Within You -part 2
The bank where I worked was a small institution where everybody knew each other. The working environment was great. It was my fourth year there and I was hoping to get promoted in a few months. My direct superior, a woman called Danneel, was only two years older than me and a great boss; patient, funny, always polite and delicate when she asked me to do something or to revise a paper I had given her. I felt good there.
Jensen never visited me at work. The rehabilitation Center was almost half an hour away, and that was without counting the occasional traffic problems. We had once tried to meet halfway for lunch and ended up spending ten minutes together eating in a rush without being able to exchange more than a few words. On the other hand, our working hours were approximately the same and we left at the same time in the morning. There was still plenty of time to see each other.
All of this to say, I knew something was either very wrong or very good when I heard a knock at my door and my husband’s voice. It was April the fourth, around ten in the morning. I noticed in my agenda.
“Come in.”
“The receptionist said it was okay,” Jensen said as an introduction. He was smiling, looking excited, short of breath. His hair was mussed up, his t-shirt full of wrinkles and by the old jeans and sneakers he was wearing, it was evident he wasn’t coming from work.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m great,” Jensen said, circling my desk and dragging my chair back, then turning it so I was facing him.
“I’m pregnant,” he added, bending to kiss me.
“Are you serious?” I didn’t think it would work so soon. To be honest, I was dumbstruck, like it had come out of nowhere, like it hadn’t been the sole focus of Jensen’s life ever since we got married. Life is strange like that sometimes.
Jensen showed me a pregnancy test similar to the one I had found in the trashcan, except this time, there was a little plus sign in the plastic window. I took it between my fingers and stared at it, probably longer than I thought because when I looked back at Jensen, he was chewing on his bottom lip and observing me with wide, anxious eyes.
“You’re not happy?” He asked softly.
“Yes, fuck, sorry, of course I am. Guess I’m in shock. I thought it would take longer and… Seriously, there’s a tiny thing inside of you? That we made together?”
Jensen nodded, his bright smile returning. I was happy, maybe more to see him happy than because I was going to be a father. Not that I didn’t want to. I still just had to process the reality of it all.
I got up and took him in my arms, lifting him off the floor. He laughed, his head tilted back, and I remember thinking how young he was -not even twenty-three years old, and that he seemed younger, like some of the innocence from his childhood remained with him. Maybe it was a piece he’d protected through the years, intact, while he lost everything else in the foster care system. I don’t know, but yes, it was a happy moment. When I put him down, he swayed on his feet and I kept both my arms wrapped around his waist.
“I'm having trouble believing it too,” he admitted.
“Those tests, are they really reliable?”
“99% accurate. False negatives can happen. False positives are almost impossible… But you know, just to be sure…”
Jensen rummaged through the bag he was carrying and took out two other tests, blushing. They were obviously from different brands. One was electronic, and the little plus sign was flashing on the digital screen. The other had two parallel lines.
“All positives,” Jensen told me. “I went a little crazy.”
“Naw, you just acted like I would have,” I replied. He knew how I was, always double checking everything, just to be sure. We all have our quirks.
“So yeah, we need to find an androcologist, and we… Should we wait before we tell everyone?”
“Why?”
“Usually, well… some people wait for the end of the first trimester which is like… three months, because the probabilities of a miscarriage are higher then.”
“We’ll do what you want,” I told him because, knowing Jensen, he wouldn’t be able to hold out that long.
I was right. But he did hold on longer than I expected. Two weeks later, when I arrived home after work, I saw Felicia’s car parked in the driveway. Felicia was still in college, completing a degree in psychology at the Portsmouth campus of Southern New Hampshire University. It wasn’t that long of a ride between the two cities, but she was living on campus and there wasn’t a week that passed without her visiting, or Jensen going to visit her. Felicia and Jensen were really close, and I knew they shared a past I would never truly understand. Maybe I was a little jealous, but I adored Felicia almost as much as Jensen did. She was a smart, active red-head who was a dangerously good volley-ball player, despite her short frame. She and Jensen shared a common passion for online games. They would log onto League of Legends and play together for hours. Jensen had been addicted when we first met, but since I didn’t share his interest, he had gradually reduced his frequency until he only played if Felicia was online, or if she was with him. Those were the only moments when Jensen used a language I can’t even repeat here. I’m no innocent, but I guess you would have to be there to understand. It was funny, hearing my oh-so-sweet husband swear like a trooper at his computer.
This time, though, they weren’t playing. Of course not. By the way Felicia ran toward me and threw herself in my arms, stuttering out congratulations between kisses, I knew Jensen hadn't been able to resist. He stood in the kitchen, his arms crossed defensively, but a smile quirked up his lips. “She guessed, I didn’t say anything,” he protested, blushing. I loved it when he blushed. Always have. Still do.
“This is so awesome, I’m going to be an aunt and your kid will be astonishingly beautiful!” Felicia cooed, finally letting me go to hang herself from my left arm.
“Of course he will.”
“Or she,” Jensen said. “Could be a girl.”
I shook my head, just to mess with him. “Naw, we’re having a little boy. And now that you’ve broken the three months rule, can I call my parents?”
This whole pregnancy thing was starting to grow on me. I’m not saying I didn’t want a kid, but it was so intense for Jensen I couldn’t help but feel like maybe, I wasn’t reacting properly. Why wasn’t I as excited, as enthusiastic? Every night when we went to bed, Jensen talked about the baby, and what he -or she- would look like, and what color he wanted to paint the room, and what kind of delivery he would prefer. I told him one night that maybe he should save some conversations for later, because we had nine months to go and, for now, the baby was barely a spermatozoid without a tail in the middle of an uvula. He laughed and agreed that yes, maybe he was overreacting, but I saw the shadow of hurt darkening his eyes for a second and I felt bad about it. Jensen wouldn’t reproach me for it. It took a lot for him to say he was mad about something. That was one of the issues we’d faced since we started going out together. Jensen was so scared of screwing up our relationship, or any relationship, really, that most of the time, he preferred to just let it go: even if someone was an asshole to him, he brushed it off instead of protesting. I could -more or less- take it when he acted that way with friends, but not with me. I’m not perfect, I never pretended to be, and when I did something upsetting, I wanted him to tell me, to react, to protest. Sometimes, we argued because I knew he was mad at me, deep down, but wouldn’t tell me. It was important to me that he understood we were equals, that I loved him just as much as he loved me and that he had the right to speak his mind, even if I wouldn’t necessarily like it. He had made some progress, but his extremely compliant nature would always be a part of him.
The night following my comment about saving it for the upcoming months, Jensen was reading silently, and I knew he was refraining from speaking about the pregnancy. The way his face lit up when I asked him if he had any ideas for boy's and girl's names… I knew I had hurt him, and that I was already forgiven.
It might seem like the man I’m describing isn’t real, too sweet and perfect to exist except in the eyes of his loving husband. But no, that really is Jensen. And there isn’t a day that goes by without me realizing how lucky I am to be loved by someone like him.
We ended up announcing the pregnancy to my parents during a Skype session, which allowed me to see my mom losing her shit and jumping everywhere while my father shook his head slowly, rolling his eyes at us. Soon after, my sister Megan knew, and Ty, and Gil, and then our friends and our work colleagues. Jensen was six weeks along when he got anxious about it all of a sudden. Maybe he should have kept his mouth shut, maybe it really was bad luck to announce a pregnancy so early? Luckily for him, he has the most down to earth husband in the world, and I quickly and efficiently reassured him.
_____
Jensen’s pregnancy was a perfect one: no morning sickness, no tiredness, a small but perfect baby bump that rounded his normally flat stomach at around the end of the third month. He was healthy and young and full of energy. Carriers sometimes experience difficult pregnancies with pelvis pain that can become debilitating. Not Jensen. He put on weight gradually, just the right amount according to the charts. His due date was October 30. He was excited about possibly giving birth on Halloween.
Our androcologist was a woman in her early thirties named Genevieve Cortese, and I liked her immediately. She understood how important this pregnancy was to Jensen and she was fantastic with him, always reassuring, always ready to answer his never-ending questions. On the 20th of May, we had an ultrasound planned for Jensen’s 18th week of pregnancy, the one where Dr. Cortese would be able to determine if we were going to have a boy or a girl. Jensen was a nervous mess. That morning, I joked that I wanted to wait to know the gender until the baby was born and he snapped at me, which never happened. This was important for him.
Dr. Cortese knew that too, and she decided to start the appointment with the sonogram instead of asking her usual questions and doing the physical exam. She helped Jensen relax by making him do breathing exercises. He was so eager to know and see our baby on screen it was difficult to get through to him, but she did.
I was excited too. The first ultrasound Dr. Cortese had done was early in the pregnancy, and it was difficult to see anything other than a shrimp with a giant head, and only if I squinted at the sonogram screen really hard. Of course, we had heard the baby’s heartbeat, but I’m sure everyone who’s ever been pregnant understands how the mid-pregnancy ultrasound is important and exciting.
We saw our baby, we saw it sucking its thumb, moving its tiny legs. Jensen held my hand so hard I could feel my heart beating in my palm. Everything was perfect, the baby’s dimensions, the location of the placenta, the umbilical cord. It didn’t take long for Dr. Cortese to find the baby’s gender. It spread its legs like it wanted to accommodate us. “You guys are going to have a little girl,” she told us, smiling at the both of us.
I’m the one who burst out crying. I was as surprised as Jensen by my reaction. Not that I preferred a girl to a boy, it just made everything so much more real. I wasn’t the one carrying our baby and it was sometimes difficult for me to relate to Jensen’s intense emotions, but during that ultrasound, I, for the first time, could picture myself holding a tiny baby in my arms. My daughter.
Jensen raised himself up on his elbows and stretched one hand to grab my neck, forcing me to bend down so he could hug me. “We’re gonna have a little girl,” he murmured in my ear.
We were.
For me, from the beginning of the pregnancy until the end of June, everything was perfect. I was happy, Jensen was happy, more so than I'd ever seen him, which was saying something because generally, Jensen was an easy-going, happy guy. He was one of the few people who had learned to enjoy the simple things, to find the silver lining in every situation, but Jensen pregnant? He was twice as gorgeous, energetic, enthusiast. He looked like he’d finally found a missing piece of himself, and his happiness was contagious. Then again, maybe that’s just me, embellishing my memories, because of the hell we would soon go through. I don’t mind. Every moment of those first six months deserves to be cherished. I’m being overly emotional about it, but really, who can blame me? It’s strange, thinking back about those first six months. I can’t really remember anything going wrong, but maybe my brain is only trying to compensate for what happened next.
_____
I remember the day it all went wrong as clearly as if it just happened. It was the 1st of July and we were working in the baby’s nursery. Jensen and Felicia painted the walls while I tried to assemble the crib. It was still early, maybe nine or ten in the morning. The day was shaping up to be a hot one and we thought it would be better to do as much work as possible before noon. The color we had picked was a soft, grayish blue. Jensen wanted the nursery to be a calming environment. The furniture was white, as well as the curtains. We planned on wallpapering one of the walls with a sheep pattern. Jensen liked sheep, he had already bought several stuffed ones, and he had chosen the wallpaper early on.
Jensen was wearing paternity jeans and one of my old t-shirts, not wanting to get paint on the few paternity pieces he owned -those clothes aren’t cheap. The t-shirt was white, with a blue boat drawn on it -I don’t even know where it came from, but I remember how tight it was, moulding to Jensen’s stomach so that the boat was misshapen and stretched. Jensen had a blue bandana tied around his head, his face was full of freckles because of a day spent outside earlier that week. He was in a good mood, joking with Felicia while painting the edges of the room. She already had a large paint splotch on her cheek, some in her hair, and kept saying that we were crazy to let her hold a brush. I was seated on the ground, carefully reading the instructions on how to assemble the crib before getting started. Music played in the background on the radio. T-Rex. Children of the Revolution. Felicia sang along.
Jensen was facing the wall, painting the corner, when he stopped suddenly. He turned toward me, very slowly. His face was white as a sheet.
“Hey, you okay?” I asked, not really concerned yet. Felicia was still singing from the top of her lungs.
“My head,” Jensen said in a strange, detached voice. “It hurts.”
I got up to walk toward him. I didn’t like how dark his eyes looked. His pupils were fully dilated. It seemed abnormal. “Maybe it’s the smell of the paint,” I said.
“It’s strange… I was okay and then… fuck it hurts.”
Jensen’s hands shook. I took the brush and paint container out of his hands and put them on the floor, then I slid an arm around his waist. “Come on, maybe you should lie down for a while. We ran so many errands yesterday, you must be exhausted.”
Jensen didn’t move. He winced. “God, it’s like… I don’t feel so good, Jay.”
“I know, come on, let’s get you out of here.”
“Jen, are you okay?”
Felicia had stopped singing and was staring at us. I didn’t answer, neither did Jensen. I dragged him along, but it was like he didn’t know how to walk anymore. He hit the paint canister with his left foot and it spilled all over the protective sheets that were on the floor. “I’m… s-s-suh-sorry,” he stuttered, not even looking down.
“No worries, I’ll clean it up,” Felicia told him in an over-enthusiastic voice, so false it made me cringe. She looked at me with wide eyes, clearly worried.
We made it out of the room and a few step into the corridor when Jensen stopped following me. “Oh my god, my head, Jay, something is wrong, my head,” he moaned as his knees buckled.
I was still holding him and we both went down. I helped him lie back against the wall. Violent shivers coursed through his body and his now paler face was covered in sweat. Tears flowed down his cheeks as he tried to grab me. “It hurts, it hurts so bad make it stop Jay please…”
“Okay, alright, try to breathe for me Jensen.”
By that time, my idea that the smell of the paint and tiredness were making him ill quickly flew out the window. He looked like he was in so much pain, confused and terrified, that panic rose from the pit of my stomach. That’s when his eyes rolled back. I grabbed his face. “Jensen? Jen! Talk to me, please, hey, Jensen!”
His head fell to the right and he started vomiting, his body convulsing, but he wasn’t really there, he was just letting it happen. There was vomit on me, and him, and on the floor, and he was choking, dry-heaving, sucking huge, difficult gulps of air.
“Jared? What’s wrong with him?”
Felicia stood next to me, and I wondered where the hell she'd come from. Her question snapped me from my immobility.
“Call an ambulance,” I snapped at her.
“What's happening to-“
“I don’t know, fuck, call an ambulance now!” I yelled at her.
She ran. Jensen’s vomiting had come to an end in the meantime. His body was lax, his eyes open to mere slits, his expression frozen in a grimace of pain. I took off my shirt and wiped the vomit off his face the best as I could, then I laid him down on his left side, something I vaguely remembered from a high school first aid class. I kept saying his name. Jensen wouldn’t answer, only letting out small moans. I was so scared. I wanted to shake him awake, yell at him, bring him back with the sole power of my will. I don’t know how many minutes passed like that. Felicia came back, speaking quickly into the phone. And then she was speaking to me.
“Is he conscious? Jared!”
“What?”
“They want to know if he’s conscious.”
“No, I don’t think so, he doesn’t answer, he doesn’t move…”
I was petting Jensen’s hair. His bandana had fallen, I don’t know at which moment. He blinked and, suddenly, he was back, looking straight at me.
“It hurts,” he whispered.
“I know baby, it’s okay, we called an ambulance, you’re gonna be alright.”
Tears started flowing from his eyes and he moved his right hand in the air. “The baby,” he croaked.
He was trying to touch his belly. I grabbed his hand and put it on his stomach. He sighed. “Jay, the baby,” he repeated, and his eyes rolled back once again.
He didn’t answer me after that. When the paramedics arrived, Felicia was hysterical. I was still crouched near Jensen on the ground, touching him, speaking nonsense about how he would be okay, how much I loved him, and that he shouldn’t scare me like this.
They got me out of the way when they saw Jensen's condition. They worked quickly, snapping at each other, getting the oxygen, taking his vital signs. If I had yet to realize how serious it was, that was the last proof I needed.
I wasn’t allowed in the ambulance. We followed. Felicia drove.
I lost all sense of time. We waited in a small room apart from the waiting room of the ER. Ty joined us, then Gil. Felicia kept repeating what had happened, like a broken record, Gil sat, completely immobile, and Ty tried to calm Felicia down. I think I was pacing. I didn't speak, I just wanted someone -anyone wearing scrubs - to tell me that it was alright, that we’d panicked for nothing and that Jensen had just had some pregnancy faintness or his blood sugar level was low or… anything really, because I already knew, on some level, that it was way more serious than that. Jensen’s vacant expression wouldn’t leave my mind and it hurt, physically, to imagine what he must have gone through and how much pain he'd been in.
I never thought about calling my parents. I wasn’t really there. Later, Ty told me we waited an hour before we had any news. The doctor who came to see us was a neurologist, which was already bad news. He looked like some kind of nobleman from the last century, almost as tall as me with a grey beard and a mass of curly grey hair. His name was Tim Omundson, and we would have the opportunity to become very well acquainted with each other, but I didn’t know any of that at the time, I didn’t even ask him for his name. “What’s going on?” Ty asked, and then my world crumbled.
Dr. Omundson told us Jensen had suffered an aneurism rupture.
I knew a brain aneurism was something bad happening in the brain, I knew it could be fatal, but that was about it.
“Are you fucking kidding me; he’s twenty-three years old!” Ty practically yelled, which made Felicia burst into tears all over again.
“Wait, wait, I… I don’t understand,” I said, pushing Ty so that I could be face to face with the neurologist. “Can I go see him? Is he okay?”
“He’s… not okay,” Dr. Omundson told me with so much compassion in his eyes it was hard not to look away. “He’s undergoing a delicate procedure right now. Please, Mr…”
“Padalecki.”
“Please, let me explain. An aneurism is like a bubble filled with blood in the brain. People don’t know it’s there because it doesn’t have any symptoms. For some, it will never be discovered, and they’ll go through their life without even realizing it’s there. But in some cases, the aneurism ruptures, and that’s what happened to Jensen.”
We were all speaking at once, asking questions, even Gil, who'd been silent until then. He was generally quiet and withdrawn due to a really rough upbringing.
“What we need to do now is to stop the blood flow before there is any more damage. It’s a procedure called coiling and that’s what is happening right now. Jensen is in surgery.”
“Oh my god, is it, are they like… opening his skull?” Felicia asked, and it made me sick, imagining it. I think that’s when my knees buckled, because the next thing I knew Ty and Gil were sitting me on a chair.
“We are not opening his skull. The neurosurgeon is inserting a catheter through one of his arteries. He’ll be able to reach the aneurysm and insert small platinum coils that will enable the blood to clot and prevent the aneurysm from reforming.”
“So that’s a good thing? What… what about the baby? Is the surgery dangerous for her?” I asked in a thin voice that sounded alien to me.
Dr. Omundson lowered his eyes. When he spoke again, it was in a soft, sad voice. “There is danger for your baby. We’ll get to that in a minute. First, what you need to understand is-“
“What?” By then I was hysterical. “We’ll get to that in a minute? We’re talking about my daughter, do you realize what you’re saying?”
“Mr. Padalecki, your husband is dying.”
The doctor’s voice resonated in the waiting room. I couldn’t process the words, even though everyone around must have, because Gil and Felicia fell into each other’s arms and Ty shoved his head into his hands.
“No he’s not, you said he was in surgery,” I protested.
I knew I wasn’t making any sense. But I didn’t want to make sense. I wanted to be home with my husband painting our little girl’s room.
“Surgery to save his life, but there is no guarantee it is going to work. I’m sorry to be so direct, Mr. Padalecki, but when your husband arrived at the E.R. he was already unresponsive. The damage done by the aneurysm can’t be undone. We can only try to stop the bleeding. I have to be frank: he might not survive the surgery, and even if he does, there is no guarantee he’s going to wake up. And if he wakes up, we don’t know how incapacitated he will be.”
I started yelling. Screaming at him to shut up. And then I had another blackout, found myself up and grabbing Dr. Omundson’s white coat, all the while yelling. Ty pulled me back. I was crying. He held me.
It’s hard to explain how you react when you receive news that devastating. You would have to go through something similar to understand. There are all these feelings that crush you, and you know, on some level, what is happening, but your brain refuses to process it completely. It’s like feeling numb and oversensitive at the same time. It’s so overwhelming, so alien to you, it’s hard to even remember.
And I don’t really want to remember that horrible day. Sadly for me, it’s engraved in my brain forever.
When I was calm enough, Dr. Omundson wanted to talk to me in private. I said no, because Jensen’s family was so important to him, their opinion mattered to me. Of course, it was about the baby. There was a possibility that the trauma of the aneurysm and the subsequent surgery would either trigger early labor or that my little girl would die in the womb. There was no way of telling, and in the process of trying to save Jensen’s life, nothing could be done about it. We would have to wait and see. Then, the terrible question came: Jensen was twenty-four weeks along. If labor couldn’t be stopped, the baby would be severely premature. Even with highly specialized care, there would be serious repercussions for the baby’s life, from long term breathing problems to severe mental impairment.
And I was asked to decide whether or not, if Jensen was to go into labour, and if the baby was still alive when it was born, if I wanted her to be saved or not.
I couldn’t make that choice.
This baby was everything to Jensen -hell, she was my daughter too, but what if he got better and woke up with a flat stomach, asked for his baby, what would I tell him? On the other hand, wasn’t that selfish of me, condemning a child to a life of misery because I wanted her father to wake up and be able to cradle her in his arms?
That’s what I told Dr. Omundson, that he couldn’t ask that of me. Ty asked the question I couldn’t bring myself to ask.
“Is being pregnant worsening Jensen’s condition? Would he have better chance if he wasn’t?”
I waited, holding my breath.
“No, not at this point. You don’t have to make a decision right now, Mr. Padalecki. I just want you to know that if it happens, you will have to.”
Jensen and the baby both survived the surgery. He was immediately transferred to the intensive care unit. The neurosurgeon came to see us, showed us some kind of x-ray of Jensen’s head with darker thin lines zigzagging to join at a darker point, which was, apparently, the aneurysm. The surgery was a success, but the surgeon insisted on the fact that there had been some bleeding and that it would take time before the blood was absorbed through the brain, and even more time to assess the damage, if Jensen survived. We were told the next twenty-four hours would be critical, that for now, Jensen was still heavily sedated so his neurological state couldn’t be evaluated.
I was like an empty shell. The hurt was somewhere at the back of my mind and I couldn’t reach it. I was allowed fifteen minutes in the ICU, alone, given the critical state of my husband. I followed a nurse who explained to me that Jensen was on breathing support, and that there would be an impressive number of machines and tubes around him. She told me it would be a shock, but that I could sit next to him and hold his hand.
I have to admit that my first reaction when I entered the glass cubicle was the urge to turn around and run toward the exit. I couldn’t recognize my husband, it couldn’t be him. He looked like a wax doll, immobile and lax, except for his chest rising mechanically with the artificial lung machine. His face was swollen, to the point he was almost unrecognizable. I sat there, shaking. The nurse was still with me. She put a hand on my shoulder. “Touch him. Talk to him. He might be unconscious, but it doesn’t mean he can’t hear you.”
I nodded and took Jensen’s hand in mine. It was cold and dry. I pressed it. I don’t know what I hoped for, maybe a small jerk, or his fingers fighting my grip, but it didn’t happen. I wanted to touch his belly, but there was some kind of monitor strapped on it, and my hand hovered a few centimeters away.
“That's to monitor of the baby’s vitals,” the nurse explained to me, pointing at one of the screen. “See, that’s its heartbeat. If Mr. Ackles has a contraction, this will also tell us.”
“How is she?” I asked.
“She?”
“It’s a girl.”
“She is doing okay. Her heartbeat is a little slow, which is normal, considering the anesthesia. You can touch his belly, just not directly on the monitor.”
I did. I had one hand covering Jensen’s, the other rubbing the side of his belly. The nurse left.
“I love you,” I said. “Come back to me, Jen.”
I repeated it again and again, until the nurse came back to tell me it was time to leave. I kissed my husband’s swollen cheek. It didn’t feel like it usually did.
My parents arrived from Richardson early the next morning. I hadn’t left the hospital, neither had Ty. Gil had forced Felicia to leave with him so that she could rest for a few hours. She was a shadow of herself, had cried so much it was like there wasn’t anything left in her. Ty and me, we didn’t talk much. Every four hours, we could go see Jensen for fifteen minutes. There weren’t any changes. The anesthesia was starting to wear off, but he was still unconscious. We were told that it was normal after a trauma to the brain, and that we would have to wait for a couple of days to really evaluate Jensen’s awakening state.
I collapsed into my mother’s arms when she and my father entered the waiting room of the ICU. I cried, for a long time. My sister had stayed in Texas. She was only sixteen. My brother was taking care of her. I didn’t want to hear anything about him. When mom mentioned Jeff, I made a scene. My big brother and I weren’t on speaking terms. As easy as my coming out had been with my parents, Jeff hadn’t accepted it. He’d changed his attitude toward me, until I had gotten angry and accused him of being homophobic. We had fought. We didn’t speak after that, and for some reason, just the mention of his name got me going. I needed an outlet for my anger. I don’t remember the rant I went into, except my father had to come and take me away from my mother who was standing there, in a shocked state. I was a wreck. I wanted Jensen. Awake. I wanted our baby to be okay. I didn’t understand how this could have happened to us.
In the afternoon, Dr. Omundson came to see us. We were all there. Felicia and Gil had come back around lunch time, both pale and silent.
Jensen’s condition was stabilizing, the neurologist told us. He had made it through the first twenty-four hours, which was good news. He was still unresponsive, and we would have to be patient, but the fact that he had survived this long was a good sign.
My parents took me back home so I could take a shower and maybe sleep a little. I followed without protesting. I was so exhausted I didn’t even feel awake. It was a shock to find the house in the same state I had left it the day before. I went into the nursery, saw the blue paint dried on the wall, the mess on the floor, and I cried, again. My mom forced me into a shower and then into bed. I slept, though not for long. When I woke, everything had been cleaned up. It didn’t make me feel any better. I just wanted to go back to the hospital, to see Jensen, to be with him and our baby. My dad forced me to eat a little, and I complied. Everything tasted of cardboard. Strange, what random memories your brain decides to remember so clearly.
The next two days are like a foggy movie in my mind, though. Most of the time was spent in the ICU waiting room. I was surrounded by members of my family and Jensen’s, they switched, maybe even taking shifts, but I wasn’t aware of it. I was just waiting for the next visit, the next chance to take my husband’s hand, to pet his hair, and rub his stomach, speaking to him, and my baby, pleading for them to come back to me. As for the rest, it’s vague.
Jensen’s neurological state was assessed forty-eight hours after his surgery. There had been some prior evaluations but they were tainted by the post-surgical state. After forty-eight hours, if he was going to wake up from the surgery, he should have done it. He didn’t. Dr. Omundson talked to me about the Glasgow Coma Scale and its different stages. I had no idea there were actual stages. For me, it was either awake and talking, or in a coma. As it turned out, there was a lot of in-between. Jensen reacted to pain and showed some reflexive movement, but that was all. He wasn’t brain dead, which is the deepest form of coma, but he was unconscious, didn’t react to voices or manipulation, and had no sleep-wake cycles. It wasn’t good. He was stable, the bleeding had been controlled, but if he remained in that comatose state more than two weeks, the prognosis wasn’t good. To be honest, it's much more elaborate and complicated than this, but those are the essentials. I asked if it did any good when I touched him, when I talked to him. The neurologist said nobody knew for sure, but there were studies that showed a higher percentage of recovery for coma patients who had been stimulated. It was enough for me. I decided right then that Jensen would wake up, and that I would be there when he did. I asked if I could have more than fifteen minutes every four hours with him in the ICU. There was little Dr. Omundson could do, the rules were strict: there were other patients and the nurses were busy. However, if the next twenty-four hours showed that Jensen was stable, he could be transferred to the intermediate care neurological unit and I would have easier access.
As for the baby, she seemed not to have suffered from Jensen’s aneurysm rupture or the surgery that had followed. Jensen showed no signs of early labour. Dr. Omundson was working with our androcologist. Dr. Cortese had looked devastated by what had happened to Jensen. We had a meeting in private, and we talked for a long time. Some of the drugs that were given to Jensen could affect our baby’s development, or trigger an early labor, but there was no way around it. Jensen’s life hung in the balance and he needed to receive the proper care. Dr. Cortese told me there were some cases where mothers or carriers had given birth while in a comatose state. That part, I didn’t want to think about. Because there were still three months to go, and I was certain Jensen would be awake by then. I needed to believe it.
Two weeks passed. Jensen went from the ICU to the intermediate neurological care, then was transferred to the neurology ward - a huge department split in two part, the second one being reserved for comatose patients. It was a quiet place with individual rooms -all of which had windows overlooking a courtyard. For me, it looked like a place where people were cared for like plants, waiting for the day they would be unplugged, or simply wasted away. I know it wasn't fair, and I feel ashamed about it now because I got to know the staff pretty well. But at the beginning, it was so upsetting to have my husband settled there like he would stay forever that I had trouble breathing. I could be with him as long as I wanted, both night and day, which was what I did. Also, more than one of us at the time could visit him. He wasn’t plugged in to that many machines anymore. The baby monitor was gone since she was doing okay, but a nurse still checked her once a day.
While Jensen was still in intermediate care, they had taken him off the respirator, and it had gone well. It was a good sign. I knew Dr. Omundson was happy about it. I remember thinking that maybe it would change things, that once the breathing machine was out of him, he would blink and awaken, but of course, it didn’t happen. He still had three different IV lines, one of which was installed in the crook of his neck. The sensors measured his vital signs. Once a day, they would plug smaller sensors on his head and take measurements of his brain activity. He had a catheter and a diaper. When I discovered it, I had to leave and clear my head. Of course, I knew Jensen wasn’t able to take care of his most basic needs, but knowing that and seeing a twenty-three year old man wearing a diaper, are two very different things.
For the time being, Jensen was fed with an intravenous solution, but if the coma continued, they would have to use a feeding tube and, given the look on the nurse’s face when she told me about it, it wasn’t something to look forward to.
Of course, I didn’t think it would come to that. Every morning when I walked into the room, I told myself that this was the day, the day Jensen would wake up, open his eyes, look at me, and ask what the hell had happened.
I refused to consider any other options. I was always with him, leaving late in the evening and coming back before the sun was up. My parents took care of the house. Felicia spent most of her days with me because she could -she wasn’t working and college was done for the summer. Ty came right after work and stayed until the evening, Gil did the same. None of us talked much. I suppose it’s because we were scared of what the others were thinking.
Ty was heartbroken. It was difficult for me to even look at him when he sat with Jensen. He was a tough-looking man, but I knew he had a big heart and that in his mind, Jensen was his son. He didn’t show much emotion, didn’t talk much, but one day, as I was coming back from a coffee run, I heard him speak. We were both alone with Jensen that evening. It hadn’t been a good day. Jensen had run a low grade fever and it had worried everyone, from the nurses to the doctors. They’d given him antibiotics while waiting for the blood test results. His fever had broken around five in the afternoon.
Hearing Ty’s voice, I froze. I didn’t want to interrupt him, and even though I felt like a voyeur, I couldn’t leave either.
“… you’re my boy, my courageous, wonderful boy. Remember how hard it was when you first came to live with me, son? You didn’t want to get attached, you didn’t want to speak with Felicia or Gil. You tried so hard to be tough. I knew you weren’t, not really. You needed to feel like you belonged. I saw you change over the months, Jensen. I saw you open up and smile and… It took time before you really believed I wouldn’t get rid of you, but after that I saw who you really were, a sweet, intelligent boy without an ounce of nastiness in him. It’s so unfair what’s happening to you, boy. I can’t…”
Ty stopped. I heard a loud, hiccupping sound, and I knew he was crying.
“… I’ll be here every day, you hear me? I’ll be right here with you. There are people who love you, Jensen, people who want you back. Please.”
After that, I did step away because I was crying, and I knew if Ty was as well, he didn’t want anyone to witness it.
My father left ten days after their arrival, but my mother stayed. She was retired and she didn’t want to leave me alone. She came to the hospital with me and made sure I had clean clothes, that I was eating -even though it felt like I would never be hungry again- and taking care of myself, to a modest degree. To me, she was just a moving figure. They all were. My focus was entirely on Jensen and the baby. I didn’t even know if I still had a job, if the bills were getting paid. I didn’t care.
Part 3
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