The Split

Just a few short weeks ago, I split in two. 

It had been warm outside, not the suffocating heat of early summer, but heat tempered by the sun’s descent towards the horizon. My skin was still flecked with drops of water from our earlier swim, and they sparkled like tiny rhinestones. My daughter had already started to make her way inside the house, wrapped in her beach towel like a tiny burrito. My husband was standing at the pool’s edge, happy, freshly-shaved head glistening.

Then, I saw him go down slowly, as though warned, not the sudden drop of a man stunned. For a moment, I thought he was dancing, the rhythm pulsing through his flexed arms again and again. It was not like our first dance, our tango and ballroom number set to “Nothing Else Matters.” I was not dipped at the end, only he dipped low to the concrete. I ran over and struggled to move him into a side-lying position. He had at least 60 pounds on me, none of which were in his control then.

I was the neurologist, observing his rigid, extended left arm and his flexed right arm. His gaze was pushed all the way to the left, struggling to see something there which was just beyond his reach. “Left versive,” I muttered to myself, “with a left figure-of-4, seems like a right hemispheric onset to me.” I took out my phone to start the timer but realized we were already in too deep. I tried to count the seconds,  I watched the saliva and blood pour from his mouth with recognition rather than horror.. “Left lateral tongue bite,” I thought, “it all fits.” The seconds were deliberate, methodical, orderly, just like the beat his arms kept as they marched from the tonic phase through the clonic phase of the seizure. 

I was the wife, my own arms trembling, hands shaking, whispering expletives to myself as his convulsions started to ease and soften. The sky swam and the water in the pool undulated while my legs quivered. I could see our daughter watching from one of the windows, processing as much as a preschooler could. Her short hair was still damp, clinging in tiny ropes to the edges of her face. I couldn’t find words for the expression she wore, all I knew is that she shouldn’t be wearing it, not at her age.

“Get inside!” I yelled. For once, she listened, and she slipped further into the house out of view.

The neurologist saw his limbs relax and his breathing become noisy, like his nightly, low-pitched snoring to which I had become accustomed over almost a decade together. She found her phone and called 911, calmly explaining how the seizure played out and how long it lasted. Phone in hand, she held the wife, who was looking around wild-eyed while breathing through sawdust and fiberglass, lungs and heart cut apart by tiny unseen wounds.

The flashing lights of the police cars and ambulance reflected off the pine trees lining the perimeter and I rushed forward across the backyard, beach towel still firmly wrapped around my torso. The neurologist met them at the gate, leading them to where my husband was laying on the concrete. The words poured out from her as it had so many times in small, crowded team rooms during residency. There were hard edges and minute details, but very little softness. Softness was for summer nights spent swimming, not at poolside as my husband clawed his way out of his post-ictal stupor. 

“Are you a nurse?” one police officer asked. He was tall with closely-cut sandy hair, the most friendly out of the group and by far the youngest. 

“No,” she replied, “I’m a neurologist.” She paused. “One who specializes in epilepsy.”

“Isn’t that lucky?” the EMS and police officers said, “that you are a neurologist.”

The wife smiled through impotent rage. 

My husband at that point in time was like any of the deer who roamed our property, one who realized he was being watched, his eyes large and uncertain. His responses were delayed, the connections and bridges slow to be rebuilt in the aftermath of the storm. But slowly, the words came, garbled as they rode on a tongue which was now ground meat that was still battered and bleeding. 

They loaded him onto the stretcher, and the stretcher into the back of a waiting ambulance. The lights flashed and faded as it careened around the block.

“What the…” the wife whispered over and over again as the quiet settled over the neighborhood. Even the air had become still, waiting for what would come next.

“He’s in the best place for help,” the neurologist said, though the wife did not know what to believe. All she knew was that he was there, and now, he was not.

I changed out of the wet bathing suit, soaked with chlorine and sweat, the last vestiges of a normal day. The wife saw his wedding band still sitting on the dresser and quickly squeezed on her own engagement ring and wedding band. His mother appeared as though out of nowhere, having sped up the parkway after I had told her what happened. Once my daughter was tucked in, I hurried out. As the garage door opened, all I could see was darkness, with only my headlights to illuminate the way. 

“Let me drive,” the neurologist urged, grasping the steering wheel firmly. We rolled out of the driveway, the neurologist paying attention to the map, while the wife’s sobs did their best to drown out the steady hum of the running engine. They would need to work together, protecting each other. The road ahead was so long and so dark.