More specifically, I had been telling him a story about a memory. When I was really, really little—like maybe three or four—I had a round, soft plastic case full of plastic ponies. The ponies were all different sizes and colors, none of which were found in nature. We’re talking hot pink, lime green, aqua blue … anyway, Dad and I used to play all kinds of imaginary games with the ponies. Then, at some point, he came up with a new game called FuFu, the Christmas Horse. For some reason, he would crawl around our family room in circles, making horsey noises, and I would chase him and shout, “I catching you! I catching you!” Sometimes, just when I was about to grab him, he would spin around, grab me, and say, “No, I catching you!” Then we would both fall over, laughing and cuddling. Eventually, I would ride on his back around the room until he got too tired, and then we would pack up all the ponies in their plastic case for a “nap.”
Telling him about all this seemed to help. His breathing, which had been kind of fast and ragged, slowed down, and he had stopped blurting out random words for a few minutes.
But as soon as the stretcher came into view, Dad got all hyper again and started yelling about mutts and bugs. The big guy introduced himself and his partner, and told me he would be evaluating my father while she got some background information from me. Apparently, he already knew our names from the lady on the phone.
As soon as she heard me talking with the medics, the dispatcher said, “I hear voices. Has the ambulance arrived?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Okay, then, Claire. I have to go handle other calls, but your father is in great hands. Good luck.” And that was it. I was alone in a room with my dad and these two strangers.
The big man, whose name tag read BIL with one L, said, “Claire, here’s the deal. We suspect your father may be having a stroke, which means we’re in a big hurry to get him to the hospital. I’m going to evaluate him as fast as I can while my partner, Kathy, is talking with you, and then we’ll load him onto this stretcher, get in the ambulance, and get going. Is there another adult around?”
“No, it’s just me. And I can’t get my mom on the phone.”
“All right. Then you’ll be coming with us to Lehigh Valley Medical Center. Now, let me ask your father some questions.” With that, he knelt down next to Dad’s chair and turned it so that Dad was looking at him. “Sir,” he said, “I’m going to be asking you to do some things for me, all right?”
Dad just stared at him blankly. It was awful.
“Sir, can you give me a big smile?”
Dad didn’t respond to that at all.
“All right, can you please lift both arms straight in front of you?”
Dad still didn’t do anything. Well, he tilted his head and drooled, but I wasn’t sure that was in response to the question.
Next, Bil asked Dad to repeat a tongue twister. I was thinking, Really? He can’t smile or raise his arms, but you think he might be up for a nice round of verbal challenge games? Maybe next we can try a game of Clue, although I suspect you guys might have an advantage. I had to look away, which was good, because I suddenly realized Kathy was sitting in front of me, holding a clipboard, waiting to ask me a question.
By the time Kathy was finished going through a bunch of stuff about Dad’s age, his allergies, his medications, and what I knew of his medical history, Bil had stopped trying to get Dad to do things and was about to prick his finger with a needle.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “Why aren’t we on the way to the hospital already?”
“This is the last thing. I’m checking his blood sugar. Sometimes low blood sugar can look just like a stroke. If his blood sugar is low, we’ll give him a quick dose of sugar, and he just might come around. If his sugar level is normal, we go.”
Bil pricked a finger on Dad’s right hand. Dad didn’t even flinch.
I sat there counting seconds and praying for my father to have low blood sugar. I didn’t even know what that would mean—diabetes? Kidney failure? But I knew that almost anything would be better than a stroke.
When my count was up to sixteen, Dad lurched to the right and bleated, “Mup! Muuuh!”
At the same time, Bil looked at something in his hand, shook his head once, and said, “Let’s go.” In thirty more seconds, tops, he and Kathy had managed to lift and strap Dad onto the stretcher and wheel him out of the house.
I grabbed Dad’s meds, my house key, and my phone, and locked the door behind us. As I followed the stretcher, every hair on my body stood on end, and I wanted to cry. Or scream. Or grab on to the stretcher and not let them take my father away. I know this is crazy, but putting him into that ambulance seemed like an ending, like something you could never take back. People who got taken away from their homes in ambulances sometimes ended up living in rehab places forever. People who got taken away in ambulances sometimes died.
I wondered whether Dad would ever come home again.
Bil got in the back of the ambulance with Dad. Kathy told me to get in front with her, and as soon as my seat belt clicked, she hit the lights, the siren, and the gas pedal. There was a sort of mini wall between the front of the ambulance and the part where my dad and Bil were, but I could turn in my seat and see them through a little connecting window, which was open. Bil was talking to someone on the radio thing with one hand, and doing things to my father with the other.
I heard him say, “Suspected blah blah blah stroke.” The middle part was a scary scientific-sounding word. Then he said, “We’re now twenty-nine minutes past initial symptoms. Patient is awake and alert, but nonresponsive to verbal commands. Vitals look good. I’m hooking up the EKG now. I’ll have two lines running within the next couple of minutes. Can you get the stroke team ready? We should be there in, uh, fourteen minutes. You’re going to want to clear the CT scanner—patient failed the FAST test. No history of stroke. No heart history. No blood-thinning meds. No recent surgery, just some kind of sinus operation last year. History of high cholesterol. I’m going to guess he threw a clot. Looks like a candidate for TPA to me. Can you tell the neuro? Okay, thanks.”
It’s amazing how much you can hear over a siren when you’re really trying. And scared out of your mind. It probably helped that Bil was a loud talker.
I turned back around as Bil broke a long needle out of a paper package. I couldn’t stand to watch him poking that into my father while zooming over bumpy roads at highway speeds. I asked Kathy, “Can I text my family?”
Without looking away from the road, she said, “That sounds like a very good idea. Now is when you have a little free time. Things are going to be very hectic at the hospital.”
I sent a group text to Matthew and my mom:
In ambulance with Dad. I think he is having a strike. Going to K fun Valley Medical Center.
Then I read what I had sent, and added two more messages:
*stroke
*Lehigh Valley Medical Center
Stupid autocorrect. It would have been a disaster if my mom and brother had tried to find their loved one at K fun Valley Medical Center, where he was being treated for a strike.
When I had sent the last text, I asked Kathy, “What’s going to happen when we get there?”
“Well, with a stroke, the saying is that time is brain. From the time a patient first shows symptoms, we have only three hours, tops, to get a whole bunch of stuff done. We have to figure out for sure that the patient really is having a stroke, then find out what kind of stroke the patient is having, and then, if the patient is having the most common kind of stroke and is eligible to take it, we start administering a clot-dissolving drug called TPA. Fortunately, you did everything right, and you live close to a great hospital. Lehigh Valley is a certified stroke center, which means they shoot for a one-hour ‘door-to-needle’ time. If your father needs TPA, it looks like he’ll have time to get it.”
“Okay, but what are they going to do to my dad in this hour?”
“The big thing is that they’re going to take lo
ts of pictures of his brain in a special X-ray machine. It won’t be painful or anything.”
“And … is he going to be okay?”
This time, Kathy actually did look away from the road for a second to lock eyes with me, which would have been a lot more comforting if we hadn’t been zipping past every car on the interstate. “I can’t tell you that, sweetheart. But he’s going to a place with a great team that specializes in treating the exact problem he’s having, and we’re getting him there as fast as humanly possible. Okay?”
I forced myself to smile back, hoping that if she saw me giving a positive sign, she would start looking back at the road. It worked.
That was why, when the tears started to slide down my cheeks, she didn’t see them. All I could think about was what she had just said: Time is brain. I glanced back at my father, who now had an IV line hanging down into each arm, a bunch of wires attached to his chest, and a green line spiking up and down crazily on a monitor screen next to his head. His eyes were open, staring straight up, as though he couldn’t see or understand any of it.
How much time did he have left?
And how much brain?
At the hospital, things started to happen faster than I could handle them. The ambulance pulled up to the emergency room entrance, and Kathy jumped out before I could undo my seat belt, saying, “Come on,” over her shoulder as she went. At the same time, I felt my phone vibrate. When I pulled it out of my pocket, it was Matthew calling, but I couldn’t answer, because my hands were shaking too hard. I got half caught in the shoulder harness from the belt, and basically fell out of the vehicle.
Kathy and Bil were already pushing my father into the building, where a team of blue-gowned, masked people was waiting for them. I steadied myself against the side of the ambulance, managed to shove the phone back into my pocket, and ran to catch up.
I got there in time to see a man shining a bright light into my father’s eyes. Dad whimpered. I would have whimpered, too, but this was different. Dad sounded like a hurt animal. I also noticed that even though the light must have felt awful to him, he didn’t pull his head away or close his eyes.
The man said something about “positive pupillary response,” and another guy typed that quickly into a little mini laptop. Dad grunted and thrashed his left hand around. His right just sort of flopped in place like a fish on dry land. Then the guy in charge started asking Dad the same kinds of questions that Bil had already gone through with him. I wanted to scream, “Leave him alone! Can’t you see you’re torturing him? He’s not going to do your stupid nursery rhyme! Now help him!”
The man started reeling off a whole list of technical stuff that scared me. He was talking a mile a minute about “neural deficits” and aspirin and how Dad couldn’t “protect his airway” and how they were going to have to “intubate” him.
At that point, an alarm went off right next to Dad’s head. “His pressure’s dropping!” the computer guy said. “We’re going to need to get a CT scan, stat!” the boss said. “Tell the radiologist I’ll be waiting here for a wet read.”
The next thing I knew, a lady grabbed my arm and led me away from my father. I wanted to reach out and squeeze his finger or something, but I was afraid to touch a wire or a tube, or that I would hurt him. And then before I could think any more about it, I was getting pulled through a set of double doors into a waiting room, and Dad was getting pushed in the opposite direction down a long hallway, gathering speed.
As the doors swung closed, I whispered, “Bye, Daddy.”
The lady who had brought me out was pretty rude. She asked, “Are you related to the patient?”
Even in that situation, I was like, No, I just like to hop in random ambulances for fun. Then I thought, I’ll have to tell Dad that one later. Then I realized I had no idea whether my father would ever laugh at one of my smart-ass remarks again, and my whole body felt like somebody had dipped it in ice water. I guess I had been shaking the whole time, but suddenly, I was actually shivering. My teeth were rattling together and everything.
The rude arm-grabber lady repeated her question, and I said, “I’m-m-m hi-hi-s da-daughter. I-I-I … ”
It hit me that I hadn’t told any of the hospital people the exact time when Dad’s stroke had started. The lady on the phone had said that was really important, and Kathy had told me that time was brain. “Ma’am,” I said, “I ha-have to t-tell somebody when my d-dad’s stroke started. It was at nine-oh-six.”
“We’ll get to that, dear.”
I forced myself to control my voice, and shook her arm off. “When? When will we get to that? You just dragged me away from my father. What if the people treating him need to know this right now? Go tell somebody!”
She just sat there and stared at me.
“Please!” I said.
But she made me go through all the same questions I had already answered for the phone dispatcher and Kathy again anyway before she headed through the double doors. When they closed behind her, I let myself lean back and shiver.
I closed my eyes and tried to tell myself that everything would be all right, but it was pretty hard to believe. My head kept flickering between images of my father’s frightened face, his floppy right hand, his body on the gurney with tubes and wires sticking out everywhere, and finally, the doors swinging shut behind him. Eventually, I tried to call Matthew back—not that I had much new info for him—and then shut my eyes when he didn’t pick up.
It felt like I spent a million years slumped down in that uncomfortable chair, but it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes before Bil and Kathy came over to me with a Styrofoam cup of hot chocolate. They sat with me for a little while and tried to cheer me up by asking questions about my life. It was a pretty transparent ploy, and if one more adult called me sweetie, honey, or dear, I was going to hurl a chair across the room.
Still, the hot drink was nice.
Mom came charging in, with Matthew in tow. She immediately started spitting out questions at top speed. “What happened? Where’s your father? Are you all right? Who are these people? Did you pay for that hot chocolate yourself?”
I was like, Can we please focus, Mom?
Bil started to talk, but just then, a walkie-talkie thing on his belt started squawking. I heard something about a multivehicle accident on Route 78, with casualties. He grabbed the thing, pressed some kind of button on the side, and barked, “Twenty-seven responding.” Then he jumped up and started walking away.
Kathy said, “That’s us, honey.” I was like, I figured that part out. She squeezed my shoulder and said, “We’ll try to check in with you when we get back. Hang in there.” I felt a lump in my throat. Kathy and Bil had both done a great job, as far as I could tell, but more than that: They were nicer than they had to be.
My mom said, “Claire?”
It all came out in a rush. “We were eating breakfast. Daddy jumped up and smashed the table into me. And then he couldn’t talk right. He kept saying ‘pumpkin’ and ‘muffin.’ He was leaning to one side, and his arm wasn’t working. So I tried to call you, but you didn’t answer, so I called 9-1-1. You didn’t pick up. Why didn’t you pick up? Daddy needs you, and I was so scared!”
I started to cry, and Mom and Matthew both put their arms around me. Mom was trying to look reassuring. Matthew looked like he was trying to decide whether he should vomit or faint. Matthew had always hated it when anybody got sick.
“Oh, honey,” Mom said, “I’m so sorry. I turned off my ringer because your brother was driving. And then when we finished and saw your message, we couldn’t get you on the phone.” Mom patted me on the back and tried to brush the hair away from my face. I hate it when she does that. I pushed her hand away, and turned to glare at her.
“Don’t comfort me, Mom. I’m not sad—I’m mad. Daddy needed you, and you weren’t there. He always tells you to keep your phone on in case of emergencies.”
My mother took a deep breath. “Let’s forget about that for a while, Cla
ire. We have to concentrate on doing what we need to do for your father. Now, what have the doctors said?”
I took three deep breaths, like my seventh-grade play director always said you should do to clear your head before you go onstage, and tried to get the sequence of everything clear in my mind. Then I laid it all out for her. As soon as I was done, she said, “So we really don’t know what’s wrong with your father yet.”
I said, “What are you talking about? He’s having a stroke, Mom!”
“We don’t want to jump to conclusions, Claire Bear. Just because some of the medical personnel thought he had some stroke-like symptoms doesn’t mean that’s necessarily what’s really going on. Maybe he’s just having a new kind of migraine. Or … or … well, I don’t know. I’m not a doctor. But until a doctor comes out and tells us it’s definitely a stroke, I think we should all try to stay calm.”
Matthew was sitting next to me, looking straight up at the ugly off-white ceiling tiles and hyperventilating. I looked down at my hands and noticed I was unconsciously clenching and unclenching them every few seconds. I was pretty sure the staying calm thing wasn’t going to work for us.
Mom casually strolled over to the front desk and started giving them our insurance information, like this was a plain old office visit. As though my dad had a nasty splinter or the flu, as opposed to a bleeding brain.
My mom never believed anything bad was happening until she had conclusive proof, and sometimes not even then. When I was little and my dad’s father passed away from a sudden heart attack, she kept saying he might be all right until my dad called from the hospital to say he was officially dead. When I had an asthma attack and had to go to the emergency room, she kept saying, “We can’t be sure it’s really asthma,” even as the medical personnel were strapping the nebulizer mask onto my face.
I thought, If somebody ran in here right now with a hatchet and chopped Matthew’s head off, she would probably stand over the body and go, “Well, I admit this looks bad, but maybe it’s just a really messy nosebleed.”