how the medical profession would react to such a confession.
Sitting up, I towel-dried my hair, shaking out the damp locks and turning to rummage in my locker for Lauren’s hairbrush. No, I thought as I stroked the brush carefully through my hair, I would have to be much subtler in my quest for an answer to my present predicament.
An hour later an orderly came with a wheelchair and took me for a head MRI scan, and I’d not been back on the ward more than ten minutes when Dr. Shakir himself came to see me. He perched on the side of the bed and asked how I was feeling.
“I still feel rather… unsettled,” I told him carefully.
He nodded, patting my hand in a fatherly fashion. “You have been through a great deal, Lauren,” he said. “When part of your memories are lost, your identity seems lost with it. It’s quite understandable you should be feeling disoriented.”
“Is it usual for patients to lose all their memories?”
He hesitated and I guessed he didn’t really want to confound me with the hard medical facts, but then he continued, “Well, it’s more usual for victims of lightning strikes to suffer anterograde amnesia, losing memories of the incident and suffering problems with memory afterward. In your case you seem to be experiencing retrograde amnesia, a loss of memories before the incident.”
“I think it would help if you could answer some questions I have been worrying about,” I said carefully.
He nodded, smiling benignly at me.
“When I suffered the cardiac arrest, how long was I ‘dead’ for?”
He looked taken aback by the bluntness of my question, but answered anyway.
“We were working on you for almost forty minutes from the time you came in to when we got a sinus rhythm going. I believe the ambulance crew had been doing CPR for at least twenty minutes before that.”
“Is it unusual for someone to be ‘gone’ for that long and have no serious aftereffects?”
He smiled rather patronizingly before answering. “I don’t think you need to worry about that, Lauren. Apart from the memory loss, you seem to be recovering well.”
“But is it unusual?” I persisted, wanting desperately to know if this body should clinically be dead.
He shook his head. “People respond differently. I suppose, to be frank, I was a little concerned there may have been some brain damage after so long without oxygen to the brain, but as soon as you woke up my doubts were allayed.”
“When you were working on me,” I continued, “did you contemplate giving up on me?”
Dr. Shakir fidgeted uncomfortably and refused to meet my gaze. Instead of answering immediately he got up, lifted my notes from the foot of my bed and began leafing through them.
“At one point,” he said quietly. “I confess I thought we were struggling to resuscitate you in vain. I contemplated calling time of death. I thought you might be too badly injured to survive. But then I heard your children outside the emergency room crying for you, begging us to save their mother. One of the little boys was chanting, ‘Mummy, come back; Mummy, come back!’ We shocked you one last time, and here you are.”
Indeed, I thought wryly. Here I was. But not Lauren. Not the children’s mother.
He put down the notes and smiled at me, less disconcerted now that I wasn’t asking awkward questions and forcing him to justify his actions, which, let’s face it, could have gone badly if Lauren had woken up brain-damaged and needing permanent care. How would Grant and the children have coped then? I wondered. From what I had seen so far, Lauren was the strong one, the one who held that fragile family together. The knowledge transfixed me. Could I possibly step into her shoes? Was I strong enough? Did I even want to try?
I shook my head, realizing that I was straying into padded-cell territory again. Thinking too deeply at this point wouldn’t help anyone, least of all me.
“Dr. Shakir?” I asked, in what I perceived to be a
Sitting up, I towel-dried my hair, shaking out the damp locks and turning to rummage in my locker for Lauren’s hairbrush. No, I thought as I stroked the brush carefully through my hair, I would have to be much subtler in my quest for an answer to my present predicament.
An hour later an orderly came with a wheelchair and took me for a head MRI scan, and I’d not been back on the ward more than ten minutes when Dr. Shakir himself came to see me. He perched on the side of the bed and asked how I was feeling.
“I still feel rather… unsettled,” I told him carefully.
He nodded, patting my hand in a fatherly fashion. “You have been through a great deal, Lauren,” he said. “When part of your memories are lost, your identity seems lost with it. It’s quite understandable you should be feeling disoriented.”
“Is it usual for patients to lose all their memories?”
He hesitated and I guessed he didn’t really want to confound me with the hard medical facts, but then he continued, “Well, it’s more usual for victims of lightning strikes to suffer anterograde amnesia, losing memories of the incident and suffering problems with memory afterward. In your case you seem to be experiencing retrograde amnesia, a loss of memories before the incident.”
“I think it would help if you could answer some questions I have been worrying about,” I said carefully.
He nodded, smiling benignly at me.
“When I suffered the cardiac arrest, how long was I ‘dead’ for?”
He looked taken aback by the bluntness of my question, but answered anyway.
“We were working on you for almost forty minutes from the time you came in to when we got a sinus rhythm going. I believe the ambulance crew had been doing CPR for at least twenty minutes before that.”
“Is it unusual for someone to be ‘gone’ for that long and have no serious aftereffects?”
He smiled rather patronizingly before answering. “I don’t think you need to worry about that, Lauren. Apart from the memory loss, you seem to be recovering well.”
“But is it unusual?” I persisted, wanting desperately to know if this body should clinically be dead.
He shook his head. “People respond differently. I suppose, to be frank, I was a little concerned there may have been some brain damage after so long without oxygen to the brain, but as soon as you woke up my doubts were allayed.”
“When you were working on me,” I continued, “did you contemplate giving up on me?”
Dr. Shakir fidgeted uncomfortably and refused to meet my gaze. Instead of answering immediately he got up, lifted my notes from the foot of my bed and began leafing through them.
“At one point,” he said quietly. “I confess I thought we were struggling to resuscitate you in vain. I contemplated calling time of death. I thought you might be too badly injured to survive. But then I heard your children outside the emergency room crying for you, begging us to save their mother. One of the little boys was chanting, ‘Mummy, come back; Mummy, come back!’ We shocked you one last time, and here you are.”
Indeed, I thought wryly. Here I was. But not Lauren. Not the children’s mother.
He put down the notes and smiled at me, less disconcerted now that I wasn’t asking awkward questions and forcing him to justify his actions, which, let’s face it, could have gone badly if Lauren had woken up brain-damaged and needing permanent care. How would Grant and the children have coped then? I wondered. From what I had seen so far, Lauren was the strong one, the one who held that fragile family together. The knowledge transfixed me. Could I possibly step into her shoes? Was I strong enough? Did I even want to try?
I shook my head, realizing that I was straying into padded-cell territory again. Thinking too deeply at this point wouldn’t help anyone, least of all me.
“Dr. Shakir?” I asked, in what I perceived to be a
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