Saving a Life

I don’t like to brag. I like telling stories, and I like entertaining my audience. Or making them think, or making them uncomfortable in ways that will galvanize them to positive social action. I wouldn’t say I’m the hero of the stories I tell about myself, because I don’t see myself as one. I’m a human trying to be the best human I can be, without getting burned by the not-humans out there that walk around on two feet. Makes them hard to tell apart from the real people, for sure.

So when I get matter-of-fact and say I’ve saved a life or two, you can be sure it happened. And I’m not saying it to brag, I’m saying it to warn others.

See this pic? See that bubbly-looking thumb sticking out on the left side of the pic?

That’s impending Death staring you in the face.

This is what a brain aneurysm looks like before it bursts.

This is my bestie’s “head shot” from a little over a year ago. See how it captures her best side?

Needless to say, bestie was UNhappy. She’s got White Coat Syndrome rather badly, and we’d just lost her older sister to congestive heart failure the year before. Bestie called me in a panic, and within a few days, I was installed in her living room.

What had happened?

She won the lottery.

This is not the lottery she wanted to win, but it saved her life.

We couldn’t save C, her sister, my other bestie. Out-of-control diabetes, COVID complications, and a pre-existing heart condition took their toll. She waited too long to go to the hospital this time, and the gangrene had already set in. All I could do was feed my bestie, since she couldn’t eat a bleeping thing at the hospital cafeteria. I’d make gluten-free meals, drive an hour and a half, and feed them to her. And we’d talk about what she needs to do immediately, and what signs to look for with impending death, and what tasks we can take off her shoulders. And we were there when C left, and I mean that quite literally – we saw a flash of light shoot out of the hospital, going southwest.

C died with her best friends and her best siblings there.

But while we stood there, waiting for the doctor, I said, “L, this will be you and me in a few years, unless we get our act together.”

Except for my weight, we’re doing our very best to keep that act together.

But when L called and said she was in the hospital because she “zoned out” and forgot how to run a register (that’s she’s done for over twenty-five years), she knew something was very wrong. The first hospital found an “anomaly,” but they weren’t equipped to see what that meant, so they were sending her home… I saw red.

My degrees are in biology and chemistry, but where those intersect is the human body. I was teaching the pre-med bio classes in college, because the professor they had doing it was a theoretical prof, not a practical one. Amazing with evolution theories, not very good in the workings of the human body. I could have gone into the medical field, but I prefer critters. They’re more honest, and innocent. But I digress.

What I’m saying is, I know med terms, and I know how to translate. So when I saw this image for the first time, I was almost dancing in my seat. That’s definitely an aneurysm, no doubt! A huge one! And it wasn’t bubbling, so it was stable!

Along the way, with all the testing, we also found out she was epileptic. She didn’t grow out of that long-ago brain injury like everyone assumed, she’s “delightfully abnormal” as her doctor says. That epilepsy jumped up to give her the warning on the aneurysm before it went critical, so she could get the stint in place before anything popped. When it pops, it’s a stroke.

And she needed that time, because her surgery kept being pushed off. And off. And off. For three freaking months. A whole season.

Why?

Because hospitals across the country are getting five, six, seven, ten emergency cases of stroke victims a day, which require immediate surgery.

I was listening to the calls as I sat beside her bed in ICU, making sure she had food she could eat. I was gratified to see they’d hired a nutritionist who bleeping well knew what she was doing, and came in with her color-coded tablet, and discussed with her “new queen of allergies” just what L could have for her meals.

When the head of the ICU came in, during another emergency stroke call, I asked her if that was normal.

She simply stared at me, face blank. “It is, now.”

Ah.

COVID.

That nasty little virus has put holes in many organs, and it will take us a long time (and a different regime in charge) to figure out how many more lives were cut short because of organ breakdown, years after the initial infection.

Why are aneurysms so deadly? Because blood is poison to the brain. That bag that holds our neural jello in place, the Dura Mater (“tough mother” in Latin), lives up to its name. In the pic, you can see the blood vessels that go through the brain. Only the stuff that feeds the brain can pass through, and it picks up the waste that living cells excrete. The holes in those vessels are precise to make sure that transfer works. Something mucking up that hole size, like a virus that loves making holes, will screw that up. Weak spots can bubble, like a balloon that’s squeezed till a spot gets thin. When the pop happens, everything that the unfiltered blood touches, dies immediately.

Success rates are measured in nanoseconds between pop and surgery.

L was so grumpy, having me in and out of her house for those three months, not being able to work, waiting, ready, aaaaand… wait some more. I kept telling her that this was amazing, doctors hardly ever get to see stable patients, and the fact that she could get all the right tests with time to recover in between led to a much better outcome.

Why yes, she’s doing just fine. She feels better than she has in years, maybe decades.

She’s still grumpy, because she keeps telling C that when she said she wants to win the lottery, she meant money, you know? Yes, we still talk as if C’s in the room and can hear us. I laugh and tell L, in front of her grinning doctor, that she doesn’t realize what lottery she did win, and how much rarer it is, brain surgery with no complications afterward. And the doc says nothing, because he can’t, but I can. He’s never contradicted me, but he grins a lot when we come in for checkups.

I couldn’t save C, but I could certainly save L.

We’re supposed to visit on Tuesday, if the snow storm allows it. Dang work schedules and January weather in the northern hemisphere! And we bring the food, and cook, and it’s all stuff she can eat, and it tastes good, and it doesn’t hurt her. And we’ll catch up, and make glass beads, and we’ll talk about glass projects we want to try. And I’ll bring pics of stuff I’ve found to try on the torch, and she’ll snag my camera and study them.

C, you made the right choice. Between money, or health, the win’s definitely in health. L won the lottery, just not the one she meant.