By Tom Dodge, KERA 90.1 commentator
Dallas, TX – On Memorial Day, twenty-one years ago, our oldest son Lyndon, on the precipice of manhood, dove into the lake and broke his neck. Five weeks ago he went into the hospital for the latest of many surgeries, an operation that required him to stay in bed for six weeks, never getting up. Then, he learned he must spend two more weeks in rehabilitation.
He told his mother and me that he wouldn't be able to handle two more weeks. I knew his unbelievable courage had reached the breaking point. It wasn't just the monotony. He had to give over all his dignity to strangers coming with bedpans and catheters. He endured with equanimity a variety of roommates, all aged and demented. One walked naked at night, stood over Lyndon's bed at 3 a.m. shouting, "Do you have my toothbrush?"
Another had chronic diarrhea. Still another, stone deaf, kept his TV locked on Jerry Springer and all the other noxious shows Lyndon would never watch if he had any choice at all. Another relict talked all day and night to people who weren't there.
These are some of the reasons why Lyndon was cracking. Another, I think, was subconscious. He did not want to be in the hospital on Memorial Day, which would have been a symbol that his life had gone nowhere in these twenty-one years. Plus, he had an appointment to get a new top put on his convertible.
"Dad," he said, "You've got to get me out of here."
I always feel helpless when dealing with bureaucrats, but I did the only thing I could do. I knew the impossibility of reaching his surgeon by phone, so I faxed him a letter, detailing the reasons why he must come home. For once, I might have been able to help him. Two days later, the day before Memorial Day, we brought him home.
Always before, it has been his mother who saved him. In a time when we hear of these tragically demented mothers who kill their children, Brenda symbolizes, for me, all the multitudes of mothers who would protect their children their lives. After he was first injured, he got pneumonia and couldn't breathe. The nurse on duty couldn't get a tracheotomy tube down him so Brenda took over and literally saved his life. During those early terrible days, she bathed him as she had when he was an infant, and when the pain kept him awake, she sang to him throughout the long hospital nights until he went to sleep.
After this most recent surgery, she had to fight the bureaucrats to get his bladder irrigated. He was sweating and complained of a severe headache. She saw that his catheter bag was empty and told the nurse, "You have to irrigate it so it can drain." The nurse refused without an order from the doctor but consented to allow Brenda to do it. Fifteen hundred cc's of urine came out and the headaches and sweating ceased.
For the past 20 years everyone has wondered why Brenda collects Humpty Dumptys, over 300 of them. They don't think deeply into it. It's really the same as that Lewis Carroll story, except that all the king's horses and all the king's men gave up on Humpty. Brenda will never stop trying to put Lyndon together again. He's not all together again, but he's home.
Tom Dodge is a writer from Midlothian.