Left Neglected

Chapter 10





There are forty beds in the neuro unit at Baldwin Rehabilitation Center. I know this because only two of the forty beds are in private rooms, and insurance doesn’t cover these. You have to pay out of pocket for privacy.

Bob made sure I got one of the “singles” with a window to the right of the bed. We both thought that a view of life outside the confines of my room would be good for my morale. We didn’t realize that this simple request needed to be more specific.

On this sunny day, I’m staring out the window at a prison. My view is of nothing but brick and steel bars. The irony of this is not lost on me. Apparently, on the other side of the neuro unit, the patients have a view of the Leonard Zakim Bridge, a work of stunning architectural achievement by day and a breathtaking, illuminated masterpiece by night. Of course, all of those rooms are “doubles.” Everything’s a trade-off. Be careful what you ask for. I’m a brain-injured cliché.

Whatever I have to do here, I’m ready for it. Work hard, do my homework, get an A, get back home to Bob and the kids, and back to work. Back to normal. I’m determined to recover 100 percent. One hundred percent has always been my goal in everything, unless extra credit is involved, and then I shoot higher. Thank God I’m a competitive, type A perfectionist. I’m convinced I’m going to be the best traumatic brain injury patient Baldwin has ever seen. But they won’t be seeing me for very long because I also plan to recover faster than anyone here would predict. I wonder what the record is.

But every time I try to get a concrete sense for how long it might take for someone with Left Neglect to fully recover, I get a vague and dissatisfying answer.

“It’s highly variable,” said Dr. Kwon.

“What’s the average time?” I asked.

“We don’t really know.”

“Huh. Okay, well, what’s the range?”

“Some recover spontaneously within a couple of weeks, some respond to strategies and retraining by six months, some longer.”

“So what predicts who will get better in the two weeks versus longer?”

“Nothing we know of.”

I continue to be astounded by how little the medical profession knows about my condition. I guess that’s why they call it the practice of medicine.

It’s now 9:15 a.m., and I’m watching Regis and some woman. It used to be Regis and some other woman. I can’t remember her name. It’s been a long time since I’ve watched morning television. Martha, my physical therapist, has just come in and introduced herself. She has streaky blond hair pulled into a tight ponytail and four diamond stud earrings crowded onto her earlobe. She’s built like a rugby player. She looks no-nonsense, tough. Good. Bring it on.

“So when do you think I’ll be able to go back to work?” I ask while she reads my chart.

“What do you do?”

“I’m the vice president of human resources at a strategy consulting firm.”

She laughs with her mouth closed and shakes her head.

“Let’s concentrate on getting you to walk and use the bathroom.”

“Do you think two weeks?” I ask.

She laughs and shakes her head again. She looks long and hard at my bald head.

“I don’t think you fully understand what’s happened to you,” she says.

I look long and hard at her ear.

“I do actually. I understand exactly what’s already happened. What I don’t understand is what is going to happen.”

“Today, we’re going to try sitting and walking.”

For the love of God, can we please talk big picture? My goals are more expansive than watching Regis and going for a stroll to the bathroom.

“Okay, but when do you think I’ll be back to normal?”

She grabs the remote, clicks off the TV, and fixes me with a stern look before she answers, like the kind I give Charlie when I really need him to hear me.

“Maybe never.”

I do not like this woman.



MY MOTHER HAS FIGURED OUT my little Stand to My Left trick and has perched herself on the visitor’s chair to my right like a nervous hen on a nest of precious eggs. Even though I don’t have a medical excuse now, I’m still trying to pretend she’s not here. But she’s sitting smack in the middle of my field of vision, so she’s unavoidable. And every time I look at her, she’s got this anxious expression carved onto her face that makes me want to scream. I suppose it’s the sort of worried expression that would naturally form on anyone forced to sit next to me or the motorcycle accident guy next door with the mangled face and no legs or the young woman down the hall who had a postpartum stroke and can’t say her new baby’s name. It’s the kind of concerned, mixed-with-a-spoonful-of-horror-and-adollop-of-dread look that anyone might have if forced to sit next to any patient in the neuro unit. It can’t be that she’s actually worried about me. She hasn’t worried about me in thirty years. So, although it bugs me, I get her expression. What I don’t get is who’s forcing her to sit here.

Martha comes in and places a stainless steel basin on my tray.

“Helen, will you go sit on Sarah’s other side?” she asks.

My mother pops up and disappears. Maybe I judged Martha too quickly.

“Okay, Sarah, lie back, here we go. Ready?” she asks.

But before I can give my consent to whatever it is we’re about to do, she places her strong hand on the side of my face and turns my head. And there’s my mother again. Damn this woman.

“Here’s a washcloth. Go up and down her arm with it, rub her hand, all her fingers.”

“Should I wash her other arm, too?”

“No, we’re not giving her a bath. We’re trying to remind her brain that she has a left arm through the texture of the cloth, the temperature of the water, and her looking at her arm while this is happening. Her head is going to want to drift back over here. Just turn it back to the left like I did. Good?”

My mother nods.

“Good,” Martha says and leaves us in a hurry.

My mother wrings the cloth out over the basin and starts wiping my arm. I feel it. The cloth is coarse and the water is lukewarm. I see my forearm, my wrist, my hand as she touches each body part. And yet, although I feel it happening to me, it’s almost as if I’m watching my mother wash someone else’s arm. It’s as if the cloth against my skin is telling my brain, Feel that? That’s your left shoulder. Feel that? That’s your left elbow. But another part of my brain, haughty and determined to get in the last word, keeps retorting, Ignore this foolishness! You don’t have a left anything! There is no left!

“How does this feel?” asks my mother after several minutes.

“It’s a bit cold.”

“Sorry, okay, hold on, don’t move.”

She springs up and scurries into the bathroom. I stare at the prison and daydream. I wonder if she’d be fetching warm water for me if I were over there. Without warning, her hand is on my face, and she turns my head. She starts rubbing my arm again. The water’s too hot.

“You know,” I say. “Bob really needs to get to work on time. He shouldn’t be driving you in here in the morning.”

“I drove myself.”

Baldwin sits in the eye of a colossal mass transit tornado, a difficult destination to reach for even the bravest and most seasoned Boston drivers. Add rush hour. And my mother.

“You did?”

“I typed the address into that map computer, and I did exactly what the lady told me to do.”

“You drove Bob’s car?”

“It has all the car seats.”

I feel like I missed a meeting.

“You drove the kids to school?”

“So Bob could get to work on time. We’ve switched cars.”

“Oh.”

“I’m here to help you.”

I’m still catching up to the fact that she drove my kids to school and day care and then into Boston by herself from Welmont during rush hour, and now I have to wrap my brain around this doozy. I try to remember the last time she helped me with anything. I think she poured me a glass of milk in 1984.

She’s holding my left hand in hers, our fingers interlaced, and her hand feels familiar, even after all this time. I’m three, and my hand is in hers when she helps me climb stairs, when we sing “Ring Around the Rosy,” when I have a splinter. Her hands are available, playful, and skilled. After Nate died, at first she held my hand a little tighter. I’m seven, and my hand is in hers when we cross the street, when she leads me through a crowded parking lot, when she paints my nails. Her hands are confident and safe. And then I’m eight, and my hand must be too awkward to hold along with all that grief, so she just lets go. Now I’m thirty-seven, and my hand is in hers.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” I say.

“Let me get Martha.”

“I’m fine. I can do it.”

Now, since the accident, I have yet to get up and use the bathroom on my own, so I don’t know why I suddenly feel like I’m perfectly capable of this. Maybe it’s because I feel normal, and I have to pee. I don’t feel like I’m paying attention to only half of me or half of my mother or half of the bathroom. I don’t feel like anything’s missing. Until I take that first left step.

I’m not sure where the bottom of my left foot is relative to the ground, and I can’t tell if my knee is straight or bent, and then I think it might be hyperextended, and after a shocking and herky-jerky second, I step forward with my right foot. But my center of gravity is wildly off, and the next thing I know, I go crashing to the floor.

“Sarah!”

“I’m okay.”

I taste blood. I must’ve cut my lip.

“Oh my God, don’t move, I’ll go get Martha!”

“Just help me up.”

But she’s already out the door.

I’m lying on the cold floor, trying to imagine how to get myself up, licking my wounded lip, and thinking that it might take longer than two weeks to get back to work. I wonder who’s handling the Harvard recruiting for me. I hope it’s not Carson. And I wonder who’s overseeing annual evaluations. That’s a huge project. I should be tackling that right now. My shoulder’s throbbing. I wonder what’s taking my mother so long.

Since giving birth to Linus, it’s become embarrassingly difficult for me to contain a full bladder. Much to Bob’s annoyance, I can no longer “hold it until we get there,” and I have to beg him to pull over at least once whenever we’re in the car for more than an hour. I drink twenty ounces of coffee at a time at work, which means I often spend the last ten minutes of any hour-long meeting tapping my feet under the table like I’m an Irish step dancer, consumed with a desperate plan to sprint to the nearest bathroom the second it ends.

I’ve abandoned any delusions I had of getting up on my own and am now devoting 100 percent of my energy and focus on not peeing right here on the floor. Thank God my bladder or whatever part of me I’m concentrating on is in the center of me and not somewhere on the left. I pray I don’t sneeze.

My mother finally rushes in with Martha behind her. My mother looks frantic and pale. Martha sizes me up with her hands on her hips.

“Well, that was impulsive,” she says.

I can think of a few choice things I could do or say right now that would be truly impulsive, but this woman is in charge of my care, and I need to get to the bathroom before I pee, and I need to get back to work before I lose my job, so I bite my bloody lip.

“I should’ve helped her,” says my mother.

“No, that’s not your job. That’s my job. Next time, press the call button. Let me be the therapist, and you be the mother.”

“Okay,” says my mother, like she’s just taken an oath.

Be the mother. Like she has any idea what that means. Be the mother. All at once, those three words irk me and amuse me and pinch a delicate part of me. But most of all, they distract me, and I pee all over the floor.