Left Neglected

Chapter 37





Heidi opens the bottle of wine she gave to me on my last day at Baldwin and pours us each a glass. She then carries both glasses while I “carry” my granny cane. I can feel her watching me as we move from the kitchen to the living room.

“Your walk is much better,” she says. “Much smoother and a lot less drag.”

“Thanks,” I say, surprised by the compliment.

A lot of things are a lot smoother and less of a drag now than they were four and a half months ago—finding the food on the left side of my plate, threading my left arm into my left shirtsleeve, typing, reading. But the improvements don’t happen overnight. They’re slow, small, sneaky, and shy, and only accumulate into something remarkable after weeks and months, not days. So I hadn’t noticed that my walk has improved since Baldwin. It’s nice to hear.

We sit down on the couch, and Heidi passes me my wine.

“To your continued recovery,” she says, raising her glass.

“I’ll definitely drink to that,” I say, holding my glass out in front of me but waiting for Heidi to do the clinking (I’d probably miss and spill my wine all over her).

She taps my glass with hers, and we drink to my continued recovery. She’s probably the only health care professional at this point who openly believes that this is possible. Everyone else either says nothing, avoids giving any kind of concrete prediction, or they say maybe, but then they drown the maybe in a list of buts, caveats, and I don’t want to give you any false hope speeches. And denial is a big problem. No one wants me to live in denial, to go on believing that I might get better if the odds are overwhelmingly against it. God forbid. But then, maybe Heidi doesn’t hold out hope for my full recovery as an occupational therapist. Maybe she believes in the possibility because she’s my friend. When it comes to Neglect, I’ll take the hope of a friend over the cautious prognosis of a physiatrist any day.

“How are things at Baldwin?” I ask.

“Pretty much the same. We have a new woman with Neglect. She’s sixty-two, had a stroke. Hers is a lot worse than yours, and she has some other deficits. She’s been with us three weeks and is still completely unaware that she has it, thinks she’s perfectly healthy. She’s going to be a real challenge to rehabilitate.”

I think back to those early days at Baldwin, when I was the new woman with Neglect. It feels like a million years ago and just yesterday. Without knowing anything else about this new woman with Neglect, I feel a connection to her, like when I hear of someone who went to Middlebury or HBS or when I meet someone from Welmont. However different we are, we share a similar life experience.

There are times now when I forget that I have Left Neglect, but it’s not because of an unconscious unawareness like it was in the beginning. I know I have this. So I don’t try to walk without my cane, thinking that my left leg works. I know I need help getting dressed, so I don’t do it by myself and then leave the house with my shirt half on and my left pant leg dragging behind me. And I don’t use the stove because I know it’s dangerous (not that I used it much before). I know that I need to constantly remind myself that there is a left side, that I have a left side, to look left, scan left, and go left, and even if I do, there’s a good chance that I’m still registering only what’s on the right.

But when I’m not walking or reading or searching for the carrots on my dinner plate, when I’m relaxing in the sunroom or talking with the kids or having a glass of wine on the couch with a friend, I feel perfectly healthy. I don’t feel like there’s anything wrong with me. I’m not a woman with Neglect. I’m Sarah Nickerson.

“How’s Martha?” I ask.

“Oh, she misses you terribly,” she says, smiling.

“I’m sure.”

“I’m glad we finally found the time to do this,” she says.

“Me, too.”

Heidi has called to check on me at least once a week since I came home from Baldwin. She’s also stopped by many times, usually when dropping off Charlie after basketball. But between her work schedule and me being in Vermont every weekend and school vacation days, we hadn’t found time to get together for our wine date until now, almost the end of March.

“I love your house,” she says, having a look around the living room.

“Thank you.”

“I can’t believe you might move from here.”

“I know. It’ll be a big change if it happens.”

“Tell me about the job.”

“It’s the director of development for NEHSA. I’d be responsible for developing and growing their strategies for raising funds. So finding corporate sponsors, donors, leveraging relationships to help market the program, writing grants. It’s twenty hours a week, and I could work at least half of those hours from home.”

“It sounds like the perfect job for you.”

“It really does. All the business skills I’ve accumulated at HBS and Berkley give me the ability to do the job well. And my disability gives me the empathy and experience as someone who has benefited from NEHSA to do the job with passion. I’d be contributing in a necessary way to an important organization that I believe in. And the hours are perfect.”

“What about Bob? Would he be able to work at NEHSA, too?” she asks.

“No, no. The organization is mostly volunteer. And he’d want something else anyway.”

Heidi checks her watch. My old watch. It looks good on her.

“Where is Bob?” she asks, realizing the late time.

The kids and my mother are already in bed.

“Still at work.”

“Wow, late night.”

“Yeah.”

I don’t elaborate. While it’s not atypical for Bob to have stretches where he needs to work late every night for a month, this particular stretch began right about when I turned down the job at Berkley, and the timing feels too exact to be coincidental. He could be working extra hours to ensure that he, as our sole breadwinner, doesn’t get laid off, or he could be under even more extreme pressure to help his weak company survive to fight another day, but I think he’s simply avoiding me and my job offer in Vermont.

“When would you go?”

“Well, NEHSA needs an answer from me ASAP, but I wouldn’t need to start until the fall. So we have some time.”

“So, what are you going to tell them?”

“I want to tell them yes, but I can’t unless Bob feels confident that he can find something up there, too. We’ll see. If it doesn’t work out, I’m sure I can find something around here,” I say, not sure of this at all.

“What about your mom? Would she go with you?”

“She’s going back to the Cape for the summer, but she’s coming back to live with us after Labor Day.”

“And what does she think about living in Vermont?”

“Oh, she loves it up there. Better than here.”

“And what will you do for help in the summer?”

“If we’re in Vermont, Mike Green’s niece is home from college for the summer and needs a part-time job. She’s nannied for years, she’s in school for nursing, and Mike thinks she’d be great with me and the kids. And if we’re here, Abby will be back from New York in May and said she could nanny for the summer.”

“Sounds like you’ve got everything lined up but Bob.”

“Yup.”

Everything but Bob.