What the Hell Happened!?

“…just when you least expect it, just what you least expect…” (The Pet Shop Boys)

On July 18, 2022, I got up early to check my secret chanterelle mushroom spots with my obsessively marked government maps of public forests, and, even though we were enduring a drought in the Catskills, I collected enough of these choice fungi to give a bag to my favorite restaurant.

Later I joined my husband Dan to help build a wooden dock on our lake. I heaved stack after stack of boards over to the site while he attached them to the frame. Honestly, I was trying to be badass and heft more than was really comfortable, but, use it or lose it, riiiiight?

After we cleaned up, we went to the Red Rose Motel, a perfectly vintage lodging for anglers on the Beaverkill River where our friends work. It was their daughter Wren’s 6th birthday. I brought my old button press and some silly retro women’s mags to help the kids create weird little badges. While there, after eating cake and checking the new kittens, I wrangled little Wren into posing for a few reference pics. I had some new painting ideas! She’s my little nature-loving muse.

Later that evening, we went home and marveled at the stars, the fireflies, our cute remodeled camp house and since I was tired, I went to bed before Dan.

Those were the last normal moments of my life.

The next thing I remember was waking up a week later in captivity in the basement of an abandoned train station in our town. Ok, that’s what I believed in my ICU delirium, so much so that the nurses had to take my phone to interrupt my escape plans. Everything had shifted so it was sideways and I hung my head to the side to try to get it right. My sisters were there and someone brought me drawing supplies. I drew my sis and the drawing was…sideways.

Also, I had been hanging out the whole week in a strange waiting room with my recently departed mother-in-law, watching my sad family from above, watching my daughter brush my hair, my son and husband cry. It was nice to see my departed mother-in-law but she kept on and on about my needing to make a decision to go through a door. She said I would love it, it’s so beautiful. She was, as in life, a bit pushy. Finally she said I needed to decide. I told her I couldn’t go through that door. She was exasperated. “Why!?” she demanded. “Because…look at them. They’re so sad,” I replied. “They’ll be here soon enough,” she reasoned.

But I said, no, and that’s when I woke up and found myself held captive in that basement (which was really the Westchester Neuro ICU that I’d been Life Flighted to on July 19, 2023).

I had suffered a totally surprise and very rare subarachnoid hemorrhage, a brain bleed, a stroke, or simply put, my mind had been blown. Even now, a year later, nobody knows why it happened. I was healthy, happy, and having fun.

After finally accepting that I was in a hospital and understanding that the helpers weren’t actually working for The Enemy, I had to confront the reality of what had occured. In an instant I could no longer walk, talk, see right, or remember things. Days came and went and soon I had racked up a month in the hospital. My family had stopped everything to spend their days at the hospital, wiping my ass and waiting for me to say something intelligible. My friends took care of Hugo, my beloved dog. Eventually, friends were allowed to visit and I must have been horrifying. I remember lifting the blankets to look at my legs and my thighs were gone! That’s when I understood that a lot of time had passed.

Then I somehow also got Covid 19 in the ICU. My daughter, Emmie, brought me some needle felting supplies and, with my jangled coordination, I weirdly made a poor rendition of my messy lungs from wool. I bequeathed it on my favorite nurse. She was mystified.

I was eventually recovered enough to be transferred to a rehab hospital in the Hudson Valley. I still somewhat believed I was being unfairly held and “pretended” to go along with their exercises to speed up my release. I thought they were buying it but upon later reading my medical records from that time, I can see that they saw right through me. It actually hurt my feelings when I read diagnostic commentary about my poor speech and floppy, draggy foot. I thought we were friends!

The months after I was finally released were the hardest of my whole life. I’m lucky to be alive, that’s for sure. I have Dan, my husband and patient friend, to thank for that. The morning of the aneurysm, he was the one who found me, babbling incoherently and lying in a pool of vomit on the bathroom floor. He cleaned me up and set me on the sofa thinking I must surely need coffee. Before he could brew anything though, my son Boone, watching me shut down, said, “I think this might be a stroke?” They piled me into the Suburu and went to the regional hospital, parting the masses at the ER saying, “She’s having a stroke!”

A quick CT scan showed big amounts of blood on the brain and I was loaded onto the chopper and taken to Westchester. I had driven past that hospital so many times thinking, man, it’d be fun to ride in that helicopter. That’s a stupid thought. I don’t think it was fun, but I remember absolutely nothing from that day, or many days hence.

About one year on, I’m still not completely better. But after two major brain surgeries, several minor diagnostic surgeries, innumerable CT scans, and meds that make me bruise hideously and feel terrible, my neuro team has declared that my brain is all sealed up and leak free.

What I’m left with is an overwhelming fatigue as my brain tries to painstakingly patch its poor self together (neuroplasticity! yay!), numbness and weakness on my right (dominant, dammit) side, and gaping holes in my memory. I’ve spent the year simplifying and eschewing things that unnecessarily use my energy, and determining what those are.

I decided that my family and painting are my priorities. Many times I just don’t have the gas for either, but I push myself because I feel so proud when I can say, I’m still here doing my thing.

Dan just completed a new studio for me, so it looks like I’m still doing my thing.

And the chanterelles are back again this year, right where I marked them on those maps.