04/01/08

Chapter 8

Glasgow Coma Scale 10,

Moderately Brain Injured

  
(excerpt) 

         Libbi had been in a coma for so long she had regressed to babyhood though she no longer flared her feet when a nurse ran a pencil up the bottom of them—like infants do. She now flexed her toes downward age appropriately, but she still had the suckling motion. She sucked everything: the corner of her pillow, the top of her sheet, the entire perimeter of a thin, red pillow that the hospital gave her shaped like a cat’s head. Her parents knew, or rather they hoped—for now they had some hope to hold onto—that she would progress beyond this stage.

            Elaine brought a small bulletin board and put it in Libbi’s room, on the stand across from the foot of her bed. She changed the main display about twice a week, but on the border were always pictures of Libbi’s horse, her dog, and her oldest brother, Mike, who hadn’t visited yet because he had started a new job at a paper plant in Portland, Maine just a few weeks before Libbi’s accident.

            Since Elaine taught elementary school, she owned supplies of fun posters and brightly colored construction paper with which she festooned her classroom to keep her students’ interest and make learning fun. At the end of each summer, a week before school started, Libbi would accompany her mom to her classroom to help decorate.

This mid summer Elaine bedecked the board in Libbi’s room in a similarly wild way, aspiring to stimulate her daughter. One day she pinned up a poster of a kitten hanging from her front paws from a branch with the words “hang in there.” Next it was a big, pink Care Bear card Libbi’s cousin Noelle got for her. And clashing construction paper backed everything, which, had Libbi been conscious, would have reminded her of her mom’s outfits.

Libbi’s nurses loved the changing of the board, to see what Elaine would post next, each display sillier and more colorful than the last. Elaine changed the bulletin board often so that her daughter might notice. 

(2nd excerpt) 

 A friend from Elaine’s childhood picked Mike up from the airport and drove him to his mother’s house in Carlisle. During the entire forty-minute ride neither driver nor passenger mentioned Libbi although her condition was the reason for Mike’s emergency trip and it was an obvious presence in the air between the two.

            When Elaine got home later that evening, she and her son hugged and sat in the formal living room upstairs and spoke just for a couple minutes of Libbi and her condition. They agreed to try to get some sleep and leave early for the hospital the next day.

            In the morning on the drive to Kettering, Mike at the wheel, Elaine tried to equip her son with a visual picture of what his sister was now: “Now, Michael, she’s either really active or really still. I think the doctor is bringing her out of it to see how she is, and then once she gets violent, I think their drugging her to keep her under so she doesn’t hurt herself or anyone else. She’s already kicked a nurse. She usually has restraints on her arms and legs for when she gets so restless.” They passed the Miamisburg public pool with its smooth surface glistening in the morning sun.

“And she has tubes running everywhere and IV lines and monitors and all that. Okay?” Elaine searched her son for some kind of slight shock or reaction, but she’d told him the same thing over the phone every day since Libbi was admitted. He’d heard it all already.

            Mike barely nodded his head up and down, keeping his eyes on the road, “Okay.”

            “Her doctor assures me that she’s right on course. They say that most people who come out of a coma are active and thrashing around like she is. They say it just takes time.”

E-mail the author at libbi@elizabethevansfryer.com.