Stir by Jessica Fechtor

Author:Jessica Fechtor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-05-23T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

Medium Dreadful

That Sunday, in the last hours of my dad and Anna’s visit, a full-fledged fever came on and stayed. We called Dr. Tranmer, who said it sounded like I’d picked up a bug, and to feel better soon. I got into bed.

My head throbbed and the coming-and-going swelling thing I thought I’d noticed became the coming-and-going swelling thing I noticed for sure. Eli saw it now, too, but perhaps this was just what recovery looked like a few weeks out from brain surgery?

The next morning I felt no worse, and maybe even a little better. My fever returned to a low-grade something or other that was questionably a fever at all. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, was beginning that night. Friends of ours knocked on our door to deliver a holiday meal.

Then things got bad fast. My fever spiked to 104 and wouldn’t come down, and the swelling was no longer going. Instead, it was spreading; it was in my forehead and temple now, too. Eli folded me into the car with an ice pack for my head and we drove to the ER.

They brought me back right away, which didn’t make me nervous but should have, and paged a neurosurgery resident. That got my attention.

“Why?” I asked Eli. “Why?” I was scared. “I’m afraid they’re going to cut into my head again.”

“That’s not going to happen,” he said. I knew it was improbable. I’d said my fear out loud in part not because I believed it could happen, but to make sure it didn’t. Magical thinking: To say it was to ward it off.

The next hours and days get swimmy in my mind. I know that there was an MRI, and that soon after, I was admitted. My fever stayed high. My head continued to swell. None of the doctors knew for sure what was happening to me, but from what I understood it was one of two things: a cerebral spinal fluid leak or an infection. There was also a third option: both. A neurosurgery resident told me that they would operate, then a few hours later said that they wouldn’t and disappeared.

Next came a trip to a neuro-ophthalmologist in the building next door. Someone carted me over in a wheelchair in my johnny with a blanket around my shoulders and one across my lap. I hadn’t been allowed to eat or drink since I’d been admitted—was surgery a possibility still?—so I was hooked up to an IV. It rattled along beside me. The office was in the hospital, but regular people went there, fully clothed ones who’d walked or driven there alone. I sat in the waiting room right along with them while they read their magazines and tried not to look. I was too sick to care if they did.

“Oh no,” the doctor said when he saw me. By now my face was contorted from the swelling. My left eye bulged and my temple was a giant pillow of a thing, yanking my cheek up with it; my skin stretched unnaturally across my forehead, a hard, protruding ridge.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.