A Family-Style Christmas and Yuletide Homecoming by Carolyne Aarsen

Author:Carolyne Aarsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steeple Hill
Published: 2012-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Two

The unconscious man lying on the bed wasn’t her father. Frank Westerveld would never have allowed anyone to invade his body this way.

Tubes and drains and electrodes and monitors indicated changes in his breathing and his pulse. An oxygen line hooked over his ears, tiny tubes inserted in his nose.

Ischemic stroke the doctor had called it. Prognosis? Time would tell whether he would gain control of his body, whether he would be able to speak again, walk again.

The hospital in Riverbend wasn’t equipped to deal with her father’s condition. As soon as he had come into the emergency room there, he had been stabilized and rushed off to Edmonton.

Janie had called the family and by the time Frank had arrived, the uncles and aunts had gathered at the city hospital.

“You’re looking at a long, slow recovery,” Dr. Williamson said, his hands hanging in the pockets of his lab coat. “The CT scan showed a clot as the cause of stroke, which means that the injury sustained did some irreversible damage, the extent of which we can only discover in time.”

“Will he be able to speak at all?” Dot, Sarah’s aunt, asked.

Sarah was thankful for Dot Westerveld’s presence. Other than “why,” Sarah didn’t know what questions to ask.

Her emotions were thrown into turmoil. Too well she remembered another panicked drive to the hospital, her sister’s broken and battered body laying on a bed in the emergency room.

But Marilee was already gone by the time she and her father got to the hospital. Her sister’s vital and fragile spark of life had been extinguished sometime between Sarah telling Marilee that she wasn’t going to break curfew to pick her up and the police showing up on her father’s doorstep, two hours later.

They never even got to say goodbye.

She wrapped her hands around the rail of her father’s bed, desperately trying to blank the memory from her mind, turning her focus instead to her father now lying helpless but alive.

Marilee was gone and father needed her now.

“He’ll have some type of speech ability, but as to how much, that depends on how he responds to therapy.” Dr. Williamson lifted his shoulder in a vague shrug. “Each stroke patient is different, so I can only give you a vague prognosis.”

The words long and slow resonated in Sarah’s brain.

“How long? Can you tell us anything?” Sarah finally asked.

Dr. Williamson shook his head slowly. “I’d say you’re looking at at least three months of therapy, and even then...”

Three months.

In twenty-two days her friends were meeting her in Toronto to begin the first leg of a European trip Sarah had been saving toward for the past year.

But she was here now. Her father lay silent in the hospital and Sarah had to make a decision. Could she really leave her father here?

“And what do you need me to do?” she asked, fighting a mixture of exhausted tears and frustration.

The doctor spoke of the need for stability, the importance of having family close by, reinforcing her vague decision.

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