Tunnel Vision

5

On the fourth day after the accident, they moved Zack to a step-down unit in another ward of the Shapiro Building.

Maggie met with a neurologist, Dr. Peter McIntire, and the head nurse, J. J. Glidden, in a small lounge near Zack’s room. Dr. McIntire, a handsome man who looked too young to be a physician, led the discussion. “The good news is that the pressure in his brain has finally normalized.”

“What a relief,” Maggie said. Yet she could sense a “but” coming.

“We are going to keep him ventilated, however, at least until we’re certain he can protect his own airways.”

“To breathe on his own,” Nurse Glidden added. “At that point, we’ll extubate him—remove the respirator.”

Maggie nodded.

“Unfortunately, we’ve taken him off the barbiturates, so it’s still a waiting game.”

“Isn’t there anything you can do … you know, some kind of stimulation to wake him. I mean…” And she trailed off.

“If there were, we’d do it,” Dr. McIntire said. “Technically, he’s still in a coma, which is not like being asleep. The brain wave activity is completely different, and we really don’t fully understand the comatose state. The thing is, you can wake the sleeper but not the coma patient.”

“But,” Nurse Glidden added, “Zack could wake up any day now.”

Or he could remain in a vegetative state for twenty years, Maggie thought.

Later that day, Maggie rented a room in a nearby motel and came in every morning, despair and hope racking her soul.

Concern for Zack and Maggie poured in. An article appeared in the Northeastern University newspaper about Zack. The school president sent out a global e-mail expressing the university’s hope for a speedy and complete recovery. Well-wishers sent flowers and cards. But Maggie allowed only a few close friends and relatives to visit—not until he woke up, she kept saying.

* * *

The next week passed, and Zack remained in a coma. But because he was stable, his medical staff had him moved out of intensive care to a private room on another floor.

On the tenth day there was more good news: Zack was breathing on his own. Also, because the swelling had subsided, the doctors removed the intracranial pressure gauge; and the bone and skin of his scalp were beginning to heal over. They shaved him regularly and changed his diaper as if he were her baby again.

But he was still in a level two coma. Although he could respond to stimuli—pressure to his fingernails or a sharp poke to the bottom of his feet—he wouldn’t respond to spoken commands or open his eyes or squeeze his fingers when asked. Because he was still unconscious, a gastric feeding tube was inserted into his stomach through a small incision in his abdomen. As the doctors explained, this was standard for patients unable to feed normally. He was also put in a special bed that inflated and deflated to prevent bed sores. Braces were attached to his joints to prevent contraction. As requested, Maggie had brought in a pair of Nikes.

By the end of the second week, Maggie could barely restrain panic attacks that Zack would remain in a persistent vegetative state, wasting away while she kept endless bedside vigil like the parents of Karen Ann Quinlan and Terry Schiavo, waiting for him to wake up or die. Already he was gaunt, sunken, and void of the flush of life. But to remind herself of the gorgeous young man he was, she brought in a framed photograph of him she had taken last year at his graduation party. Posed with Damian, Anthony, and Geoff, he glowed with vitality. With his thick ringleted black hair, smooth, high-cheekboned face, and green starburst eyes, he looked like a young Zeus—the same beauty that a long time ago had first attracted her to Nick.

Despite Kate’s claims that he could break through at any time, Maggie felt herself slip into dark fears that went back to early motherhood, when she was alert to every potential threat to her children—too high fevers, toys they could choke on, plastic bags. When they got older, she and Nick would take them to Canobie Lake Park, where they would stroll down the lanes thronged with other parents and kids. While they appeared to be having a happy family time, Maggie’s mind tripped over the possibilities of her sons being thrown from the Flying Mouse or suffering brain damage from a centrifugal ride or frightened into cardiac arrest in the Haunted House or choking on a candy apple. When they became teenagers, a whole new buffet of horrors presented itself—drugs, alcohol, AIDS, car accidents, school shootings.

With Jake’s murder, all her nightmares came true. Adding to the horror, his killers got away with murder, and Nick had descended into an abyss of despair, disappeared into monastic silence, only to die. And now Zack lay in a coma that could go on indefinitely.

It seemed to Maggie that she had become defined by grief in a world that no longer made sense.