Last Mother’s Day

My mother spent her last Mother’s Day in a coma.

On Friday, May 12, 2006, my mother suffered a ruptured cerebral aneurysm. She had just returned from the garden center with a trunkful of small red flowers (Mom loved flowers) and had asked my father if he wanted the last slice of cold pizza (Mom loved cold pizza). She kissed Dad on the head, then walked through the open family room—with its long line of tall windows overlooking her garden and her woods—to the kitchen. A minute or two later, she called out “Dan!” and collapsed onto the hardwood floor. While they waited for an ambulance to arrive, my father rolled her onto her side; her body convulsed with seizures and vomiting. She was rushed to a local hospital and immediately airlifted by helicopter to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, about an hour’s drive south of their home.

We got the call late Friday night. I don’t remember what time exactly, but late enough that the phone’s ringing triggered heartburn. Mo’s mother was old and unwell: I expected that the call was for her.

My dad’s sentences were clipped and breathy, and I couldn’t get all that he was saying. I really didn’t know what an aneurysm was. I didn’t even know how to spell it.

I spent the rest of the night and morning on Wikipedia. In our home office with the lights left off, I tried to make sense of a lot of words that were Greek to me—actual, genuine Greek, like “hemorrhage” and “hematoma” and “hydrocephalus.” I read about the Circle of Willis—which has to do with neither Bruce nor Drummond—and about veins and arteries twice to make sure that I had them straight. I followed “cerebrospinal fluid” through the entire central nervous system.

I read about paralysis and retardation and vegetative states. About stroke. About intracranial pressure. About the finite space inside the human skull. I followed every link to every word that I didn’t recognize, many that I did, and anything that sounded even remotely Greek.

I must have read the prognosis paragraph a dozen times; that I could read through it so quickly disturbed me. Only four sentences long, the paragraph concluded in its ham-handed, poorly punctuated way that “of the 30,000 people per year in the United States who suffer a ruptured aneurysm, only 20% will be alive and well in one year’s time. 20% will be alive but disabled, and 60% will have died.”

Scans showed that my mother had not one but six individual aneurysms: five inside her head and one in the base of her neck. Of the five in her brain, four were located close to the surface on the left side, while the fifth—the one that had ruptured—was smack-dab in the middle of her head. If you imagine a line running from ear to ear and another from between your eyes to the back of your skull: where those two lines intersect was where this aneurysm lived. As it was explained to me: a typical aneurysm is about the size of a grain of rice; this one in the center of my mother’s brain was the size of an adult’s thumbnail.

How this aneurysm had grown to such a size without rupture was unknown. As was how to fix it.

I wanted to fly immediately, but my family needed me to wait to get my grandmother and brother on a plane with me. I looked into flights without them anyway; neither was ill or incompetent or had trouble getting around, and I wanted to get there before it was too late. I wanted to get there while there was still a chance of—something. Anything. Contact. Possibility. Waiting until Monday was unnecessary, frustrating, and—quite frankly—stupid.

But I had never been to my parents’ house in Georgia. They had moved south only a year before, and the only thing I knew about the area geography was that everywhere was at least an hour away from everywhere else. My father was ostensibly out of reach, and at the time I didn’t know the name of the hospital, let alone where it was. I would have made it as far as the Atlanta airport, then been stranded with no idea where to go.

So instead of rushing to my mother’s side, I spent the weekend doing laundry. I cooked and stocked the freezer, unsure how long Mo would need to fend for himself. On Sunday I picked up prescriptions and got a quick haircut. My mother had been a hairdresser. I tipped this hairdresser all the cash I had in my pocket for trimming my ends straight between sobs. Her boyfriend’s baby brother had died from a brain aneurysm the year before.

Some people survive brain aneurysms. Neil Young did. Bill Berry did. Months later Teri Garr would. Age and general wellness help contribute to many recoveries, and my mother was in perfect health, a spry 60-year-old whose buoyancy and pep could verge on being just plain annoying.

But she had seized in the kitchen. She had seized in the ambulance. She had seized in the helicopter. She had been placed in a medically induced coma to keep her body from killing itself before a rock-star surgeon could be flown in from his now-aborted trip to Italy.

Poor outcome. Paralysis. Permanent disability. Six aneurysms all lying in wait. Just five minutes earlier, and she would have still been driving. She could have killed someone. She never would have recovered from that.

While Mom celebrated Mother’s Day unconscious in a hospital bed, I faced a salon mirror and the ugly reality that my mother was better off dead.

*****

To be continued.

Tagged as: brain aneurysm, family, Mom, mother's day