Within You -part 3
It was July 17th and it hadn’t rained for days. It was hot and despite the fact that Jensen’s room rarely received direct sunlight, I was sweating, even while wearing a thin t-shirt and a pair of shorts. Jensen wasn’t too hot. He never was. He tended to be cold and needed to be kept warm, because he didn’t move much, except for when the physical therapist came to manipulate his body for his muscles not to cramp and suffer from atrophy.
I remember it was early afternoon. I was sucking on a popsicle and rubbing Jensen’s stomach, discussing out loud what name we should give our daughter. We didn’t have time to talk about it seriously before and I liked to imagine how he would have answered me. I liked the classic names that never went out of style, like Sarah, or Mary, and I was pretty sure Jensen would want something more unique. I was kind of having fun with myself, and the Jensen who was alive and well in my head. I don’t think I was doing well, psychologically, but hey, is that surprising?
I'd developed the habit, early on, of leaving one of my hands on Jensen’s stomach, because then I would be able to feel when our little girl moved. It was always very emotional whenever she kicked or pushed against my hand, she was so alive while Jensen was so immobile, so far away. I would get close and speak directly to Jensen’s belly, because I wanted our daughter to feel like I was there with them. That afternoon, she was quiet, and I was lost in my blabbering about names so the sudden movement I felt took me by surprise. It wasn’t her usual soft push, it was way stronger, and when I lifted my head I realized it wasn’t her.
Jensen’s eyes were open. He was breathing almost convulsively, like he couldn’t get enough air. I froze.
I think my popsicle fell to the floor.
“Jensen?”
He didn’t move, but his eyes… slowly, oh so slowly, searched for me, for my voice. He croaked something. I burst out crying and bent over him, took him in my arms. I must have made a lot of noise because soon, a nurse came running.
Minimal conscious state, that’s what Dr. Omundson told us later that afternoon, while I sat with Ty in another impersonal waiting room. I hadn’t wanted to leave, but there were tests to perform, a brain scan to be done, and I had so many question the waiting was torture, literally, like I could feel it in my bones, an itch, impossible to scratch.
Jensen had looked at me and said something. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t done anything other than look at me. A few minutes later, his eyes had closed, and I had lost it, shaking him by the shoulders, pleading with him to come back. It took two orderlies to get me out of the room. Even then, I was a shaking mess until Ty arrived. He’d calmed me down as much as he could.
When Tim -we were on first name basis by then- arrived, I felt like I had been holding my breath for hours. He sat in front of us and smiled.
“He’s in what we call a conscious minimal state.”
“So he’s awake?” I asked.
“It’s… more complicated than that, Jared, but before I go on, I want you to know this is good news. This is excellent news. I wasn’t expecting this. The bleeding in the brain resorbed nicely, but with an event like a ruptured aneurysm, more than sixty percent o patients die within minutes.”
“Okay, I get it, but he’s doing better, right?”
“He is.”
“Did he speak? What did the brain scan show? Can he move, does he know where he is?”
Ty put his hand on my arm. “Jay, let the doctor talk, please.”
“A minimal conscious state is the lighter state of a coma. What it means, basically, is that Jensen is… kind of conscious, even if his interactions are minimal. He’s not exactly awake. He can’t hold a conversation or speak whole sentences. He can’t feed himself, can’t control his bladder either, but he has a certain awareness of his surroundings.”
“And…?” I didn’t really understand. Was a minimal conscious state similar to being very sleepy? Was it temporary?
“Sometimes he’s going to appear to be there, all of him, sometimes he’s going to be less conscious. Minimal conscious state varies for every patient. What’s really encouraging is that most of the time, it’s a transitional state. To full awareness.”
“So he could recover, right? He will recover.”
Tim lifted one of his long-fingered hands. “We can hope. There is no absolute certainty, Jared, when it comes to brain injuries. There is so much we still don’t know. We can guess, we can go through statistics, but the truth is, each individual is unique and the way he or she will heal, or not, is as well. But what the hell, let’s be positive about this, alright? You can go see him. He was tired after all the tests and he fell asleep, but don’t worry, it’s normal.”
I asked Ty to come with me, but he said he would call the others and that I should go first. I did.
I entered my husband’s room and there he was, as immobile as before, his eyes closed, lying on his back, with the head of his bed lifted to a forty-five degree angle. Over the past two weeks, his physical appearance had changed. He had lost some weight, his skin was pale, his eyes sunken and his lips chapped, almost as pale as his skin. His hair was plastered on his head. He was shaved, but only because I did it every other day. Jensen never had much facial hair and never let it grow anyway.
I walked softly to him and lowered the bed rail so that I could sit near him. I took his hand and waited. It wasn’t long before I felt it. His fingers, moving against mine. It wasn’t much, but it was there.
“Hey, babe,” I whispered.
His eyes moved behind his eyelids. He grimaced, like it was too much, trying to open his eyes.
“You can sleep, it’s okay. I’ll be right here next to you.”
There was a gasp, and Jensen’s eyes flew open. He looked at me. He was confused, and lost, probably not entirely there.
“Hey, you. I missed you, so much.”
“Yeah,” Jensen whispered in a raw, low voice.
“How are you feeling?”
He frowned. “Yeah,” he repeated.
“Hey, it’s okay, baby. It is. Ty is here with me, he’ll come see you.”
“Yeah,” Jensen repeated for the third time.
His eyes left mine. He looked up, doing this strange thing with his fingers in my hand, like he was trying to beat the rhythm to an inaudible sound.
Then, as suddenly as he had opened his eyes, he started crying in a way he never had before. Not that Jensen had gone around crying daily ever since we’d met, but the few time it had happened, it was almost silent. Tears were quick to flow, but he used to hold back any sound except for hiccupping intakes of breath. Not this time though.
His face crumbled and he wailed, he wailed, letting out loud, raspy sobs, tears flowing down his face, clear snot coming from his nose, his lower lip trembling. I tried to guess what was wrong, I talked to him, took him into my arms as much as I could, nothing worked. It was like he couldn't hear me.
That’s the moment I started to understand what a minimal conscious state really was.
_____
Jensen wasn’t awake. A part of him was, but there weren’t moments when he would “be” completely there. It took me some time to get used to it. When he looked at me, he was looking at me. When he smiled, it was because he felt good, comfortable. The contrary was true for when he was in pain, confused, sad. That was the hardest. It was very difficult to know what he was feeling, and why. Having him wince and try to move a leg, we could help him immediately to move into another position, but when everything seemed to be okay and he started crying or moaning, it broke my heart. Not only mine. Most of the time, Fel would cry with him. Ty or my mom would take his hand, murmur soothing words, patient like only a parent could be, I guess. Gil… Gil had to leave the room. By how shy he was, and how otherwise occupied I was, I was not the one to receive his confidences. It was Ty who told me how hard it was on him. Gil had been twenty-one when Jensen moved in to live with them, and he always felt like he had a responsibility toward Jensen, like a big brother would. “He doesn’t know how to handle this,” Ty told me. “I know he’s drinking. I’m trying to keep a close eye on him ‘cause his mother was an alcoholic. I’m scared it’s going to spiral out of control.”
I wish I could have helped, but I wasn’t much better. I hadn’t gone back to work since Jensen's coma. Danneel had come to the hospital a couple of times, and she’d told me my job would be waiting for me whenever I was ready to come back. Until then, I earned no money and we didn’t have any savings. At the beginning of August, my mom sat with me and showed me the bills she’d paid. I was dumbstruck, almost shocked, to realize that even when your whole universe is collapsing, the rest of the world keeps going on as usual. It’s a feeling that everyone who’s lost someone, who’s been through a loved one’s long sickness, will understand. Sometimes, only seeing a girl and a boy walking on the sidewalk holding hands would make me so damn angry. How dare they look so carefree when I could lose everything that had ever been important for me? Silly, right? But I was mad at the world.
I apologized to my mom. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t even imagine going back to work and leaving Jensen’s side for long hours. I just couldn’t. She told me it wasn’t what she was asking of me. She told me she’d spoken with Ty and that they were taking care of it. I needed to be with Jensen and our daughter. I cried. Let’s just say, I had spilled so many tears since the beginning of July that I had stopped trying to hold them back.
My little sister was there. She’d just arrived for the week and she was crying too. I was supposed to take her to the hospital the next morning and, for a moment, I wasn’t sure Megan would be able to go through it. She hadn’t seen Jensen day after day, and I had no doubt she would be in shock.
When she went to bed that night, my mom took me aside. She had this expression that told me she wanted to talk about Jeff, and god forgive me but I just wanted to tell her to shut up.
“He called again.”
“So.”
I was cleaning the kitchen, trying not to look at her, trying not to snap. Jeff had been calling me on a regular basis ever since Jensen had been admitted, and I had never answered. I didn’t want his pity, I didn’t want anything from him. I had looked up to him ever since I was a little kid and his rejection, after my coming out, still hurt.
“Jared, people change, you know.”
“I don’t fucking care.”
I was angry. I stopped and lowered my head. I apologized.
“I know that's not true, you do care, and I know he’s the one in the wrong. You know your father and I have always supported you, but he regrets it, baby, so much. He’s really, really sorry.”
“Why? Because my pregnant husband is in a coma? Guess what, mom, I’m sorry too.”
I left the kitchen. I didn’t even want to think about Jeff. He didn’t deserve it.
I warned Megan about Jensen on the way to the hospital, early the next morning. He might say hi to her, or be completely oblivious. He made faces, sometimes moving his arms and legs, or trying to sit up, but nothing was really coordinated. He had a tube attached to his nose that fed him because he wouldn’t eat. He wasn’t conscious enough to eat. He wouldn’t drink either. It was too dangerous. They'd tried, with a straw, and even though he seemed to know what to do with it, he had choked badly on the water. “It’s like he’s in between.”
“But what… what about the baby?”
“She’s doing fine. Our androcologist comes on a regular basis to follow her development.”
We were in the elevator, and she pressed herself against the wall, like she wanted to protect herself from an invisible danger.
“But what… How will she come out?”
I snorted and took her arm to drag her out of the elevator. “How do you think? Do I need to give you the Talk?”
“That’s not what I mean, I’m not stupid. What will happen when it’s time for her to be born and Jensen is… if he’s still in that kind-of half coma?”
I stopped dead in my tracks. That was another thought I always pushed to the back of my mind and I wasn’t ready to give it a place in front. Not then.
“He will be awake. He’s getting better, Meggie. He’s going to give birth to our baby like any other person would.”
She blushed, because my tone had been harsher than I intended. I wanted to apologize, but we were walking in front of the nurse's station and I had to get the news about Jensen’s night. Annie, the head nurse, looked at Jensen’s charts to read the night staff's notes.
“He slept most of the night. He woke up at four o’clock. He was uncomfortable because of acid reflux. He was given medication to help and he went back to sleep after that. His vital signs have just been taken and they’re normal.”
“Thank you, Annie.”
I introduced her to my little sister and we went to Jensen’s room. He was still in a sitting position. It was better for his blood flow and breathing as the pregnancy was progressing and the baby taking more space. Later in the day, he would spend some time in an orthopedic chair. He also had daily visits from the physical therapist. The most important thing right now was to be sure he didn't lose any more weight and moved as much as he could. It was crucial, for his health as well as the baby’s.
“Hey, Jensen, I have a visitor with me this morning.”
He was awake. He turned his head slowly toward us, a blank expression on his face. They were having trouble keeping his feeding tube in place. It went through his right nostril and was held with way too many layers of tape. The skin around it was red and irritated. He had a fading bruise on his chin. He’d hit himself on the bedrail while shifting position. He looked sick. He smelled like sickness. Fuck, I loved him so much that every time I came back after a few hours away it was like getting a punch in the guts.
By the way Megan took a step back, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.
“Hi Jensen,” she said in a tiny voice that made her sound way younger.
Jensen blinked. “Hi Jensen,” he articulated slowly.
Megan took a shuddering intake of breath, then she burst out crying, hiding her face in her hands. I took her by the shoulders. “It’s okay, Meggie, I know it’s hard, it’s okay.”
“No it’s not,” she stuttered, sniffing. “No it’s not, he looks so…”
“Hey, he’s right here. He can hear us, alright?”
Jensen was staring at Megan, and I could see his face crumble. He had sympathetic responses, which meant he knew Megan was crying, and if I didn’t get her out of the room soon, he would be crying too.
“Hi,” he repeated, and I could almost feel his empathy.
Instead of taking Megan away, I grabbed her hands and forced them away from her face.
“See? He knows what’s going on.”
“I’m sorry, Jensen,” she said, trying to hold back her tears. She walked the few steps that separated them and, to my surprise, she wrapped her arms around Jensen’s shoulders.
“I’m sorry, it’s not fair, I’m sorry for crying,” she whispered, kissing his cheek.
“Yeah,” Jensen said, but he wasn’t on the verge of crying.
“You can hug her back,” I told him very slowly, very clearly.
Sometimes, Jensen would answer to direct commands. They had to be simple, and it always depended on how with us he was.
He stretched out an arm, shaky and unsteady, and let it rest on Megan’s back. “Yeah,” he murmured, like it was everything that needed to be said.
_____
Tim Omundson had hoped Jensen would transition quickly from his minimal conscious state to complete consciousness. Hell, we all hoped for it. It didn’t happen. August passed, then it was suddenly mid-September. Jensen was in a stable state. He wasn’t getting better, nor worst. He was into the thirty-fourth week of his pregnancy and his belly was the only thing getting bigger. Tim Omundson and Genevieve Cortese worked together to make sure he received enough nutrients, but the truth was, he was thin, thin to the point where he looked emaciated. It was strange, seeing his belly protruding, large and full and firm, as he himself seemed to shrink. Jensen had problems with the feeding tube. It had to be taken out on a regular basis because he had so much reflux it sometimes made him throw up. It was a concern. He might aspirate his own vomit and literally drown in it. The fact that he was pregnant, with his belly pushing up toward his stomach, didn’t help. When he was given a few days off the tube, the I.V. hyper alimentation had to be enough.
I was in a bad place. I had been so full of hope in July, when he had regained some consciousness, but as the days, then the weeks passed, it was hard to keep my hope alive. Felicia refused to go back to college in September. She was the one, after me, who spent the most time with Jensen. She too had lost some weight, and that spark that had always been in her eyes was gone. Even her red hair seemed less flamboyant than usual. It was like in the Sleeping Beauty tale, Jensen was lost in his semi-sleep, and it was like a spell had been put on everyone around him, like we were all caught in it, wasting away with him.
The baby was coming, and I wasn’t ready. I wanted Jensen to be excited, to walk around showing his belly. I wanted to organize a baby shower for him, to help him in and out of the car while he complained that he was getting enormous.
Sometimes in the evening, I climbed in bed with him and helped him get on my lap, and then I would hold him and put his hand on his belly with mine. I would tell him that our little girl needed him, that he had to be ready, to come back for her, because he’d wanted her for so long. One of those evenings, he said “baby” after I said it, and he kept repeating the word, his hand tightening on his belly, and I knew he was aware, much more aware than he could show me. It didn’t make things easier. It made them worse.
Around that time, Dr. Cortese asked me if we could have a talk. She’d just done a sonogram and measured Jensen’s belly. He tried to get away from her. He was tired, he was uncomfortable, and despite the nurse constantly wetting his lips and mouth with water, he’d started to have sores inside his mouth. They were probably very painful.
I left Felicia with Jensen and followed the androcologist to a small room. We sat.
“It not easy, is it?” She asked me softly.
“No, it isn’t.”
“Jared.” She paused. We were on a first name basis as well. I sometimes got the impression I knew half the staff of the hospital on a first name basis.
“We need to talk about the birth.”
I'd known it was coming. It didn’t made it any easier.
“I know, I just can’t…” I shook my head. What was left to say that she didn’t already know?
“Do you know what will happen if Jensen goes into labor now?”
“You… are going to try and stop it?”
“Yes, but it’s possible we won’t be able to. To tell you the truth, Jared, I’m surprised by how far along in the pregnancy Jensen has gotten. In these cases, there is a high likelihood that the parturient will go into premature labor. If your daughter were to be born today, she would have excellent chances to survive and to be perfectly healthy. You have to prepare yourself, Jared. Jensen might not be fully awake when he gives birth.”
“Will the c-section affect him? Is it risky?”
“There won’t be a c-section, unless we don’t have any other choice.”
It was like she was speaking nonsense. “What are you saying?”
“When a comatose parent goes into labour we let it happen naturally, if possible.”
“What? But how is he supposed to give birth? He can’t… Most of the time he’s not even there.”
“His body will know what do to. It’s difficult to believe, but there is no problem for a comatose patient to give birth. He’ll push the baby out just as if he was awake.”
The image shocked me. I had to restrain myself from yelling. “Are you serious? He’ll be in pain, he won’t even know what’s happening! A c-section-“
“Presents greater risks,” Genevieve cut me off calmly. “It’s an invasive procedure. Trust me, Jared, when I tell you that a natural birth is, by far, the best solution. I wouldn’t put Jensen through this otherwise. We can administer painkillers. I’ll do everything in my power to keep him as comfortable as possible.”
“I want to be there,” I stated firmly.
“You will. Of course you will.”
I left the room then. Now that it was out in the open, I couldn’t stop thinking. I had pushed it to the back of my mind for as long as I could.
I had to come to terms with the possibility that I might have a new born to care for and a husband in a minimal conscious state at the hospital. And if our baby was born while Jensen was still sick, what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t take care of our daughter while spending my days at the hospital with Jensen, I couldn’t rely on Ty and my parents to pay the bills forever. I would have to go back to work, eventually, I would have to raise our daughter on my own for an indeterminate amount of time.
Maybe forever. Maybe he’ll never get better than he is right now, a very disagreeable voice murmured in my mind.
Life had to go on, for me, afterward, despite Jensen being frozen in that in-between state of consciousness.
I couldn’t take it.
I went home and found my mom in the living room, watching some TV. As soon as she saw me, she shut it off. “Has something happened, Jay? Baby?”
I was hyperventilating. I tried to speak, to explain to her that I couldn’t do it, I didn’t want to do it. She tried to calm me down, but anything she said sounded like she was speaking an alien language. I was that close to a panic attack. I knew what a panic attack felt like because I'd had a few the months before my official coming-out. I tried the counting trick. 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, and on, and on, but I had used it so many times since Jensen’s aneurysm rupture it didn’t work anymore. My mother made me sit and put my head between my legs. A few moments later, I felt a cold wet towel on my neck. It did some good. At least my breathing returned to normal, but the hurt, the pain… they wouldn’t go away.
“I can’t do this without Jensen, mom. I don’t want to. I don’t want to, you hear me?”
My mother was rubbing soothing circles on my back, just like when I was a little kid. “I know, but you will if you have to. For Jensen.”
“You can’t stay here forever!”
“Why not? Your father is finally learning to cook for himself and Meggie,” she joked. “I’ll stay as long as you need me. I’ll be there when your daughter is born and I won’t leave until you throw me out. As for your work, we’ll figure something out. You won’t be alone in this, Jared, I promised you.”
Later, much later, when I was finally calm enough, she spoke to me for a long time, and I listened. She asked me what still needed to be done before the baby’s arrival. We made a list. Nothing had been done on the room since that July day. It needed to be finished. There were clothes to buy, some furniture, diapers, baby formula. My mother put some things on the list I had no idea were necessary for a newborn. It was scary, but I didn’t have a choice anymore. I had to face it. There was no time left.
I fell asleep crying, holding one of Jensen’s sweatshirts. His smell had washed out a long time ago, but it was all the comfort I could get.
A couple of days after that conversation, Gil, Felicia and my mother finished the nursery. My mother used Jensen’s car to run errands and get everything we had written down on the list. I didn’t really help. I told myself I didn’t have time, that I had to be with Jensen, but the truth was, I wanted to stay as far away from anything that reminded me my daughter was coming, and soon. It now seems very selfish of me, and I sometimes wonder how the people around me put up with it, but they did. They were there every step of the way. Even someone I didn’t want to be there showed up.
My brother.
It was almost October and I had left the hospital to grab something to eat. Ty was with Jensen. I didn’t like to leave him alone during the day, when he was awake, even with the nursing staff around.
I came back less than an hour later. I heard a conversation coming from Jensen’s room, and I was expecting to see Gil, or Frank, one of the male nurses.
Not Jeff.
He looked shaken. He was speaking to Ty, standing close to Jensen’s bed. Jensen was looking at the both of them, a blank expression on his face, licking his chapped lips. Seeing Jeff so close to him triggered something in me, a bout of rage I didn’t even know I could muster. I walked straight toward him, pushing Ty out of the way, and took his arm.
“You have no right to be here,” I told him, dragging him away from the bed. “You have no right, do you hear me?”
“Jared, wait, calm down, I’m sorry, I couldn’t… I couldn’t not come…”
“Jared,” Ty warned, trying to get me to stop.
“You get out of here, I don’t want you near my husband, you fucking asshole, never…”
We were close to the door. I was yelling. Jeff didn’t resist, didn’t try to add anything else. I had trouble keeping up, I was shaking so badly.
“Jared, you have to calm down, Jensen doesn’t like this,” Ty cut me off, and I saw the distressed look on my husband’s shallow face, his eyes filled with tears. It only made everything worse. I pushed Jeff with all the force I could gather and he fell backward in the corridor, his back hitting the opposite wall.
“Jay, calm down.”
“What? What did you say to me?”
“I want to help, let me help.”
“I don’t need your help, Jeff. I don’t need anything coming from you.”
We were starting to gather attention. I didn’t care. “You let me down. You rejected me because I was… what was it that you said? A fag. A fucking fag! And now you think because my husband - my pregnant husband - is in a coma, we can forget everything and be brothers again? Is that what you think?”
“Jared, I will ask you to keep your voice down,” a nurse -Annie, I think- told me. “Please don’t make me call security.”
“I’m sorry, Jare. I’m really, truly sorry. I was stupid,” Jeff said.
“You get away from here. I don’t want your apologies.”
I backed off. All the rage that had suddenly built up in me was gone. I didn’t want to worry about Jeff, not for the time being. I wanted to be with Jensen.
“Go Jeff, please. I don’t want to deal with this right now.”
Jeff nodded. I turned my back on him, didn’t even see him leave. It took some time, before I agreed to speak to him again. What can I say? Jensen can be persuasive when he puts his mind to something.
In the room, Ty was speaking softly to Jensen. He was still crying, and I hated myself for that.
“I’m sorry,” I said lamely.
“Don’t be,” Ty told me. “Your brother thought you would react like this. Just think about this, Jared. We never know what life will throw at us. Maybe sometimes it’s better to make peace.”
I nodded. I sat on the bed and took Jensen into my arms until he calmed down. It took a long time, maybe because it took me a long time to calm down as well.
part 4
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