse I now recognized looked up from checking one of Elle's tubes.
No. This was real. And my wife, the girl I'd been in love with since I was seventeen, the girl who I had loved as my closest friend for an even longer time, had fallen and cracked her head open. Even the best neurosurgeon I knew, my friend and partner, would never be able to fix the damage.
For a minute, I stood frozen, remembering how much Elle did not want to suffer through a lingering death like her mother had endured. Phil shoved a consent form on a clipboard in front of my face. “Sign, so I can take her to the OR. I don't need to explain this to you,” he said.
“We should let her go.” I turned and bolted into the bathroom, where I heaved my lunch. It felt like everything else I'd ever eaten came up in that scummy hospital toilet, too. Make no mistake; it is possible to turn inside out.
Phil opened the door and found me throwing up. “Matt, I need to take her downstairs. Now. We don't have time for bullshit. Listen, horrible as this is, you know as well as I do, she probably won't make it, but you'll hate yourself if we don't try.” He shoved the clipboard in my face again.
What did I promise Elle on our wedding day? That I would love, honor, and respect her. I had to respect her wishes. She wouldn't want this. I knew the odds. I knew the consequences.
I grabbed the clipboard and scribbled my consent anyway.
He disappeared through the door, leaving me behind, regretting every betrayal I'd ever made of her. It was selfish to want her to live, knowing the kind of suffering she would have to bear, knowing her brain could never truly recover from a neurological insult this devastating. That was the trouble with being a neurosurgeon; I knew her prognosis. I could not be lulled by blind hope. Nothing and no one could save Elle. But I needed her. I needed Phil to save her even if it was impossible.
