The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine

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Carpet

The lifeless quiet of another Minnesota winter night will not allow me to sleep. On our nightstand, my wife’s idly placed earrings fluoresce apple-green halos under the glow of our alarm clock. Tonight, after we returned from an annual Christmas party she pulled on a nightdress, deposited the earrings and fell asleep all within twenty minutes. Our king sized bed, encased in an imposing wood frame, is too large for a middle class bedroom. However, she had insisted we purchase it in the basement of a Duluth antique store two years ago. Back then it usurped almost the entirety of our sole apartment bedroom. Tonight, she sleeps soundly under these monolithic four posts like a princess guarded by castle turrets. Her breathing is so calm that it lulls the unruly pulse in my ears to a tolerable throb. A harsh breeze picks up outdoors and I imagine it converting our oval subdivision into a giant fingerprint of snowy whorls.

From outside I hear the tentative scrape of an aluminum snow shovel. At first it is reserved, as if trying not to wake the neighborhood. Slowly it abandons this idea and the harsh metallic grating gains a rhythm then, soon after, a melody. Before long the shoveling ends abruptly, replaced by indiscernible conversation. My wife is turned away from me sleeping on her side as she has been prone to do for the last several weeks. I follow the graceful curve of her right hip and watch it sink with her every expiration. Now my pulse bounds at the angle of my jaw. I imagine it must be disconcerting to some to feel the beating of your heart so frequently. To me it is reassuring, like the ticking clock which soothes eggs hatching in an incubator. The conversation has ended outside and shoveling ceased. Tomorrow morning, while our coffee makers drip, we will stand around making small talk as we blow and scoop the snow back into place. The throbbing winds and my bounding carotids preclude sleep so I perch myself on the side of the bed. I dig my toes into the plum colored carpet that covers most of our house. It is comforting, soft and just ideal. To be honest the carpet is the reason I pressed for us to buy this home last year.

I was raised in a clay-pot colored house at the end of a subdivision in the St. Paul suburbs. A neighborhood not unlike the one we now live in. It was surrounded by a green chain link fence. My first memory is helping my mother weave streamers through that fence in preparation for my sixth birthday party. Oddly, I don’t remember the party itself. My father worked constantly as an accountant and even more so from January to April during the busy tax season. As I grew up, I knew not to ask him many questions during this time of the year for fear that I would invariably be met with a gruff response. My grade school life passed quickly in that neighborhood. I remembered riding bikes, playing tennis, little league and waiting for the school bus just at the entrance of our cul-de-sac. What I remember most about that house is the carpeting in the family room. It was a golden cinnamon color and stretched from fireplace to dining room. Its plush texture inevitably invited board games and books to be strewn upon it. When vacuumed the bent fibers fashioned shadows which made it look like an enormous perfectly frosted caramel sheet cake. After my mother cleaned it, I hesitated to walk on it for a couple hours. I never wanted to desecrate the cake by taking the first piece.

When I was seventeen years old, I found my father lying face down in that room. It was a Wednesday evening in early April and he had come home with a headache. His migraines were not uncommon with the tax forms that overflowed his brief case being due in another two weeks. After dinner he grumbled an excuse that he wanted to read the paper and, as was his custom, made his way to the family room. I continued to help my mother clearing out the dishes and cleaning up the kitchen. Then I walked over and there he was. Later the doctors asked us how long he had been lying there. We believed it was not more than ten minutes. He had fallen forward and saliva poured out of his mouth onto the carpet. He could not move his left side and would not speak. For a few seconds I froze and tried to get him up but he was unmovable. Lifting his right arm, I rolled him onto his back while the drool from the corner of his mouth continued to slowly pour out onto that perfect carpet.

Later on in life I learned that the word stroke was derived from the expression “a stroke from the hand of God.” In the fourteenth century the word was used to mean an act of divine chastisement or vengeance. God’s hand came down on my father and for that matter the rest of us that evening. The ambulance took him to the hospital and after a few hours in the emergency room my mother and I waited outside the intensive care unit for a word on his condition. It was late in the evening and I remember they put us in a waiting area usually reserved for parents of children in the pediatric intensive care ward. On the walls were Disney posters of Goofy and Mickey playing golf with exaggerated swings. The floor was covered in a turquoise blue business carpet which starkly contrasted the bright yellow posters on the wall. Later I learned it was his middle cerebral artery that failed him and he had lost blood flow to nearly half his brain. However, that evening all we knew about his condition we learned from Dr. Bishop, the young resident on call. I was not exceedingly tall at seventeen but she was a good six inches shorter than me. She entered our waiting room where the previous occupants had made a makeshift bed on the couch using hospital sheets and blankets. After briefly introducing herself, placing her hair in a ponytail and setting down her coffee she remarked,

“Well I’ve got some good news and some bad news.”

My mother and I sat quietly unsure what to expect.

“He has completely lost the use of his left side but he is breathing on his own and can keep his eyes open.”

We were utterly speechless. We were unsure which part of this news was good and which bad. We were permitted to see him at that time. He lay in an ICU bed with a cardiac monitor over his head. I remember the tangle of wires and IV tubing which surrounded him. His eyes were closed and he was dressed in a hospital gown with sheets drawn up to his arm pits. Although flat on the bed beside him, his arms looked as strong as always almost as if he could use them to rise up and walk away. However his eyes were closed thanks to a sedative the doctor informed us and he lay completely still. Later I would learn that the inflammation affecting his brain at the time forbade a conversation.

The next morning I met Dr. Alva Haney, a gentleman who would change the course of my future. Dr. Al, as he later implored me to call him, was a man of about sixty with gray-tinged temples framing otherwise black curly hair. His olive skin disclosed the Armenian background of his mother. He was a neurologist, a specialist of the brain and nervous system he explained, that the hospital staff called in to see my father. While he stood speaking to us from one corner of the ICU, I watched a team of physicians stand by my father’s bedside. The young woman from the previous night, looking more fatigued, was at the center of the group. She had placed down her omnipresent Styrofoam coffee cup branded with her lipstick and began gesticulating at the monitor. From our distance I couldn’t hear her words but watched the other doctors nod knowingly. I doubt if she knew we were watching because as a finale of her short dissertation she picked up my father’s left hand at the wrist then let it fall like dead weight onto the bed. Almost like a judge pounding a gavel, as soon as his hand hit the bed the team was off to the next patient. Short white coats and long white coats, some with ties and some in green scrubs, most with clipboards in hand, they marched from patient to patient in deep discussion.

As the herd of physicians approached us, Dr. Al suggested we meet at his office in the building across from the hospital. We set a time and my mother and I arrived to find him welcoming and hospitable. He offered us coffee, soda and ginger snaps, sat us in leather chairs and spoke in comprehensible words about my father and his condition. He explained that my father suffered from an attack of the brain not unlike a heart attack. Dad had a hardening of the arteries that cut off blood supply on the right side of his brain causing symptoms on his left side. Dr. Al took us through pictures and diagrams then gave us information on recovery prospects and gave us numbers of support groups. His office was comfortable with chocolate colored wood all four sides and a floor covered in a plush oriental carpet. His diplomas were framed with matching wood and the paper encased was beginning to yellow. Pictures of, I later found out, his extensive family adorned his desk and walls. Displayed were photographs of his wife, children, grandchildren, friends, and some showing the couple at world landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and Taj Mahal.

Continued
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