WORDS ARE SIMPLE,
SOLUTIONS NOT ALWAYS

A Widow Bit – March 30, 2008

By Mary Koch

            I was reminded this week of how important it is to speak simply. For example, if you describe an injury as “fractured vertebrae at C-1 and C-2,” that naturally prompts a degree of concern and, for many of us, confusion.

            But if you say, “Her neck is broken,” that provokes a gut-wrenching reaction.

            Those were the four words my mother’s friend, Jean, said over the phone after Mother fell Wednesday afternoon. Then she turned the phone over to the emergency room doctor. Because Jean had provided context, I could minimally understand the doctor, who rattled off a long “C-1, C-2” description of Mother’s injuries.

            It all boiled down to what Jean said in the first place, a broken neck. Surgery was the preferred treatment but, for complicated reasons, turned out to be not viable. So the doctors opted for Plan B, a “halo.”

            It’s a metal ring that surrounds the head like a crown. It is held in place by screws that are drilled into the skull, then stabilized with vertical rods that attach to the shoulders of a hard plastic vest. The contraption stabilizes the patient, allowing the bones to mend.

            Mother will have to wear the thing, like a body cast, for three months. This “halo” would try the patience of a saint.

            By coincidence (and I don’t necessarily believe in coincidence), I am reading a book, “The Heartmath Solution,” in which, among other things, the authors discuss connections between the heart and brain. The part of the brain called the amygdala, the authors explain, assigns emotional significance to everything we hear, smell, touch, and see.

            “If an old emotion has become familiar, we often respond to new, similar situations with the same emotion, whether it makes sense or not … The amygdala assigns significance very rapidly, but not always very accurately.”

            My amygdala went into overdrive when I got to the hospital where Mother was being treated. Just walking into any hospital evokes old emotions: sorrow, frustration, even anger. But those are emotions fostered by the brain, not the heart.

             I stood with Jean and family members in the noisy, operating room waiting area, listening to a surgeon whom we’d barely met tell us the bad news about the halo. I was instantly transported, as if in a time machine, back 14 years to a busy hospital corridor where a doctor I’d never previously met gave me the worst news I’d ever heard. He bluntly described my husband’s post-stroke status as “terrible.”

            As Mother learns to cope with her temporary immobilization, we talk frequently about our late husbands. She especially finds courage in relating the similarity and differences between her needs and John’s during his years of paralysis.        

            It’s a comfort to realize that he continues to lead by example now that he’s gone, just as he did in life.  And there is healing for me in once again providing some of the care that was mine to give for those 14 years.

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