Tuesday, September 25th – The hours of the night blur into day. I have no memory of what happens in the emergency room, other than that Tom is there. I tell him he has to call Amy, my publisher, that I can’t bear to tell her myself what’s happened. We are supposed to be in Atlanta on the weekend, at the Southern Independent Booksellers Conference, an important event for my novel.

I don’t know when I leave the emergency room. At some point I am told that I’m in ICU. They attach me to an automatic blood pressure gauge. Whenever it starts up, it feels as if it will cut my arm in half. I still have a headache. Hospital personnel keep asking me if this is the worst headache I have ever had. “No. It isn‘t much different from normal headaches in the past.” They want to put me on a morphine drip. Tom cautions them that I don’t like strong pain medications. They try a slight drip. My head continues to hurt and I am sick at my stomach. Eventually, they halt the drip and go with Tylenol. Much better!

The first thing I notice when I’m in a room is the clock on the wall. It puzzles me. I see it clearly, even with my visual loss. I see the hands and the numbers but I cannot discern what time it is. (The next day, I will re-teach myself to tell time. To do this, I mentally go back to grade school and those “big hands” and “little hands” and what each tells us. That’s all it takes and I gain a small insight into how people like newsman Bob Wodruff, injured in Iraq, reprogram their minds. The brain absorbs information immediately. What I will continue to think about the next few days are the soldiers with terrible head wounds from Iraq. Although their situations are so much worse than mine, I feel a new empathy for them.)

I am surprised the first morning to find I have a male nurse. I have not been in a hospital since my children were born. Something new has been added! And I will quickly decide that it’s a very good addition. During the week, I will have five male nurses: 3 Davids, Rick and Alan. I fall in love with each of them: they are wonderful young men, with that special mix of strength and gentleness. Like angels, the real kind, who in biblical literature are all male.

Wednesday, September 26th through Monday October 1st – One day runs into the next in a hospital. The door to my room constantly revolves with nurses and aides and five or six neurologists and brain surgeons (“standing by,” the surgeons tell me, in case they’re needed. Fortunately, they aren’t.) I am told by one neurologist that if I had to have a stroke, this was the best place in the brain to have it. The bleeding is walled off there, he explains. I am told that the cause of the stroke is probably high blood pressure and they are putting me on all kinds of medication. I’m told I’m on anti-seizure medicine. My primary neurologist explains that a brain injury can cause seizures, although I may not ever have seizures. I ask him if I should take the medication before I have any seizures or wait to see if I will. He decides it’s best to wait and that he will take me off the medication. I am told that the stroke has damaged my left peripheral vision and that I have what is called a “wide field cut" in my vision. I do my own experiments to see what I can see on the left side. I discover that very dramatically after several days when I get out of bed to go to the bathroom and the bathroom door opens suddenly in my face, as if by magic. I discover that Tom, who was seated at the foot of the bed, has gotten up to open the door for me, passing by my left side. I never saw him. After that, no one has to convince that I shouldn’t drive, at least for awhile. But I am also told, that some of the lost peripheral vision may come back. And that I can probably be trained to drive again.

Slowly the headache goes away. I notice that scrawled on the bulletin board in my room is a short motivational message to my care team, that “excellence means no more headaches.” When I complain about the food to one of the nurses named David, he tells me that the chefs are from Johnson & Wales. Then he laughs and says he was a cook before he became a nurse. I ask him where and he names two of Charlotte’s best restaurants. I’m impressed. But he says he loves nursing. When I do my walk down the hallway, he talks about his two-year-old daughter who kept him awake all night. Another time, we talk about Northern Virginia where we have both lived. He tells me that his brother has recently died of war wounds from Iraq and now rests in Arlington Cemetery. He says he would like to read my novel. When Tom brings me one, he is off that day and I am going home. I leave him a copy at the nurses’ station.

Through the week, I realize how many people are aware of my situation. I have never before had a serious illness. Now I receive phone calls and cards and flowers and messages sent through others. My daughter, Carol, who is about to deliver her first child in Kentucky, wants to fly to Charlotte. I tell her no, to stay put, we will communicate by phone. I talk with old and dear friends. I experience myself at the center of an incredible outpouring of concern. I will learn that during my illness I have been the beneficiary of thoughts and prayers from across the country and as far as my former grad school roommate in England and my nephew in Tonga. There are angels everywhere and I even receive call from a real angel, well, kind of real, my friend actor Leon Rippy, who plays the angel Earl on the TNT television series “Saving Grace.” Leon and his wife Carol tell me that the cast and crew of the show are praying for me. I know I should accept all of these expressions as what people “do” in times of crisis. I am, after all, a Methodist minister’s wife. But I have never been easy with religious language. I am a born questioner. How do I reach God? What is prayer? Does it really work? Yet I am deeply moved by these words of caring, and through the week, I feel an incredible sense of calm and well-being. [I will ask myself later if that is what beta-blockers do? Or was something far more profound at work? One thought about that: I continue to take beta-blockers, but am not nearly so calm in the weeks since the hospital!]

As Sunday approaches, my doctors talk about releasing me. One neurologist hesitates. He says he is concerned that blood pressure may not be the cause of the stroke. He worries, because of the particular place in the brain where the bleeding occurred, that there might be what he calls an “underlying cause,” none of them very good – aneurism, tumor or a tangle of arteries. He wants to do an MRI. I sense that others of my doctors think differently or at least question an MRI at this point. I’m not concerned that they question each other. How else do scientists get at what’s true? I learn on Sunday that I will have the MRI that afternoon. Am I claustrophobic, they ask. “No,” I tell them and later tell the technician I was not bothered by the weird noises. “My son is a drummer,” I explain. Finally, the neurologist returns. He says that I will have to have another MRI when the bleeding in my brain has been fully reabsorbed into my body and he can assess the damage more clearly. “But for now,” he says, “I see no other problems."

I can go home.