The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Author:Joan Didion
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780307279729
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-02-12T16:00:00+00:00

11.

Sometime in June, after she had left UCLA and was in the sixth of what would be fifteen weeks as an inpatient at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at New York University Medical Center in New York, Quintana told me that her memory not only of UCLA but of her arrival at Rusk was “all mudgy.” She could remember some things about UCLA, yes, as she could not yet remember anything else since before Christmas (she did not for example remember speaking about her father at St. John the Divine, nor, when she first woke at UCLA, did she remember that he had died), but it was still “mudgy.” Later she corrected this to “smudgy,” but she did not need to: I knew exactly what she meant. On the neuro floors at UCLA they had called it “spotty,” as in “her orientation is improving but still spotty.” When I try to reconstruct those weeks at UCLA I recognize the mudginess in my own memory. There are parts of days that seem very clear and parts of days that do not. I clearly remember arguing with a doctor the day they decided to do the tracheostomy. She had by then been intubated for almost a week, the doctor said. UCLA did not leave tubes in for more than a week. I said that she had been intubated for three weeks at Beth Israel in New York. The doctor had looked away. “The rule at Duke was also a week,” he said, as if under the impression that mention of Duke would settle the question. Instead it enraged me: What is Duke to me, I wanted to say but did not. What is Duke to UCLA. Duke is North Carolina. UCLA is California. If I wanted the opinion of somebody in North Carolina I would call somebody in North Carolina.

Her husband is right now on a flight to New York, I said instead. Surely this can wait until he lands.

Not really, the doctor said. Since it’s already on the schedule.

The day they decided to do the tracheostomy was also the day they turned off the EEG.

“Everything’s looking good,” they kept saying. “She’s going to get better sooner once we do the trach. She’s already off the EEG, maybe you didn’t notice that.”

Maybe I didn’t notice that?

My only child?

My unconscious child?

Maybe I didn’t notice when I walked into the ICU that morning that her brain waves were gone? That the monitor above her bed was dark, dead?

This was now being presented as progress but it had not seemed so when I first saw it. I remembered reading in Intensive Care that the ICU nurses at San Francisco General turned off the monitors when a patient was near death, because their experience was that family members would focus on the screens rather than on the dying patient. I wondered if such a determination had been made in this case. Even after I was assured that this was not the case, I found myself averting my eyes from the blank EEG screen.

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