Healing Lazarus by Lewis Richmond

Author:Lewis Richmond
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2002-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Hey!

This is a journey.

The journey is a river.

The river is long.

Follow the river.

And then he clenched his fist.

On October 5 I visited my neurologist, Dr. Castleman, who offered a more medical perspective on my problems. He was delighted to see me, and thrilled at my progress. He was one of the doctors who had attended me in the coma. It was he who had first told Amy how grim my condition was.

But as I sat in his office with Amy, he was all smiles. “It's unbelievable,” he said, hearing me describe all that I could do.

“Computer programming?” he repeated in disbelief.

“Yes,” I replied. “About ten minutes a day.” Like reading, this was a skill I could manage, though not for long.

“And you do it well?”

“I think so,” I said.

He shook his head. “Most people recovering from a case of encephalitis as serious as yours just sit staring off into space while their family talks for them. You're in miracle territory.”

“What were my odds, do you think?” I asked. “A hundred to one?”

“No.” He shook his head. “I would say a thousand to one.”

Then the discussion turned to the symptoms that most disturbed me—the fog, my limited attention span, my insomnia at night and anxiety during the day.

“The brain heals very slowly,” he explained. “Especially your inhibitory functions. More than half of the brain is devoted to inhibiting the activity of the other half,” he explained. “Sleep, for example, inhibits wakefulness. Calm inhibits anxiety. Your whole brain swelled during the illness, your spinal cord too. You need to give them time to settle down and heal.”

In my present state of mind, patience was most difficult, but over the next couple of weeks I did begin to notice one welcome improvement—to my sensory fog. It was hard to sense the change inside the house, where sights and sounds were muted, but at the supermarket, with the rumble of refrigeration equipment and bright colors on the shelves, I noticed that the fog was at last beginning to subside.

That was a most welcome development, but it did not assuage the isolation and loneliness that my illness had forced on both Amy and myself. Once, driving home from the store, we saw a homeless couple holding a sign hand-lettered on cardboard, “Family Stranded.” I felt a wave of sadness well up in my chest. When I glanced over at Amy behind the wheel, I saw the tears on her cheeks too. I had my therapies and my appointments, but most of the time it was just the two of us, alone together in the house, sitting across from each other at the kitchen table. I knew from looking in the mirror that my face appeared haunted, perhaps even a bit deranged, and I would apologize to her every day for not being able to better control my fears. From across the table she would cradle my hands in hers and do her best to comfort me, but neither she nor I had any real idea how to deal with the day-today trial of my condition.

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.