Once Upon a Wish by Rachelle Sparks

Author:Rachelle Sparks [SPARKS, RACHELLE]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781937856120
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.

9

During the five-hour surgery, Mike and Linda roamed halls, paced the floor. In a deli across campus, Mike calmed his nerves with a big Italian dish while Linda drank hot chocolate and chicken broth, the only two things she knew her nerves would allow her to keep down.

They spent most of their time in Garrett’s empty hospital room, looking out the window at the highway packed with cars coming and going between New Hampshire and Boston.

Everything will be fine, Linda told herself. They will take good care of him. He’ll be okay. A pager in her hand buzzed every so often with updates, confirming her thoughts.

“We are starting surgery now,” a nurse working with Dr. Sharma texted after they took a CAT scan of Garrett’s brain and merged it with results from a previous MRI, creating a perfect map of the area where they would place the leads.

They shaved and numbed his head before starting to drill. Garrett didn’t feel a thing. For perfect placement, doctors asked him questions, challenging his brain, making him move his arms and legs, firing neurons. The sound of it, the noise of his brainwaves, rushed through his ears, a soft static swooshing loudly with each command, every movement.

“One side is done!” the pager announced.

I knew it, Linda thought. I knew everything would be okay.

Fake it ‘til you make it.

A few hours later, another message.

“The other side is done—Garrett did great!”

She could finally breathe.

“You can see Garrett in the recovery room,” the pager said, and Mike and Linda made their way through the waiting area, a small, warmly lit room with a beautiful undersea mural painted on its wall. Linda thought of their trip to Belize just a week before, filled with ocean adventures, possibly their last journey, their last family trip before the unknown. Now here they were, the words Garrett did great on the pager in Linda’s hand. As she glanced at the mural, the ocean, one last time, she smiled at the irony.

“It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be,” Garrett said, smiling at his parents.

Two days later, brain surgeon Dr. Emad Eskandar surgically placed a pacemaker in Garrett’s chest, wire connecting to the leads in his brain, and recovery was more miserable than he ever could have imagined. He slept through as much of it as he could, waking up to throw up, trying to rest during the most intense headaches he had ever felt. But then it was over, and once again, it was time to wait.

They headed home, where Garrett rested and healed, filled his time with relaxation and schoolwork, and a month later, it was time to see if the surgery worked. The incision had healed, the swelling had subsided, and Garrett went with his parents to see Dr. Sharma and nurse Lisa Paul, who would turn on the device that would determine his future.

They wanted the reaction of a light bulb after a flipped switch—instant. But that’s not how this worked, and they knew it.

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