Lifeless

After our discussion with the detective, I needed to be alone. I decided to step into the women's room on the surgical floor.
Upon entering the bathroom, I headed for the far stall with my head hanging down, holding my breath. The bathroom was illuminated with florescent lights attached to an electric strip on the ceiling. It held two stalls on opposite sides of a small, white porcelain sink.
When I entered the stall I caught myself leaning against the cool, pale blue tile. I struggled to catch my breath as I began to shake.

Before leaving the small meeting room the detective had left me with another devastating bit of news. Upon arriving at Mt.Clemens General the day before, the hospital had run a routine drug panel on my father's blood. They do this for all unconscious patients to make sure they are aware of any and all drugs or chemicals that may be in a person's system.
My father's blood alcohol level had been 2.4

My father had always had a drinking problem, his entire life. He spent his life either deep in the throws of addiction or fighting the addiction with all his strength, often with the substitution of pot, cigarettes, exercise or sex...anything...anything to give him a high.
I remember the first two years after my parents divorced being so frightened to be left alone with my father. His drinking had raged out of control after my mother left him and the honest truth was I was afraid of him.
He was unpredictable.
His usual pattern being a happy drunk at the beginning of the evening, than as the alcohol continued to flow he would become sloppier and finally...he would become... scary.

He never beat me, hit me or hurt me physically while he was drunk, but the verbal and emotional abuse I endured for years was almost worse. I remember him screaming at me as if I had crashed his car, simply because I had spilled his beer on the living room floor.
I remember my father pouring his beer into a to-go cup as we left the house, with him behind the wheel. As young as I was I never knew how wrong that was...for me it was normal.
It was only when I became an adult that I realized, my father had endangered my life on a nightly basis for well over two years.
I remember being called fat and being told to shut up...but most importantly I remember feeling angry and inferior. Angry that he couldn't spend one night with me sober. Angry that no matter how much he told me he loved me, he would still drink. Angry that he couldn't see what he was doing to me...to himself. And I felt inferior. No matter how much he loved me, he loved beer more. That is what I spent my adolescence believing...
No matter what I did, it was never enough.

But when the morning would come, and the alcohol would wear off, my father was so different. Still not the most calm, collected and supportive man in the world...none the less, he was far different during the day. He was capable, funny, loving, charismatic and extremely intelligent. He would take me horse-back riding in the mountains. We would drive the two hour stretch to the Horse Ranch singing Motown's greatest hits with the windows rolled down.
We would ride for hours at the ranch enjoying the sound, feel and smell of nature...sharing our equal love for horses. On the way back from the ranch we would always stop at the old A&W drive-in cafe and get foot-long hot dogs and french fries. When he was sober I was no longer fat, but strong. When he was sober I was never annoying, but intelligent and articulate. When he was sober he was my father and I was his daughter.
When he was sober I loved him.

But he was rarely sober.

A blood alcohol level of 2.4. Jesus! And that had been a good hour or so after he had gotten into his car. Even though this news upset me, it did not surprise me. I had been in the car with him after drinking 16 beers, and that was simply on a night I had decided to keep count. This was not unusual for my father and as much as I hate to say it, as much as saying it seems to condone it, the truth was my father was probably more sober that day than most days...
With my face pressed against the cool tile, my body shaking, I began to finally allow the tears to roll down my checks, my body wretched with sobs and I began to pound my fist against the tile wall.
Hard.
Harder.
Until my skin became raw.
I kept pounding, until I thought my hand would break.

I could not explain the emotions coursing through my body. Anger. Sadness. Grief. Remorse. Anger. Love. Hopelessness. Revenge. Fear. Anger...but ultimately, strangely...love.

Its unexplainable how you can love so deeply someone who has hurt you so badly. It is almost as if love it programed into the DNA. Just as my father's curly hair, oval face and muscular build had been programmed into me at birth, so had my love for him. No matter what he had done, no matter what role he had played in this horrible incident, I still loved him and I still wanted him back in my life. I still wanted him alive.

Peeling myself off of the tile wall, I unlatched the silver lock of the stall door and walked to the sink. As I cupped my hands under the cool water I bent down to splash the water over my face. I threw my head back and looked into the mirror.
What I saw staring back at me was a stranger. A gaunt, sunken, tired, lifeless stranger. My eyes look wild and lost. My usually olive complexion had gone fair with grief and my face was held in an almost permanent grimace, as if I had smelled something sour.
I turned away from the mirror and left the bathroom.

As I headed back towards the waiting room I saw my mother at the nurses desk. She was walking towards me, fast.
"We can go back and see him now," she said, "He's out of recovery."
"Ok."
"Honey?" she said catching my arm, "try to forget about what the detective said for a little while and just visit with your father."
I looked at her wanting to say what was in my mind. I wanted to tell her that nothing would ever take those words out of my head. I wanted to tell her that years upon years later I would remember every second of the last two days in gruesome detail, that it would haunt me...forever...and that I would be angry that no matter how supportive my friends, family and lovers were...no one would know what I felt...no one would ever be able to know...no matter how much they tried.
But I didn't.
On some level I knew this accident had affected her deeply. She used to be married to my father, she used to love him, more than anyone. She still loved him on some level, and I knew she always would.
And I knew that there was not a day that goes by that she does not look at my face, as I resemble my father greatly, and see him staring back at her.
"Ok, Mom," I said...more for her than for myself.

____________________________________________________________________

Upon entering my fathers room in Intensive Care I at first could not look at the bed that held him, or the shell of what he used to be.
I found myself looking around the room at all of the machines he was attached to. He was connected to a ventilator that made a steady hissing noise as the equalizing air filter expanded and then fell, expanded and then fell...filing my father's lungs with air.
The heart monitor showed spikes of activity as my father's heart beat within his chest at 59 beats per minute.
The oxygenation sensor displayed a 95, than a 97, than a 93 and back again....it constantly changed with each hiss of the ventilator.
A long yellow cord snaked out from under the sheets filing a large bag with urine as it hung from the bottom of the bed.
A blood pressure cuff automatically filled with air as it wrapped my father's arm and then slowly deflated....130/92....displayed in blue across the monitor.
And finally the bags hung from their IV poles with snake-like fingers reaching into all areas of my father's body...I would soon know all of these medications as if I were a nurse myself.

These figures, these numbers on a monitor, would become my lifeline into my father for the next several weeks. I would watch these numbers and believe that by knowing they were stable, that my father too, was stable and on his way back from the brink.
This of course was what I told myself, no one really knew.

I finally looked up into the hospital bed and saw my father. My eyes filled with tears and a single, slow, wet tear escaped down my check.
"Oh, daddy," I whispered walking to the bed.
He lie lifeless, his body swollen about 20% its normal size. His shaved head lie on a pillow bandaged from the forehead-up. His arms lie on pillows elevated above him chest, which rose and fell with each hiss of the ventilator. A feeding tube protruded from his stomach and ran into one of the containers hanging from one of the IV poles. The ventilator tube was fastened around his neck with a soft collar. His eyes were closed and the skin beneath them black; dried blood was still visible at each nostril. His mouth was shut tightly, and I remembered it had been wired shut.

I reached out and touched one of his swollen, coarse hands.
It was cold.
He did not move.
Without the ventilator and the small, slow drip of the IVs there was no movement.
There was no life.

Revelation

When we were finally called into the surgical counseling room at the completion of my father's surgery we could hardly hold our heads up or concentrate on the words the surgeon was saying.
It was nearly noon, yet we felt like we had been in that room for days, weeks.
The surgeon motioned myself, my grandmother and my mother into the small room. This room seemed a smaller version of the emergency room in which we had been waiting just the night before. A small round table sat to the immediate right of the door, and two chairs were pulled up under the table. A small, two person sofa sat to the back wall and a tall floor lamp illuminated the room.
The surgeon asked us to take a seat. My grandmother and I sat, my mother stood behind me with her hands on my shoulders.

"I was able to remove the three clots that were present in Linwood's brain. There were two in his right temporal lobe and one in his frontal lobe," the surgeon began, as he rubbed his hands together and rolled his fingers over the tops of his hands, as if they had been chilled.
"The surgery itself was a success but because of the extensiveness of the injury, and the swelling that has occurred in his brain, I have had to remove a large portion of his skull to allow for swelling in the brain, " he paused looking at us. Testing us, to see if he could continue.
"Without removing this portion, the brain would swell against the bone and cause further brain damage..." he stated.

My mind flashed to the right side of my father's head. The side I had seen caved in the night before.
I shuddered.

"After the swelling has gone down, we can replace this portion of the skull and it will heal, with minimal scaring or deformity," the doctor stated placing his hands behind his back and looking from my grandmother to me and back again, "Additionally, we had to wire Linwood's jaw shut as the X-Rays showed his jaw is also broken in two places. The wiring should be in place for about six weeks, so we have inserted a feeding tube into his stomach and performed a tracheotomy so that he may continue to breath on the ventilator. We want to keep him as sedated as possible for the next week or so to allow his brain, and body, time to heal.," the doctor finished looking at me squarely.
I looked at my grandmother who sat staring at her hand and then up at my mother who looked ready to speak, "What will he be like when he wakes up?" I asked, half wanting, half not-wanting, to know.

"His injuries are great," the doctor said looking down, "we won't really know how he will be when he awakes...if he awakes," he continued, "unfortunately, medical science knows every detail about so many of our organs yet the brain remains somewhat of a mystery. ..I am going to be quite frank when I say he could awaken after we reduce his sedation and function somewhat, or...."the doctors voice trailed, "he may remain in a coma indefinitely."
At this last piece of news my grandmother gasped and clamped her hand over her mouth, "Oh god!" she breathed as tears formed in her eyes.
I looked down.
"I am extremely sorry about this accident," the doctor said as he moved towards the door, "my deepest sympathies go out to all of you," and with that he was gone, shutting the door softly behind him.

I sat back in my seat looking at my lap. I imagined life with my father as a vegetable. I imagined visiting him in the hospital where he lay as days, weeks, months and years passed by, unaware of what was happening around him. His beard being shaven by nurses who spoke over his body as if he wasn't there...

After a few moments my mother opened the door and I began to follow my grandmother out of the room. I shuffled towards the information desk prepared to ask when we would be allowed to see my father when I noticed a tall, handsome police officer at the desk.
"Mr. West's family..." I heard him say.
The nurse behind the desk looked startled when she saw me approach the officer, "that's them," she said motioning to myself and my mother and grandmother. I could tell she was curious as to why a police officer was looking for us, yet fearful of knowing the answer.
"Renee West?" the officer asked turning towards me.
"Um, yes?" I said glancing at my mother.
My mother's face was set. She showed many different emotions, fear, sadness, curiosity and a hint, just a small hint, of anger.
It was this hint of anger that took me back, what is going on?

"I need to speak with you about the incident involving your father," the police officer began. The nurse stepped from behind her desk and motioned us back into the small room from which we had just come.
"Um, ok..." I said looking back to be sure my mother and grandmother were following me.
When we entered the room, we returned to our respective seats and the officer pulled one of the chairs from the back of the room towards the table, "Please sit," he instructed my mother.
She sat.
The officer began, "It has come under our investigation at the Saint Clair Shores police department that your father was the victim of an assault yesterday afternoon."

An assault?
I thought he was in a car accident?
Who would assault my father?
Why?
What is going on!

"At approximately 3pm, " the officer continued looking at a leather binder filled with notes, "your father was proceeding west on Grand Avenue street towards his home at 2543 Grand. At some point your father was involved in an altercation on the road with another driver. From what we can gather your father and this other driver were yelling obscenities at each other from their vehicles, then they both decided to stop their vehicles, exit, and resume the argument face-to-face," he continued.
I looked at my mother, that emotion, anger, flashed across her face again.

"We are still unclear as to what exactly was said but we have witness testimony that at some point the other man struck your father with a fist in the face. Witnesses say your father fell backwards and struck the curb with his head," the officer paused looking up at me.

"Oh!" I exhaled feeling as though all the air had been knocked out of me, feeling as if I had been punched in the stomach. All I could imagine was my father falling back, hitting his head on the curb. I thought about the concrete he must have hit.
So cold.
So hard.
So...deadly.

"Are you ok miss?" the officer said, leaning forward and putting his hand on my arm. I looked up into the officers kind eyes and again noticed how handsome he was.
"Yeah," I said clearing my throat, "so...um...who is this guy?"
"We can't provide you with that information yet, until official charges have been brought," the officer said.
"Well, why?" my grandmother spoke up clenching her small fist as it sat in her lap, "this man almost killed my son and no charges have been brought yet!?!" she exclaimed.
"See," the officer began, looking down again,"there is a statue of limitations we are dealing with in this case. We can charge the man with two different offenses depending on the prognosis of your father's condition."
I shock my head, "I'm sorry I don't understand," I said, "Why can't you just charge him with assault or assault with intent to do harm, or something like that?" I asked.
"Because," the officer began, clearly not wanting to make his thoughts known to us, "while that is the charge we would mostly likely bring upon this man, there is a possibility of another charge, " he continued as he slowly looked up, "depending on how things go...."
"Another charge?" I asked, confused, "what other charge."
The officer closed his notebook and looked at me gently, "Depending on how things go, the other charge," he continued with great difficulty, "would be...involuntary manslaughter."

My eyes opened wide. This was it, this was what was keeping the police from pressing charges quite so soon.
They were waiting for my father to die.

Photos

Some of my favorite photos to take are not photos of things that are pretty, beautiful or even cute...but interesting. I love photos that show emotion and evoke an emotion in the person viewing the image.
Nothing evokes more emotion in me that these images. They are not pretty, but they are real. (All taken in manuel mode)
These images were taken yesterday 2/4/09 in my father's hospital room, as was the blog header photo.