Survivor by Christina Crawford

Author:Christina Crawford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504049078
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

On Friday, August 7, late in the afternoon, the nurses began preparing me to leave the intensive care unit. Slowly and carefully they began unattaching me from the monitoring sensors and finally from the intravenous. I was being transferred to a room on the eighth floor, where my husband was waiting. I still felt extremely weak, but the transfer definitely meant that I was making good progress.

Leaving the quiet dimness of intensive care was a shock to my senses. All of a sudden there were sounds and colors surrounding me, bombarding my eyes and ears. Although I was still in the hospital, I was back among the living.

My new room on the eighth floor was directly across from the nurses’ station. Two nurses helped the gurney attendants transfer me into my waiting bed. For the first time I realized that I had a wide surgical collar around my neck. Everyone handled me with great care.

David smiled and held my left hand. It seemed to me that he had been with me every single moment since Monday, either in person or in spirit. There were beautiful flowers already in the room and more arrived. They were a sea of color filling the air with fragrance. I was very tired but looking forward to my first meal.

That night David insisted on sleeping at the hospital on the couch in my room near my bed. I was overjoyed at the prospect of being with him once again but worried that he’d wake up with a terrible crick in his neck. Since I couldn’t communicate any of my worries, I just smiled gratefully.

Saturday was my first visiting day. I was allowed to have visitors for a total of three minutes each hour. I was overwhelmed. Many of the women I worked with on the charity organization board spent the whole day at the hospital with my David. I felt enormously loved, more so than at any other time in my life. I could barely move, I could only speak a few halting words, and yet we were able to communicate. Strange that so many good feelings of love and caring filled a time of such tragedy.

David had to help me eat. My left hand was not skilled enough, though I was carefully trying to learn to negotiate with it. My right hand and arm were useless, completely paralyzed, without feeling or motion. In fact I had to learn to pay very careful attention to positioning myself, always looking to see where my right hand was located, so that I wouldn’t inadvertently hurt myself. It is a very strange feeling having a living appendage to your body that has no feeling. It is not something you get used to easily.

I had partial paralysis on the right side of my face. It was considered minor and didn’t significantly distort my features. However, I soon discovered that eating could be extremely hazardous. Since the right side of my mouth also had no feeling, I couldn’t tell when pieces of food were stuck between my gum and cheek.

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