Brain Damage, page 2
part #2 of Prescription: Murder Series
The crazy cat lady isn’t just a terrible stereotype. I honestly believe it’s a real thing. At least fifty percent of cats carry an infection known as toxoplasmosis, which is the reason pregnant women shouldn’t change litter boxes. I’ve read that toxoplasmosis can theoretically infect the brain of the owners, effectively causing psychosis. So the crazy cat lady might not just be crazy because she’s got twenty cats in her home… it might be because of toxoplasmosis. That’s a real thing. I didn’t want to end up with toxoplasmosis psychosis.
But then I figured, screw it, I’ll get a cat.
I open up a can of cat food for Kitty. Kitty refuses to eat any dry food and will only eat gourmet brands of canned cat food. I swear, the stuff looks so good, sometimes I’m tempted to take a taste. (Okay, I admit it, I did try it once. I don’t recommend it.) I honestly don’t know why my cat is such a spoiled diva, especially considering three months before I adopted her, she was eating out of garbage cans.
For myself, I pull a salmon filet out of the refrigerator and throw it in the frying pan with some olive oil, salt, and pepper. No matter how tired I am at night, I always cook myself a hot meal on the stove. Nothing gourmet, but hey, it’s better than a TV dinner.
I hear my phone buzzing inside my purse, and contemplate whether I should answer. It could be my best friend Bridget (well, best friend after Kitty), but more likely, it’s my mother. Ever since my father passed on, she’s been checking up on me on a daily basis. And our conversations always touch on the exact same topics: the fact that I live alone and the fact that I don’t have boyfriend. I’m just not in the mood right now.
Oh hell, I’ll talk to her for a minute and that’s it.
“Charly!” my mother booms. She must be on her cell phone. She’s somehow unable to regulate the volume of her voice when she’s on the cell phone. She basically always just shouts into the phone, thinking I won’t hear her otherwise. She sounds the way I do when I’m talking to my older, deafer patients.
“Hi, Mom,” I say. I glance over at my salmon, which is currently steaming. “I can’t really talk. I’m in the middle of cooking dinner.”
“What are you making!” she shouts.
“Salmon with a salad,” I say as I pull a head of lettuce out of the fridge. Since I read that pre-packaged lettuce is dangerously unhealthy, I’ve been cutting my own, so I have to balance the phone precariously between my chin and my neck as I slice. I miss the days of ignorance.
“Don’t forget to turn off the oven when you’re done,” she warns me.
“You really think I’m going to forget to turn off the oven if you don’t tell me?” I say. I’m trying to keep the irritation out of my voice but it’s hard. “I mean, I’ve cooked thousands of meals living on my own, and you think that the only thing stopping me from keeping the oven on and burning down the building is you telling me to turn it off? Is that really what you think?”
“It can’t hurt to remind you,” she sniffs.
I love my mother. I really do. Probably more than anyone else in the world. But somehow it’s become impossible to have a conversation with her without my ending up shouting, then feeling guilty about it later. Why does talking to your parents always make you regress to your teenage years?
“Charly,” Mom says, “I know you’re going to say no to this, but the son of this woman I met playing bridge is interested in—”
“No.”
“But if you could just meet him and—”
“No.”
“Why are you so stubborn, Charly?” Mom says. “I mean, you’re in your mid-thirties. Don’t you want to get married and have kids?”
“I told you—if it happens, it happens.” I shrug at my salmon. “If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.”
“If you don’t make it happen, then it won’t happen.”
“Then it won’t happen.”
“But Charly—”
“My dinner is ready,” I say as I lift the lid off my pan containing the salmon. The filet has turned that perfect pink color that lets me know that it’s cooked to a medium-rare. Perfect. “I’ll have to talk to you later.”
My mother reluctantly gets off the phone so that I can assemble my plate of dinner. I love being able to eat whatever I want for dinner, then watch whatever I want on television while Kitty settles down on the sofa next to me so that I can stroke her soft, black fur.
The truth is, I haven’t met a guy yet whose company I enjoyed better than the peace of my own home. Why wreck something that’s already perfect?
But then as the perfectly cooked salmon dissolves on my tongue, I can’t help but think about Clark Douglas, that patient from this morning. And how, even though it’s practically impossible, I wouldn’t entirely mind if he were here, sharing dinner with me right now. And maybe hanging around for a bit afterwards.
Chapter 3
One Week After
The light feels like a knife.
Yellow light inches away from my pupil, jabbing at my eyeball like an ice pick through my brain. I want to close my eyes to block it out, but I can’t. My eye won’t close. Something has wedged it open.
I try to cry out to protest, but my lips don’t move. While something holds my eye open, something holds my lips shut. Tape, I think.
“No pupillary response,” a voice announces.
With those words, my eyelid is released and I am plunged back into blessed relative darkness, marred only by a large green spot in the center of my vision. I want to live in this darkness.
“No way,” a second voice says. “Are you blind? I got a definite contraction of that pupil.”
It happens again. My eyelid is yanked open and I see the blurry outline of a face before the light floods my field of vision again. The pain came slower before, but this time it is immediate. I’ve never been a religious person, but I find myself praying that the light will go away.
Please, God, make it go black again…
“She had pretty eyes,” a voice comments.
They are complimenting me in the past tense. That can’t be good.
“See?” a triumphant voice announces seconds before the light shuts off. “I told you it contracted.”
“Fine,” says the first voice. “Keep her breathing on the vent for another month or two instead of giving her organs to somebody who isn’t brain-dead.”
There’s a long pause before I hear: “She’s an organ donor?”
“Said so on her driver’s license, apparently.”
Another long pause. The pain in my head is fading and with it, my consciousness. Blessed darkness. Thank you, God.
“Well, she’s not dead yet.”
Those words are comforting to me. Something has happened to me, but I’m not dead. I’m alive. I’m still here. Not dead.
Yet.
I hear one last remark before I slip away again:
“Do you think she’s really still in there?”
_____
I don’t know this girl, but she is very pretty and her hair is tied back into a blond ponytail. She is young, maybe in her twenties, with a fresh-faced eager look. There are freckles sprinkled across her nose, which make her look even younger and more fresh-faced and pretty. Her smile fills my vision and makes me feel comforted, optimistic.
“Are you ready to try eating something today, Charlotte?” she asks.
Who is Charlotte?
I have no idea who she is talking to. But her eyes are locked with mine. I think she might be talking to me. Yes, she is definitely talking to me. I am Charlotte. That is my name, I think.
It’s a pretty name. Charlotte. I like it.
I look down and see there is a plate in front of me. On the plate, there are three mounds of food. They all sort of look like mashed potatoes, but one is gray, one is white, and one is yellow. Multicolored mashed potatoes. I wonder how they do that.
The girl spoons a bit of the gray material and then lifts the spoon to my lips.
“Open your mouth, Charlotte,” the girl says.
I look down and see the badge hanging from the pocket of the girl’s bright purple scrub top. Written in big letters is the word Amy. The girl’s name must be Amy. That’s a pretty name too. Almost as pretty as Charlotte.
“Come on, Charly,” she says to me. Amy. Her blue eyes are wide and hopeful. “Open your mouth for me.”
She demonstrates by opening her own mouth. She has a little pink tongue.
I really want to make Amy happy, so I do what she did. I open my mouth. Amy’s face lights up like a Christmas tree. She’s even prettier when she’s happy, although I’m not entirely sure why opening my mouth made her so happy. “Great job!” she tells me.
My reward is a mouthful of gray material on a spoon. It’s not a very good reward. The spoon tastes metallic and bitter, but the food tastes even worse. It almost tastes like meat, but with an odd aftertaste. I don’t like it and I don’t want it in my mouth. I want to spit it out, but I don’t think Amy will like that.
“Now chew, Charlotte,” Amy instructs me as she removes the spoon.
Amy demonstrates this one by letting her lower jaw fall slack, then raising it up again, then lowering it again as if I didn’t understand what chewing is. I mimic her movements and Amy looks like she may faint from happiness. Her standards for happiness seem ridiculously low.
“You’re doing amazing today, Charlotte,” she says.
Amy’s standards for “amazing” seem ridiculously low too.
“Now I need you to swallow.”
I understand what she wants me to do. I mean, I do and I don’t. I know what swallowing is, and I know I’ve done it before, but I don’t entirely know how to do it right now. I’m not entirely sure why.
I see a little crease forming between her brows. Amy isn’t happy anymore. I want to make her happy, but I don’t know what to do. Whatever it is, I’m obviously not doing it.
“Swallow, Charly,” she says. “Come on, swallow.”
I stop the chewing motion. I feel some of the gray material sliding out of the corner of my mouth. Amy allows the food to trickle down my chin before she dabs at my face with a napkin.
I feel terrible. I want to let Amy know that I am trying my best, I don’t mean to disappoint her. I want to do what she’d like me to do.
But when I open my mouth to tell her those things, I lose the rest of the food that she placed in my mouth and it leaks down my chin and splatters on a napkin across my chest.
Amy just sighs and shakes her head.
_____
The ball is red and I keep watching it. This is trickier than it sounds. The ball goes up, down, to one side then it’s gone. Magically, inexplicably gone. Where did it go? I try turning my head, but I still can’t find it.
Where is it?
“Whoa, Charly,” a voice says. I feel a hand on my shoulder, pushing me. That’s when I realize that I have been falling to the side. The hand is keeping me from falling.
There’s the ball again! I found it!
It’s red.
The person holding the red ball has short brown hair like a boy, but I don’t think it is a boy. Her features are delicate like a girl. And her voice is low pitched, but still definitely sounds like a girl. So I think she is a girl. I’m like ninety-nine percent sure.
Also, I look down and her name tag says Valerie, which is a girl’s name. So yes, I am ninety-nine percent sure she’s a girl.
“Is this what you were looking for, Charly?” the girl (I think) says.
Who is she talking to? Who is Charly?
Oh wait, I think that’s me. I think that’s my name.
Valerie rotates the red ball around in her fingers. She holds it in my face. “Do you want to try grabbing it?”
I know she wants me to do something, something to do with the ball, but I don’t really understand what. So I just look at the ball. We wait there for a minute, then Valerie’s face breaks out into a smile and she shakes her head.
“Wishful thinking,” she says with a laugh.
I keep watching the red ball. I watch it goes up, up, up. This time, I swear I’m not going to lose track of it.
“How is she doing today?”
The question was asked by a pretty girl with her blond hair in a ponytail. She looks a little bit familiar. I look at her name tag and read her name. Amy. I’m sure I’ve seen her before.
Valerie shrugs. “Pretty bad at the beginning of the session, but just now she was tracking this red ball pretty well. I mean, she didn’t grab for it or anything, but she followed it almost everywhere.”
“Everywhere?”
Valerie smiles. “Well, she loses it when it goes to the left. Her left neglect is still horrendous. She has no awareness at all of her left side. She’s practically falling out of her wheelchair to the left.”
Who is “she”? Who are they talking about? There’s nobody else here besides me. They couldn’t be talking about me though. I can’t be falling out of my wheelchair because I’m not in a wheelchair. Why would I be in a wheelchair? Those are for old people.
I look down, to my right side. I see an armrest, then a large metal rimmed wheel.
Huh. Maybe I really am in a wheelchair.
“Better than nothing,” Amy comments. She sounds a little bit sad, but I’m not sure why. “I don’t know… She had one really good day about a week ago when I got her to open her mouth for some food and even chew it a little bit, but then nothing since then. I can barely get her to stay awake through my session.”
“We did the coma scale yesterday,” Valerie says, brushing some strands of brown hair from her eyes. She has very pretty eyes.
“And?”
“What do you think?” Valerie snorts. “Still vegetative. No purposeful movements.”
They are both quiet for a minute.
Oh shit, I don’t see the red ball. They were distracting me and I lost track of it. Where did it go?
“It’s sad,” Amy says. “I just can’t get anything out of her most of the time. I hate to give up though. She’s so young… and she used to be a doctor.”
“Yeah, but her insurance…”
Oh my God, there it is! The red ball! It’s in Valerie’s hand. I found it!
This time, I am definitely not going to lose track of that ball. Valerie gestures with it and I watch it. It goes up and down. It’s easy to follow because it’s red.
Chapter 4
One month After
“Open your eyes for me.”
There is a very pretty girl with blond hair sitting across from me. She is smiling at me. I like her smile. She has very straight teeth. And there are freckles across her pert little nose.
I feel something stroking my hand. I look down and see that the pretty blond girl has my hand in hers. Her hand is so soft, like a baby.
“Very good,” the blond girl is saying. “Now I want you to keep your eyes open.”
I keep my eyes open, focusing on the blond girl’s smile. It’s hard. I’m so tired. It would be nice to close my eyes.
“Good,” she says. She rubs a cold washcloth over my forehead and my cheek, and I shiver. A droplet of water slides down my cheek and down my neck. “You have such pretty eyes. The color is so unusual. Violet, like Elizabeth Taylor.”
Violet is like purple. How could I have purple eyes? Purple is not a normal color for eyes.
“Listen to me,” the blond girl says, “I want you to give me a thumbs up if I say your name. Okay?”
I read the name off of the blond girl’s name tag: Amy. She looks sort of familiar to me. I think I met her before. Her hand feels very soft, like a baby.
“Is your name Susan?” she asks me.
Is my name Susan? I don’t think it is. That doesn’t sound familiar.
No, I’m almost certain that my name isn’t Susan.
“Is your name Lisa?”
I don’t think Lisa is my name either. What is my name again? That seems like something I should definitely know.
But I’m sure if she says my name, I’ll recognize it.
I look to my right and see that there is another person in the room besides Amy. It is an older woman, with gray hair that is pulled back into a bun, although dozens of loose scraggly strands have escaped and fallen around her face. She’s wearing gray-rimmed glasses that slide down the bridge of her nose. I look for a name tag, but I don’t see one.
“How come she always has her head turned to the right?” the older woman asks.
“Injuries to the right side of the brain can sometimes cause a neglect of the left side,” Amy explains. “Basically, she has trouble paying attention and noticing stimuli on her left side.”
“So she can’t see things on her left side?”
“It’s not necessarily a question of vision,” Amy says. “It’s about perception. Like, for example, if I touch her on her left arm, notice how she doesn’t really respond, even though her nerves are working fine. She just doesn’t perceive that I’m touching her. She ignores any stimuli on her left side.”
Is Amy touching me right now? I guess she must be. I’m just not perceiving it, whatever the hell that means.
“That’s so bizarre,” the older woman says.
Amy nods. “And weirdly, it doesn’t just apply to real life. Patients with hemispatial neglect on the left side can ignore the left side of hallucinations, dreams, or memories too.” She turns her attention back to me and smiles. “So tell me. Is your name Charlotte?”
Is that my name? I’m not sure. It sounds familiar.
“Give me a thumbs-up if your name is Charlotte,” Amy says.
The older woman is leaning forward eagerly, her blue eyes wide behind the lenses of her glasses. She has dark circles under her eyes. Her blouse is wrinkled, like she slept in it.
“She did it!” the older woman says triumphantly. “I saw her thumb move.”
Amy shakes her head. “I… I’m not so sure.”
